Developing publication multilingualism at PCI: A modest strategy to improve equity in research dissemination and to give a better visibility to scientific results

The two main problems posed by the almost exclusive use of English in science, apart from the poorer working conditions for researchers who are not perfectly fluent in English (eg. Amano et al. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184), are as follows (https://translatesciences.com/): knowledge produced in languages other than English is (very) poorly disseminated, and non-English-speaking readers benefit (very) little from knowledge written in English. We intend to apply several of the pieces of advice given by Amano et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01137-1), including the one that we feel is the most important: “Disseminate research in several languages” in order to increase the “discoverability” of articles recommended by PCI and published by PCJ. The title, keywords, and abstract are sufficient for a Web search; therefore, it is unnecessary to translate the whole articles.

The automatic translation of titles, abstracts, and keywords of articles submitted to a PCI is now displayed on the submission webpage. Authors can then correct these automatic translations and add other translations of their choice, either automatic translations that they can edit, or their own translations. After evaluation and recommendation of the preprints, the translations are displayed on the recommendation page of the articles (see the figure).

Figure: Screenshot of a PCI Zoology recommendation page showing the various languages in which the abstract, title and keywords can be read.

When translations are automatically generated, the following warning is displayed: “This is an automatically generated version. The authors and PCI decline all responsibility concerning its content.” As soon as the authors edit an automatic translation, it appears as “author generated.”

We chose the eight languages now displayed on the PCI websites according to the number of speakers and countries: Arabic, Chinese, French, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish (by alphabetic order). This list may be updated in the future.

The automatic translations are generated by Google Translate, which currently offers a higher language diversity than other tools such as DeepL for instance. This is not set in stone, and future updates may use other AI-generated translations.

We prefered not to offer the possibility to submit/evaluate articles in languages other than English. The main reason is that articles written in non-English languages can only be evaluated by a fewer number of experts (recommenders, reviewers), those sharing the same language.

This move is a modest but essential step toward multilingualism in science.