Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash
Today, English is the dominant language that houses many scientific terms such as dinosaur, oxygen, and immune system. Thanks to the evolution of language, we’ve come to know them as part of the English vocabulary despite their origins from a variety of languages such as Latin, French, and German.
Around the world, there have been attempts to describe scientific terms in local languages. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, translates to bisaatsinsiimaan which means ‘beautiful plantings’ in the native American language Blackfoot or Siksiká. ‘Immune system’ is translated to amasosha omzimba in Zulu, meaning ‘bodily soldiers’, a translation that makes use of an analogy to describe the clinical term.
What does this mean for communities that don’t speak English? How then can scientific ideas be shared?
While it may ‘make sense’ to come up with descriptions and translations in local languages, others have found that it might be more efficient to simply make something up in that language, such as the British Sign Language sign for DNA instead of fingerspelling “deoxyribonucleotide”.
For science communicator and Zulu-speaking Sibusio Biyela, the challenge in science communication is not just about understanding scientific terms in a foreign language, but also in translating them to a local language. The word ‘dinosaur’, for instance, came from a Greek word that means ‘terrible lizard’. It would be odd and inaccurate when translated as it is, so he opted for isilwane sasemandulo which means ‘ancient animal’. Biyela points out that simply translating scientific terms shouldn’t be the goal—choosing the right words to describe them might be more useful and efficient when communicating scientific concepts.
English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches.
As we think about scientific terms that exist in English, what about words that can’t be directly translated into English or other languages? Do the same rules apply? Most of the time, they’re borrowed into another language and stay that way, such as the gelatinous ‘agar’ or ‘agar-agar’, ‘feng shui’, and ‘pyjama’. And while these words have been borrowed into another language, some words remain in their own, such as ngilu, a Malay word to describe the shivers we get when we hear the sound of scraping metal, and Orangutan, which is a species of primate native to Southeast Asia. Did you know that Orangutan directly translates to ‘Jungle Person’ in Malay?
Can you think of other loanwords or words that cannot be directly translated into another language? Are there any Red Dot words that don’t have a direct English translation?
‘What happens if you have no word for dinosaur’ also talks about what it means for communities that don’t have words to describe certain smells, taste, and colours. What does this imply about their perceptions of the world? Read it all in the original article here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200116-what-happens-when-you-have-no-word-for-dinosaur
Read this article on the evolution of scientific language: https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-06/how-did-english-become-language-science
Read more about Biyela’s works here: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/decolonizing-science-through-sci-comm
BLIP Lab is recruiting families with children from ages 0-4 years for our upcoming Baby Talk-a-thon! Sign up here: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
More information about our Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
This article was written by our research assistant Shaza and edited by lab manager Fei Ting.