The language barrier is an obstacle to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, some in the research sphere believe that continuing to writing in native languages guarantees diverse thought and social anchoring as was reiterated in the Helskinki initiative on multilingualism in scholarly production.

Translation is at the core of these important issues. For disciplines that publish mainly in English it facilitates knowledge appropriation beyond the scientific community by professionals, students, etc. Disciplines that publish mainly in French consider that doing so promotes the influence of French research worldwide.

The working group will explore the possibilities offered by translation technologies (machine translation engines, translation memories, terminology bases, multilingual electronic corpora, etc.) to help increase the translation of French scientific texts. It will make an inventory of existing tools especially by integrating open source tools. It will also define principles for the evaluation and post-editing of texts produced by machine translation engines. On the basis of this work, it will propose projects with operational potential which could be initiated as a continuation of its work.

This working group was set up in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture’s General Delegation for the French language and the languages of France and has the support of the National Open Science Fund.