In the future, we expect CRediT to increasingly be used in metascience, evaluation for grants, and scientometrics, and we don’t want non-English scientific journals to be shut out. While English is the lingua franca of science internationally, plenty of important science is published only in other languages, for example much research in biodiversity and conservation.
As a reminder, CRediT is a way of providing some information about who did what in a research project, and it’s now used by thousands of academic journals. CRediT is a NISO standard, but its text is in English only. In this project, we are creating quality translations into all the languages that we can.
In two online co-work sessions (also known as ‘hackathons’), we discussed how the translations should be done and worked on them, or the associated website code, together.
We’ve had two hackathons (1,2) so far to translate CRediT into multiple languages and start getting some of them into the machine-readable template that Marton created for our CRediT translation website. The hackathons were online co-work sessions in which
So far we have final or close-to-final translations of German, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese (simplified script), and Chinese (traditional script). Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and French have all been started. It’s been great to see members of the scientific community come together and chip in on these translations in our hackathons.
After someone does an initial translation of CRediT into a target language, as a quality check on the translation, typically a second person fluent in that language, but ideally naive to CRediT, takes the translation and translates it into English. Then, one or both of these two people together look at the original English and the back-translation into English. Any discrepancies are sometimes a result of the original translation being not as good as it could be, and after discussion of this, the people can often see a way to improve the translation.
Can you help us?
If you’re fluent in a language we haven’t done yet and are interested in joining the project, please provide your name and email at this short Google form. Doing the translation is not a very big job - the entirety of what needs to be translated is only 250 words!
If you know of journals, scientific societies, or publishers working in languages other than English that might be able to make use of a CRediT translation, we’d like to know about that, too - let us know at the Google form.
Oh, another way to help would be to just give money to the project :smiley: .
We’ll announce another co-working call to jump-start further translations, and other next steps, including:
- Entering the translations in machine-readable form in this repository
- Getting the associated website going, including writing code to display the translations there in human-readable form.
Keep abreast of all our CRediT-related activities by following us on Mastodon at @tenzingContrib@neuromatch.social.
| Photo: Alex Holcombe |