Re: Untranslated notes (was: Poll by Email No. 7)

En réponse à Boudewijn Rempt <boud@...>:

>
> Then they have no business being scientists.
Excuse me?! You're talking about some of the best researchers on their
respective fields in the world, and recognised so! Because instead of losing
time learning German or whatever, they did some research! A scientist is not
recognised by the number of languages s/he can read, but by his/her findings
and articles s/he wrote. I prefer a mono-lingual scientist who advanced in
his/her field of study than a polyglot who did nothing by him/herself. At
least, one of them used his/her mind for something constructive.

 Any university-educated
> Dutchman
> should be able to read scientific English, French, German and Dutch.
> And,
> depending on his field, Russian, too.
>
Time-consuming energy-wasting nonsense! Does it mean that if I ever want to be
a good scientist I have to learn German? Or that because I never learnt German
at school I will never be a good scientist?! While somebody has been learning
German, I've been learning about different scientific methods and theories that
your German-learning scientist never heard of because of lack of time to study
them. And I know for a fact that I'm better prepared to the challenges I'll
come to in my scientific carrier than if I had spent that time learning German.

>
> Which is a sure way of mis-representing the source, and therefore should
> be
> frowned upon. It makes the quoting paper worthless.
>
Really? Can you misrepresent graphs and equations by changing the language?
You're talking about scientific language, not about talking about feelings and
emotions. The Law of Gravity is the same in all languages. The principle of
Cause and Effect is the same in all languages. Whether it's valid or not
doesn't depend on the language it's formulated in. Scientific speech *can* be
translated accurately, and even paraphrased accurately. I've been doing it
myself, translating the work I've done in France in French to English without
problem.

>
> Translations always lie, without any exceptions.
Except physics, since their representation is language-independent.

 If you quote someone,
> you
> should use his or her _exact_ words. Translations of quotes should be
> relegated to footnotes, if the author thinks them necessary at all.
That's the most annoying thing you can do. If you want your paper not to be
read, please do that. But don't expect me to take one year ful-time to learn
enough of a language to read two articles. I have other things to do.

>
> And, frankly, I'd expect someone interested in acquiring certain
> knowledge to
> do the groundwork necessary, learning a language, if necessary.  The
> reader
> needs the knowledge: he do the work.
Sorry, but in my field the amount of experimental work and theoretical research
to be done is enormous. I prefer spending my time doing experiments and
thinking about theory that will allow me to actually try to solve the problems
I'm facing. They may have been already solved in a German-written article (they
haven't, I know that for a fact since I personally know the only German people
that ever worked on the same field as I do, and published their most important
articles in English BTW, and even paraphrased in them articles they had
published in German before :)) ), but it's faster to make the experiment and
find out the results myself rather than learning a language to read one article
(after all, water doesn't care what language you speak. In the same conditions
it flows the same way, whether you speak Dutch, French, English or German).
There are Korean people working on a related subject. Do I have to learn Korean
then? Not that I would dislike it, but then don't expect me to do anything else
in the next five years! After that, maybe I'll have enough knowledge to read
their articles in scientific Korean.

Maybe in linguistics you have more time to do what you say, but I'm talking
about the field of physics, in which we just don't have that time. We only have
one life and the amount of work to be done is enormous!

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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