There are 6500 languages in the world, but only one language of science, English. The Library of Alexandria and Scientists in Developing countries aim to change this.
"Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". (WHO)
"الصحة هي حالة من الصحة البدنية والعقلية والاجتماعية الكاملة وليس مجرد غياب المرض أو العجز"(Arabic)
Here is the WHO definition of Health in English and Arabic. In the next 5 years, all journals can become multilingual
The Library of Alexandria is ushering in a new era of multilingual science. Reducing the burden of translation, indeed promotes openness and scholarship.
“We build too many walls and not enough bridges” (I. Newton) One of the major walls of science is one of different languages.
We are writing to you with a simple idea. In 2006 Vint Cerf (the father of the Internet) told us about Google translate, and we were excited to build a language translator into our Supercourse, and the Library of Alexandria. However, much of it produced was Gibberish. We tried again five years ago, and Google translate captured the “gist” of the materials, however, it was still a bit messy. In the past few months we have seen a major improvement in translation capabilities with a new approach called Google Neural Machine Translation which produced marked improvement in accuracy, and we feel is now acceptable to build multilingual science world wide.
Multilingual Translation of Science
We propose to establish a beta version of a translation button to be made available to all journals for free. We would capture metrics of usage, and concerns of translation. We would like to have you join, We are planning a 6 month beta version, after which we will decide whether to continue.
Please contact Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D. (Emeritus professor University of Pittsburgh)
Ismail Serageldin, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Library of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt
BMJ* in English https://www.bmj.com/ Translate in Spanish** in Arabic
Cell in English https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cell Translate in German in Japanese
CAJGH in English http://cajgh.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cajgh Translate in Kazakh in Russian
Nature in English https://www.nature.com/ Translate in Chinese (Simplified) in French
NEJM in English https://www.nejm.org/ Translate in Persian*** in Korean***
Science in English http://science.sciencemag.org/ Translate in Urdu*** in Pashto***
* after uploading you can change URL to any other Journal URL or other existing web page for translate
** after uploading you can change language to any other language from 104 languages provided by Google Translate
*** possible problems with translations on these websites
Search inside of Supercourse and lectures in HTML and PPT format