I can’t speak for all fields, but in many STEM fields translations are pointless. I would have a harder time understanding a paper in my native language simply because the scientific vocabulary doesn’t exist.
In other STEM fields, like mine (climatology), they are highly valuable. Many of the colleagues I work with at national weather services around the world are not good in English and were educated in French or Spanish.
Also in your field, some may be good scientists, able to read English enough, but lack the English skills to write a good article. If they could write the article in their mother tongue and have it translated they could contribure to scientific progress. You may not see those people because the current system wastes this talent.
I simply don’t know the scientific vocabulary in my native language. And nobody I know does.
Scientific vocabulary is a major problem producing translations from English to other languages as well. Making dictionaries is also an important task to make science more open. On our Wiki we have started collecting scientific dictionaries.
The University of Delft had a great service when I did my PhD there, they had a translator who corrected our English articles. She was really good and sometimes even gave good suggestions to improve the science. ;-) The university did this to get higher acceptance rates and thus more publications; my guess is that that was a good bet for their university rating.
A next step could be that I write an article in Dutch and the translator translates it in English. Then it would be no problem to use the English terms for science specific terms.
I was working on cloud structure at the time. My work would probably have been better if more work from Russian scientists were translated. They do top research on turbulence. No one ever punished me for not knowing the state-of-art (Russian) literature because the others also did not know, but as a science we would have been better of.
Thanks for the feedback. That is valuable. There are many people who have trouble seeing the value of translations. I was one not too long ago. So these are questions we need to be able to answer and likely the topic of an upcoming blog post. We only mentioned some reason briefly in the introduction.
P.S. Translating our English blog post to German also helped me see which formulations in English were not optimal. Next time I will translate my posts before publishing to have that added quality benefit.
Should they be mentioned in one’s CV? Definitely. As a published paper? Definitely not.
It is work that is useful for research, but it is not comparable to original research. In my humble view, it would be around as useful to mention as refereeing duties.When I was young, I also put conference contributions on my CV, publication list. In some fields they are important, in my field, not really. As the post mentions the title of the translation should mention it is a translation so that they are not confused with original research.
