[okfn-discuss] Open Science Tranlsations

Tue Sep 9 13:18:45 UTC 2008

On 09/09/08 01:43, Patrick Primate wrote:
> Hello, my name is Patrick Welch. I am a masters student in Clinical
> Psychology at the University of Regina. I'm curious if anyone has
> heard of any open science / open knowledge service or effort to
> translate journal articles and other research to other languages? I am

I did remember someone once talking with me about such an idea but I 
don't think anything concrete came of it.

> a native English speaker, and English is said to be the dominant
> language of science, but much of the English knowledge and research is
> unavailable to the non-English speaking world. Just as importantly,
> research and articles published in non-English languages are
> unavailable to the English speaking world. This is a large barrier for
> open science / open knowledge for a number of obvious reasons.

Yes it is.

> I can imagine a blissful scenario in which one has a choice of
> language when one downloads an article or some other research. Of
> course this may be improbable to do 'Officially' (the original authors
> may not be able to translate directly into other languages and
> publishers may not be able to afford the translation costs). But
> perhaps some sort of collaborate open science / open knowledge
> endeavor could produce 'unofficial' or 'quasi-official' translations.
> This could be done in a number of ways (e.g., a wiki-like system for
> collaborative editing/translating, with an export to pdf/odt/etc..for
> download).

This seems a good way to go.

> Although this issue may become easier to deal with as more 'free'
> forms of open access come to dominate (something that certainly will
> take some time) in the current atmosphere I don't know if we would be

It another reason why 'proper' open-access that allows for full reuse 
and redistribution is so important.

> legally allowed to do this. Does anyone know if the publishers would
> sue if we start collaboratively translating articles? Has anyone heard
> of any projects like this?

I haven't heard of any but that doesn't guarantee it isn't happening! 
Regarding the publisher's attitudes -- who knows. I doubt this would 
threaten their revenues much -- at least when translating from English. 
To be honest in these cases it might be better to go down the 'seek 
forgiveness, not permission route' and just go ahead and do it -- though 
  this will mean you run the risk of getting shut down at some later date.

Regards,

Rufus