 Welcome to June's Indian Wednesday Webinar, hosted by Eli, the series that aims to give early career researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. Today, our speakers will discuss how to overcome language barriers in science. The webinar will begin with the panelists sharing their stories. Then in the second half, you will be putting your questions to them. To ask your question, you can type in the question box in the GoToWebinar Functions panel, or you can tweet us, we are at Eli's community, using the hashtag ECR Wednesday. Finally, I would like to let you know that we are recording the webinar and that it will be made available on YouTube in the near future. Now I'll pass over to Margarita to introduce the panelists. Hello, thank you very much Elsa for that introduction. So I'd like to welcome you to our new webinar. As I was saying in the title, we are going to talk about how to overcome language barriers in science. This is because, I mean, not being an English native speaker, I can realize that English is the most important language that it's dominated in science. I think it is a bit of a viral obstacle for early researches that they actually need to be fluent in English in order to be able to share the science. So I realize it can be a problem when they are not fluent in English and we're going to talk about all that, I mean, everything related to language and science. So for this, I would like you to introduce our speakers. We're going to hear about Clarissa, she's a scientist, she's working at the Ministry of Environment in Peru and the European Commission and in the European Security Policy and she gives science-based evidence and advice for policemen. She's the founder and the director of the new project, which focuses on empowerment of Latin American young professionals and with the programs of professional mentors. Her work also relates to international security, and modern technologies, science diplomacy, gender equality, reduction of inequalities in education for sustainable development policy. We also have a BISWA, where actually the order will be with BISWA first, then with Croatia, sorry. BISWA is an assistant professor of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in the U.S. He's a volunteer mentor with author aid, and he is an ambassador of our E-Lice community. He works in biomedical research, it's on the power of high-resolution mass spectrometry, living metabolomics, alongside with other omics from the St. Human Metabolic Resources and health and wellness, and as an E-Lice ambassador, he tries to improve the human process, promoting health and wellness and treatments, and change academic knowledge of that, which is helping to look for that knowledge. So he hopes he's going to give us a break, and I'm just going to stop. Then we'll have Tantzouye, he is an ARC, future fellow at the School of Biomedical Science of the University of Spain, he is actually, actually the website is over there. It's after 1am. Oh my God. Yeah, it's a bit sleepy. Yeah, that's fine. Thank you very much for coming to the seminar then. You're welcome. The seminar is more difficult for you, and he's primarily interested in how scientists can make meaningful contributions to halting and reversing down-going global biodiversity crisis. He has a project that tries to understand the consequences of language barriers in biodiversity conservation with a translate project. I hope he was going to talk a little bit about that. And he aims to assess the importance of scientific knowledge that is available in non-English languages, and understanding how language barriers can be the application of science in decision-making and devised solutions for exchanging information across languages in an effective manner. And then we have Yad, who is a professor and a regional representative of Epicenter in Africa. He is at the research term of a medicine, in front of us, I don't know how to say in front of doctors without borders. He is currently based in Cameroon, and he has been the head of the Epicenter Research Basics in Africa, and he has been doing research projects in TPOS, in my area, and others. He is in charge of the field coordination for the MSS Epicenter processing against Ebola and virus and the virus, and doing this outbreak in West Africa, and now in Congo. He knows his work. Yad has been inspired by the vision of a healthy and wealthy Africa, and aims to create a critical mass of young Africans to find home ground and innovative solutions to address the public health problems in Africa. So that's a bit of a very brief introduction of all our speakers. I mean, I have to apologize at the beginning because our webinar will be in English, and we're going to talk about all the problems of having only English as a language in science, but I think at the moment, at least it is the language that we can use. So many thanks for all the speakers. Thank you so much for attending the webinar. We're going to welcome you to questions and have a good discussion afterwards. And I'll give Vistla the words so he can start. Vistla, can you? You can all see my screen? Yes. You can all see my screen? Yes, I think so. Thank you. So as you can see here, I have highlighted the language barriers in green. That means it shouldn't be affecting our science, and I have given a green signal for it to move on in a very positive way. So as you see this slide, I'm going to tell you that there is a very famous saying that you are not doing science if you are not communicating science. So you can do very fantastic science inside your lab, inside your computers, but if it doesn't get communicated to the society, to the global community of scientific researchers, your peers, colleagues, policymakers, and more