Communications of the ACM
Professor Helps Address Need for Foreign-Language Science Textbooks
"I am somewhat obsessed with spreading the message of conservation biology to students around the world," says Boston University Professor Richard Primack.
Credit: Boston University
In too many developing nations, native-language students struggle to read English-language scientific textbooks which typically don't even include examples from the reader's area of the world. A Boston University biologist has created a solution that can help: Recruit professors as co-authors in the foreign country to translate the English text and insert local examples.
In "Locally Adapted Textbooks Can Help Biodiversity," published in the current edition of the journal BioScience, Professor Richard Primack describes his mission to invite scientists from around the world as co-authors for foreign-language editions of his popular textbooks "Essentials of Conservation Biology" and "A Primer of Conservation Biology." He has completed 29 translations in 18 languages with a dozen more in production and four in the planning stages, most financed by local publishers and foundations but some from his own pocket.
"I am somewhat obsessed with spreading the message of conservation biology to students around the world," says Primack, widely renowned for his academic research updating records kept by Henry David Thoreau starting from 160 years ago at Walden Pond to track the impact of global warming on the flowering times of wildflowers.
In Primack's textbook project, the co-authors first translate the books then add in local examples, case studies, and photographs to make it more relevant to their student audience, substituting them for less pertinent matter from the USA and Europe. For example, the Indonesian edition prominently features issues associated with tropical deforestation and orangutan conservation.
Meantime, Primack says an unexpected benefit of these translated textbooks is that the best country-specific case studies have been incorporated back into the English-language versions, enriching their global perspective.
Some translated editions cover countries or regions with large populations, such as China, South Asia, the Arabic-speaking world, and Latin America, while others cover less populous countries, such as Estonia, Nepal, Greece, and Mongolia. And many have already had a big impact. The Portuguese version, published in 2001, now is used by some 200 Brazilian universities.
"There have been many projects designed to build conservation biology capacity in developing countries, but we need far more than exist at present," Primack says. "This textbook project is one approach which would be worth extending to related disciplines," he says, suggesting possabilities including ecology, environmental science, wildlife biology, forestry, and agriculture, and even perhaps geography, medicine, and economics.
Comments
Gunnar Wolf
Translating technical texts is also not enough. Translations are sometimes surprisingly unclear or hard to follow In the computer science/engineering world, I have read some very well known texts translated to Spanish, and most often, they are confusing and misleading.
As an example, translating pieces of computer programs not only renders them useless (and puzzles readers who already understand what should be going on). Even worse, when translation is not consistent, and we have terms translated differently throughout the text, or two terms that are on equal standing, but one is translated and one is not.
And I'm not talking about little known books or editorials. I am talking about, say, the Minix books by Tanenbaum ("Operating Systems design and implementation"), distributed by Pearson (just to mention one example).
I am taking part of a very interesting program I have some doubts on its methodology and the results it will have across its spectrum, but the idea is really good: Project LATIn (http://proyectolatin.org/index.php/en, Latin American open Textbooks INitiative), funded by EuropeAid, is funding university-level textbook writing projects, with the requirement that books are developed by teachers of at least three countries in our region.
I am taking part of the Operating Systems textbook; I am Mexican, and am working together with people from Argentina and Colombia, producing a textbook that will be freely redistributable, natively written in Spanish.
Of course, we cannot expect to compete with the well-known and established texts in the field, but we do try to make a comprehensive, good quality material, that is at least readable and understandable by students in our cultural region.
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