> a lot of research doesn't get published in English, so somehow it doesn't "count".
As it shouldn't. I am from a non-English speaking country myself, and I cannot begin to tell you how senseless it is to cling to native languages for any serious work. It's creating an arbitrary barrier to collaboration just for pride or convenience. English is the lingua-franca (lol) of the world, just embrace it and stop being proud of your weird language that you're stuck with because of random traditions and geography.
Imagine Prague universities would have top AI research published in Czech, would that actually help the scientific community? My bet is: not until someone goes and translates it to English, is it going to be read by anybody outside of the country, whether that person is native English or not.
In this thread there's a lot of talk of the EU losing competitiveness because it is a fragmented market between a group of isolationist countries, opinions like these are a big part of that. Stop putting English second place, this is a global world now, English is the language of the global world, learn it, use it, or lose.
It's not about pride - it's about the reality of the fact that most academics do not have a sufficient command of English to write research papers in that language. We can lament this fact if you wish, but somehow it seems more important to me that a mathematics or chemistry researcher is good at those categories and not necessarily at writing in English. Again, you can think this is their loss - and maybe it is, but my general point is that the quality of their research isn't any worse just because it isn't done in English.
The obvious solution to this is translation - but I'm sure you can see why not every research paper is translated, the cost of doing so would have to be carried by someone so only some papers are translated, which means that by default English-speaking universities are getting a better position in rankings because all of their research counts, no matter how bad or good it is.
>>Imagine Prague universities would have top AI research published in Czech, would that actually help the scientific community?
Well it's a bit of a catch 22 - if it was top AI research, then university of Prague would pay to have it translated and then yes it would help.
> the fact that most academics do not have a sufficient command of English to write research papers in that language.
Because the academics are not taught in English, which they should be, because they will need to command English sufficiently if they wish to participate in the global science community. Again, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> the quality of their research isn't any worse just because it isn't done in English
No but the quality of their work as a researcher is, because communication and collaboration is a part of research.
> The obvious solution to this is translation
No its not, because translation is exactly the meaningless overhead I was talking about. It does not aid in collaboration because its still a one-way process, and its lossy.
As it shouldn't. I am from a non-English speaking country myself, and I cannot begin to tell you how senseless it is to cling to native languages for any serious work. It's creating an arbitrary barrier to collaboration just for pride or convenience. English is the lingua-franca (lol) of the world, just embrace it and stop being proud of your weird language that you're stuck with because of random traditions and geography.
Imagine Prague universities would have top AI research published in Czech, would that actually help the scientific community? My bet is: not until someone goes and translates it to English, is it going to be read by anybody outside of the country, whether that person is native English or not.
In this thread there's a lot of talk of the EU losing competitiveness because it is a fragmented market between a group of isolationist countries, opinions like these are a big part of that. Stop putting English second place, this is a global world now, English is the language of the global world, learn it, use it, or lose.