【经济学人】英语所站的巨人肩膀丨2017.02.04丨总第820期

“EVERYONE who matters speaks English.” So say many in Britain and America. In fact, a lot of people do not. But in some domains , this crude approximation is true: in globalised enterprises the world’s single scholarly language is increasingly indispensable .（读者试译句 ） Among those global enterprises is science, in which more and more work is being done in English. This is not always good.

“世界上举足轻重的人都是说英语的。”这样的话多见于英吉利和美利坚。不过，实际上很多人并不是说英语的。 （期待您的翻译，明天会有针对这句话的长难句解析哟~） 在这些企业中科学方面的事物正在越来越多的使用英语。这并不一直是好事。

• domain       n.(c) 范围，领域; 领土，疆土; 管辖范围; [计] 域名

• Crude adj. 简陋的; 粗糙的，粗杂的; 粗鲁的; 天然的，未加工的; n.(c) 原油; 原[生]材料，天然物质

• Indispensable adj. 不可缺少的; 绝对必要的; 责无旁贷的; 不可避开的 n.(c) 不可缺少的人或物;

A scientific lingua franca has advantages. A few moments imagining scientists toiling away in different countries unaware of each other’s successes and failures is enough to show that. For centuries, Latin allowed the Copernicuses, Keplers and Newtons of Europe to stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants” who had preceded them. With the rise of European vernaculars as “serious” languages, an educated person was expected to read several; German was a leading language of science.

科学的通用语言是有好处的。时不时想到科学家们在不同的国度里艰难钻研，然而却(因为语言不通)完全不知道其他人的成功与失败已经足以证明这一点了。这么多世纪以来，拉丁语使得哥白尼，开普勒，欧洲的牛顿能够在前人的基础上(加以更深的研究)，用牛顿的话来说就是“站在巨人的肩上”。随着欧洲自己的语言不断发展成为“正统”的语言，受教育者一般要能够读懂多国的著作；德语成为了科学界的主要语言。

• lingua franca通用语言

• toil vi. 长时间或辛苦地工作; 艰难缓慢地移动; 跋涉 n.(u) 报酬很低的苦活，苦工; 罗网，圈套

Now, non-Anglophone scientists learn English; English-speaking scientists hardly bother with other languages at all. The rise in perceived need for more STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) has made schools squeeze anything that looks dispensable, and in the English-speaking world that includes foreign languages. Legislators in Florida have even proposed letting schoolchildren learn a computer language to satisfy schools’ foreign-language requirements.

现在，母语非英语的科学家在学习英语；母语是英语的科学家基本不会有语言上的问题。人的意识中对于更多的STEM项目(科学，技术，工程，数学)需求的不断增加使得学校尽可能的标榜出各种各样不可缺少的项目，而在英语国度中还包括外语。佛罗里达州的立法委员让学童们学会一种计算机语言来满足对“外语”的需求。

Three scientists have raised an alarm about English-only science in a paper in PLOS Biology, a journal. Tatsuya Amano, Juan González-Varo and William Sutherland looked at fields where local knowledge matters, such as ecology and conservation. They found that 64.4% of papers on Google Scholar mentioning “conservation” or “biodiversity” were in English. The second most common language, Spanish, was far behind, with 12.6%.

对于PLOY生物学杂志上只有英文这件事上三位科学家敲响了警钟。Tatsuya Amano, Juan González-Varo和William Sutherland专注于地方性知识领域，例如社会生态和环境保护。他们发现64.4%的谷歌学术论文提到“环境保护”和“生物多样性”都是用英语。最普遍的第二种语言西班牙语，占12.6%，也远落后于英语。

• papers on Google Scholar 谷歌学术论文

Monolingual ghettos are bad for science. In 2004, work on the transfer of H5N1 flu from birds to pigs languished unread in Chinese while critical time was lost. In the study’s sample, only half of Spanish-language papers and a third of those in Japanese even had abstracts in English. Those that did, unsurprisingly, were more likely to be published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. But the bird-flu case shows that that hardly includes all the science that matters. Some good scientists still can’t write in English.

用一种语言的贫民区不利于科学。2004年的时候，在中国没有解读出作用于鸟类身上的H5N1流感转移到了猪身上，这样关键时刻就丢失了。在研究样本中，只有一半的西班牙语论文和1/3的日语论文的摘要用英文。那些没有这样做得，毫无意外都是发表在知名的同行评审的期刊上。但是禽流感案显示这几乎不包含所有的科学问题。一些很棒的科学家仍然不会用英语写作。