Breaking Language Barriers in the Scientific Community: The Benefits of Translating English Articles into Spanish

The majority of scientific articles are published in English. As a result, researchers face challenges reaching a bigger audience of non-English speakers. Correspondingly, Project SCIENTIA closes the language gap between these communities by translating and disseminating research articles from the research program Genes to Environment: Modeling, Mechanisms, and Mapping (GEM3). Through interdisciplinary collaboration we translated a total of three abstracts, keywords and titles. We also interviewed the authors to understand the main idea and stay true to the article’s message. Different issues arise when translating a scientific text, like multiple meanings in translation. For that reason, our team created standardized glossaries of scientific terms by the use of parallel texts which are texts similar to the one being translated in the target language, and were found on official Spanish websites and scientific texts. Reliable translating outlets, that included academic papers, were used to accurately translate the scientific term, group discussions and the use of parallel texts were used to ensure the precision of the translation. The combination of these methods added credibility to the translation while acting as a resource researchers can use to make their work more accessible to the Spanish-speaking community