出國留學網英語欄目為您帶來“雙語閱讀：英語已經阻礙了科研的雙語步伐”，希望對大家有所幫助!

Thirteen years ago,閱讀英語已經 a deadly strain of avian flu known as H5N1 was tearing through Asia's bird populations. In January 2004, Chinese scientists reported that pigs too had become infected with the virus—an alarming development, since pigs are susceptible to human viruses and could potentially act as a 'mixing vessel' that would allow the virus to jump to humans.

13年前，一股名為H5N1的阻礙致命禽流感在亞洲鳥類中肆虐流行。2004年1月，科研中國科學家的雙語報告稱：豬也會感染這種病毒——這是一項很有警示作用的進展，因為豬很容易感染人類的閱讀英語已經病毒，而且可能會充當“混合容器”，阻礙最終使病毒傳染到人類身上。科研

Yet at the time,雙語 little attention was paid outside of China—because the study was published only in Chinese, in a small Chinese journal of veterinary medicine. It wasn't until August of that year that the World Health Organization and the United Nations learned of the study's results and rushed to have it translated.

然而，當時在中國以外只有很少人關注，閱讀英語已經因為研究報告是阻礙用中文寫的，刊登在中國一份小型獸醫期刊上。科研直到當年的雙語8月份，世界衛生組織和聯合國才得知報告結果，閱讀英語已經緊急請人翻譯。阻礙

Those scientists and policy makers ran headlong into one of science's biggest unsolved dilemmas: language. A new study in the journal PLOS Biology sheds light on how widespread the gulf can be between English-language science and any-other-language science, and how that gap can lead to situations like the avian flu case, or worse.

那些科學家和政策制定者們都一頭扎進了科學界最難的一個未解悖論中：語言。PLOS Biology雜志的一項新研究關注了英語(精品課)語言科學和其它語言科學之間有多大的鴻溝，以及這種鴻溝會如何導致出現像禽流感案例這樣甚至是更糟的情況。

'Native English speakers tend to assume that all important information is in English,' says Tatsuya Amano, a zoology researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author on this study. Yet particularly when it comes to work about biodiversity and conservation, Amano says, much of the most important data is collected and published by researchers in the countries where exotic or endangered species live—not just the United States or England. This can lead to oversights of important statistics or critical breakthroughs by international organizations, or even scientists unnecessarily duplicating research that has already been done.

該研究的第一作者、劍橋大學動物學研究者天野達也說：“以英語為母語的人傾向于假想所有的重要信息都是用英語來傳達的。”然而，特別是涉及到生物多樣性及保護的工作時，天野達也說，收集和發表很多重要數據的研究人員都來自奇異或瀕危動物生活的國家，而非僅僅來自美國或英國。這可能導致國際組織忽視重要的統計信息或關鍵性突破，甚至會讓科學家們去做不必要的、已經做過了的重復性研究工作。

Even for people who try not to ignore research published in non-English languages, Amano says, difficulties exist. More than half of the non-English papers observed in this study had no English title, abstract or keywords, making them all but invisible to most scientists doing database searches in English.

天野還說，即使對于那些想努力不忽視非英語研究成果的人來說，也有很多困難。研究發現，半數以上非英語論文都沒有英語標題、摘要或關鍵詞，導致大多數用英語進行數據庫檢索的科學家完全找不到這些論文。

It's also worrisome that English has become so prestigious for scientists that many non-English speakers avoid publishing research in their own languages, Amano says. Federico Kukso, a MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow who has reported on science in Spanish and English for more than 15 years, says the bias extends beyond how scientists view studies; it also manifests in what science the media chooses to focus on.

天野說，還有一點令人擔憂的是，英語在科學家們看來已經變得非常權威，所以許多非英語國家的人會避免使用本國語言發表研究結果。費德里科?庫克索是一位麻省理工大學奈特科學新聞學者，他已用西班牙語和英語發表科學研究逾15年，他說語言偏見已超出科學家們如何看待研究的范疇;它還表現在媒體會選擇聚焦哪些科學研究上。

Amano thinks that journals and scientific academies working to include international voices is one of the best solutions to this language gap.

天野達也認為期刊和科學研究院努力收入各國聲音才是解決語言鴻溝的一種最好策略。

英語資源欄目推薦閱讀：