One-Way Mirror in the Room: How Language Barriers Impede Conservation | Tatsuya Amano
The issue of language barriers—difficulties faced in communicating information when it involves a language other than one’s first language—has long been recognised in scientific communities. Historically, this issue has been perceived as the “English” barrier faced primarily by non-native English speakers, resulting in the lack of a concerted effort to solve the problem from within scientific communities. However, recent advances in research on language barriers in science have revealed that this is a multi-faceted problem that can severely hinder the advance of science and its contribution to addressing global challenges including the biodiversity crisis.
In this presentation, I will talk about how language barriers can impede evidence-based conservation of global biodiversity in three major ways: barriers to (1) The global synthesis of scientific evidence scattered across different languages, (2) The application of English-language evidence to local decision making in countries where English is not widely spoken, and (3) The generation of scientific evidence by non-native English speakers.
Tatsuya Amano is a senior lecturer at the School of the Environment, and the Deputy Director in Research at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, The University of Queensland, Australia. He is committed to generating and providing scientific evidence for biodiversity conservation, and leads the translatE project, which aims to understand and overcome the consequences of language barriers for conservation and more generally science.
The Linnean Society works to inform, involve and inspire people of all ages about nature and its wider interactions through our collections, programmes and publications. Founded in 1788, the Society takes its name from the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778).
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