THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE GLOBALIZATION IN THE SCIENTIFIC ENVIRONMENT 

ABSTRACT

The article highlights the problem of monolingualism of scientific language, which is becoming increasingly relevant in the world of transnationalization. We have studied the influence of the English language on people who want to contribute to scientific research, but cannot because of the inequality in the production of knowledge between countries with different levels of English proficiency. People have to write in English, although this leads to a lot of difficulties both for themselves and for the scientific community and the world as a whole.

Keywords: globalization, scientific influence, science's monolingualism.

Nowadays 6,266,815 scientific papers are published in English per year, 96,933 in Chinese, 70,542 in Spanish, 55,911 in German, and 37,559 in Russian. As can be seen from these figures, English is leading by a huge margin.

About 80% of non-native scientists consume and create scientific content in English. This result can be interpreted as a “commitment” rather than a "preference" due to the tendency to the predominance of one language in the scientific environment and the need for interaction with international science, that can be held only in English.

Does English fully interpret the information, to share it all over the world, saving enough semantic nuances? What are the implications of scientific monolingualism?

The fact, that the English language dominates in the most important spheres of society indicates the hierarchization of languages and, consequently, cultures, which leads to changes in the cultural paradigm. There may be several reasons for this.

The first is inertia: after the Second World War, German ceased to be the language of science. Since then, it has been widely believed that the best science is created and published in English.

The second is the reward system. The quality of published works is measured by the citation rate of the journal-publisher, and not by the relevance or novelty of the content. Therefore, the most cited journals are in English. Many researchers in Ibero-American countries publish in English not only for interaction with the international scientific community, but also for reasons of status.

The third is connected to the other two and defines them. Two large international companies, Elsevier and Clarivate Analytics, have privatized science quality assessment systems; they compile international indexes listing the impact factor of journals that have preferred English for decades.

The tendency of giving the higher education an international character and the loss of importance of local and national traditions have become the reason for the predominance of the English language in a non-English-speaking managerial academic environment. As a result, most of the work activity is mostly performed in English. There are also "international teachers" who specialize on English language and lecture mostly in English. This is primarily a matter of neglecting other languages of mass communication.

To consider the theses more specifically, let's turn to the examples. The level of English proficiency in Colombia is one of the lowest in the world. To understand global inequity in science it is necessary to realize the scale of the problems that Colombians have to face to be published. There are some of these problems:

• Rejection or revision of articles due to English grammar or ethnicity (43.5% of doctoral students face this problem). Of the Columbians surveyed, 92% of their scientific publications were in English and only 4% of their articles were in their national language.
• 81.2% of doctoral students said they prefer creating content in English than translating from Spanish. Even though they spend around 97 more working hours writing in English.
• The number of scientific international events are held mostly in English language. Colombians do not attend there because they do not understand the language well (currently 33% of doctoral students). Also, they often do not know about the most important researches of their region, which leads to a lack of information important in several spheres of life: politics, environment, etc.
• The prices for translation and editing in Colombia can be comparable to the average salary of a Doctor of Sciences of 947 US dollars or 3 million Colombian pesos.

There is an interrelation between the knowledge production of non-English speaking countries and the barriers to entry into the scientific environment. The low level of knowledge production in such countries preserves to biased attitude to their scientific outputs. Due to the difficulty of understanding English, scientists often do not receive proper feedback, since comments written by reviewers mostly contain either criticism of grammar or euphemisms that are difficult for scientists to understand. Constant pressure affects academic migration, known as "brain drain".

In addition, native English speakers are used to having all important information written in English. As a result, world scientists missed a case of flu danger in China, which turned into a pandemic. Data from small exotic countries on endangered species of mammals are also ignored. The latest data of bird fabulous pitta, which lives in Asia and is vulnerable, were missed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

It's not about neglecting the usefulness of the English language, but about its thoughtless use. Anyone who chooses to write in dominant or in their national language should understand that they are acting in a global context. There are three strategies for stimulating awareness in the use of languages:

Scandalization. Rejection of conferences and magazines that pretend to be "multinational" and do not express cultural diversity, including different languages. This phenomenon should be loudly condemned, regretted and criticized.

Careful study. Practices that "explore linguistic negotiations and their influence on power". One of the main features is the constant quoting of translations of well-known non-English sources instead of the originals.

Ingenuity. Preservation of terms, quotations, phraseologisms in the language of the original, using footnotes with provision of translation and reinterpretation work to the reader.

Unified journal evaluation system, which is based on the impact factor, is unfair to non-English speaking scientists. When a journal is assessed by this system, it automatically enters the system of global scientific value. This makes the journal compete with global production. The methodology mainly reflects the environment dominated by the British. As a consequence, non-English-language journals cannot compete with English-language journals. The evaluation of all journals according to the same criteria increases English language hegemony.

Some may say that increasing the number of local journals in their native language could fix the situation. However, we cannot assume that giving researchers the opportunity to use their national language in scientific publications will lead to an improvement in academic publications. It is obvious that local and regional academic platforms mostly contain low-quality articles. Consequently, even increased level of publications in native language cannot destroy the factors of the dominance of English language in global culture. Moreover, an increase in number of “publications at any cost”, written in national language may increase bias towards scientific research of this cultures.

One of the most popular alternatives is to use Google Translator*(По требованию Роскомнадзора информируем, что иностранное лицо, владеющее информационными ресурсами Google является нарушителем законодательства Российской Федерации – прим. ред.). This alternative will free authors from the need for translation by themselves and help readers to consume content without interference in any language.

The living alternative is to encourage and promote the visibility of already existing multilingual journals.

For example, the French journal Management. It helps other languages and cultures to develop in a scientific environment. It already provides publication of texts in different languages. Because of the journal it is possible for readers and authors to make a clear vision of international management progress in the place, where they can exchange information and knowledge.

Another way is to encourage the so-called "top magazines" to manage special issues to articles written in different languages. Such practice could be applied once a year and would contribute to greater publicity and coherence of non-English-speaking authors. Also, there are some topics, in which non-English-speaking scientis have a competitive advantage. Promotion of these topics by using special issues may be an alternative too.

To sum up, the world is moving towards monolingualism. This, in turn, makes it harder for non-English-speaking scientist to enter the scientific environment. It is necessary to move towards open science, where scientific researches are free and accessible to all citizens. AI and automatic translation should help us guarantee access to science. It would be great if in the near future it would be possible to read the contents of each scientific article translated not only into Spanish or Portuguese, but also into Korean, Chinese or any other language.

References:

1. N.N. Troshina, Internationalization of science and the problem of scientific culture in the epoch of globalization, Society. Communication. Education, 12 (3) (2021) 70–80. DOI: 10.18721/ JHSS.12306
2. Tardy C. The role of English in scientific communication: Lingua franca or Tyrannosaurus rex? Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 2004. pp. 247–269.
3. Murphy J, Zhu J. Neo-colonialism in the academy? Anglo-American domination in management journals. Organization. 2012;19: 915–927.
4. Orban L. Le multilinguisme en Europe. 2018. Available at: http://ries.revues.org/358
5. Stutterheim C. von, Nüse R. Processes of conceptualization in language production: languagespecific, perspectives and event contrast // Linguistics. 2003. V. 41. Pp. 851–881.
6. C. von Stutterheim, R. Nüse, Processes of conceptualization in language production: language-specific, perspectives and event contrast. Linguistics. 41 (2003) 851–881. (In English)