Sign and Sight recently featured a translation of this Frankfurter Allegemeine-Zeitung op-ed, calling for an increase in German-language scientifc writing. Or rather, presumably, an end to its precipitous decline.
I've remained deeply fascinated by linguistic-nationalist-scientific-activism—old thesis topics die hard. Phrases like "new terminology must be coined!" always get me smiling (interestingly enough, I have an opposite reaction to those "there ought to be a word for" type features one finds in the back of magazines like The Atlantic, or in the innumerable Sniglets volumes of yore—they're always kind of annoying to me, in that they're all but totally unserious about their coinage—invariably a horrendous pun-monster—and, besides, there usually does exist a more or less elegant turn of phrase that would serve the purported purpose nicely). Right, but back to the article:
Anyone who only encounters scientific research in a foreign language pays a heavy price, even if he is a master of the idiom. "We are dumber in English" – this was the conclusion that researchers came to in Sweden and the Netherlands, where children were introduced to English on their first day of school. Lectures in English are part of every subject, but nevertheless, the test results are about ten percent lower on average than in courses taught in the mother tongue. In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.
I'd love to track down the study—Google only returns references to the aforementioned article. The quote makes it sound like each student took some courses in English, and some in his or her native tongue. But was the division uniform (e.g. math in English, art in Swedish), or did some in the study do the reverse (English art, Swedish math) and show the same ten percent drop? Other permutations abound (teach in English, test in Swedish?).
But back to our op-ed's prescription:
It shouldn't hurt German scientific language if, in the course of everyday research, publications appear in English. Such articles almost always deal with tiny advances in knowledge – like the question of whether or not gene X is expressed under the influence of protein Y. They are oriented towards a small audience, they seldom influence scientific concepts and they are, even if composed by native speakers, usually linguistically as outstanding as a manual for a DVD player. [!!!–ed.]
But a pile of puzzle pieces is still not science. Every discipline needs publications that show connections, transmit inspiring ideas and sketch out new concepts. Such work is intended for colleagues beyond the narrow realms of one's own field and broaden the circles of knowledge. They are nourished by their use of language, because the author wants to lead the public through a distant and foreign territory, and thus wishes to be as convincing as possible. In order to preserve German as the language of science [Um das Deutsche als Wissenschaftssprache zu erhalten], we should make an effort along these lines.
Ah, the big questions: what is science? What is German science? And how do we do it? Now leap to the end:
If we re-learn how to tell the story of science, then German will have a future as a language of science. [Nur wenn wir wieder lernen, Wissenschaft zu erzählen, hat Deutsch als Sprache der Wissenschaft eine Zukunft.]
I'm interested in the translator's choice to say both "German as
the language of science" and "German as
a language of science". Whether intentionally or not, it does get at an ambiguity of the article's vision: does he think that, simply, everyone would benefit from learning and "doing" science in their mother-tongue, or that German is better-equipped (at least till all the German scientists utterly lose the ability) as language for the clear expression of scientific "big ideas"?