wider dissemination, then you are doing a disservice to friends. And to communicate it, you need a medium, and that is language, which is English or whatever. Currently it's English. And being from India, you learn English very early on. That helps a little, but not everybody is lucky even in the Indian system to learn English. There is mother tongues of 22 different states, and they are using 20 different languages. There are 600 different dialects. That complicates the matter a lot. And coming from a family, from a father who used to have a master's in English, you learn more of British English, uses of English in the Victorian era. Then you come to the US to work, then you realize it's American English. And then you realize in scientific communication you use scientific English. It's not American, not British. So, giving you a perspective, I have been approached as you can see, last 11 hours back, six days, one week, one week and two weeks back in ResearchGate. And through AuthorAD, through that service, over Gmail, so many requests from different scientific authors and researchers, mostly early care researchers who are English students, graduate students, postdocs, sometimes faculty from different countries and who approach me to edit their article. It all started with me volunteering on ResearchGate and AuthorAD, AuthorAD, that I can volunteer for you in my free time to give a read to your scientific article and edit it in a language or for, you know, scientific policy and stuff like that. Then the request started piling up and it came like thousands and hundreds at some point and I said, thank you for approaching me but sorry I can't do it. Just because as a postdoc and as a faculty you got very little time for yourself, you know, writing demands and writing your own papers. So, started with the volunteering service now I have to stop it at some point. But then I'm realizing that most of these requests come from, you know, deeper parts of Asia, from Africa, from Latin America and, you know, in European countries where language has been an issue when communicating in English. So, in the next slide, I try to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities and some of the questions I would like to open for this audience to discuss and the panelists to discuss. So, I see some of the challenges is coming from the education system because a lot of this is coming from the mother tongue or the native language of a given country and it's a very late start with English and that's what propagates that there is a fear factor, there is a inability or there is a reluctance to do things in English because you have been trained for your 10 years in high school and another four years in college sometimes masters in non-English medium. And a lot of these things is also coming from socio-cultural background, for example, coming from India. I had never had a course that taught me how to write scientific English or scientific writing. Nobody taught me what plagiarism could be. The favorite thing taught copy-paste. You try to cut and copy and paste from everything. The CCP is a very bad term but it's very common out there and everybody does it. This thinking that, well, nobody writes anything from new so you can take it from others and compile your own and this is very prevalent. So there is also issues with the training and education what you receive. So there was no course, absolutely. I did my masters, I did my PhD, one of the top institutions in India but there are no courses that helps you to write scientific writing or there is awareness on that and then I realized when I had to write my own manuscripts out of my PhD thesis during my doctoral studies that doing experiments was so easy and writing those in the form of scientific communication was so hard. So it's a very different ballgame than just writing in English. I mean, I can write very flowery English with, you know, Shakespearean poems and poetry, writing good stories but when writing scientific manuscripts it's a lot of challenge. So there are ample opportunities. I think we'll discuss in details as we move to the panels but so somebody needs to volunteer. So a group of like-minded people who can probably volunteer a few hours but how many you can do? Thousands, hundreds, you know, but the requirement is so huge that probably this approach may not work and then once you do this are you being an author because you are not charging it's not a freelancing thing. So you are not asking for money. So there is always a trend for somebody acknowledging you or giving you authorship but if it's not related to your field are you gonna do it? Are you comfortable doing it? So why not start an e-life community volunteer scientific writing online course that people can take, somebody can volunteer we can gather and start something or is there a scope for non-English scientific journals? You know, I recently heard this that from India they are starting a India archive and they are trying to have manuscripts in that frequent server in the archive to allow submission of scientific articles in non-English languages which are coming from different states. There are like 26 or 25 different languages which are officially more or less recognized to allow that. And of course, you know, there is self-writing and reading it makes it perfect. You know, you can start with tweets, Facebook posts, blogs and stuff like that. So there are a lot of questions. So some of the questions that I'm going to discuss is is it difficult to pass on the scientific content of a manuscript to global audience effectively? Yes, because if it's really poorly written then it can give a reviewer a very hard time. It could be a fantastic scientist but as a reviewer in a reading, I'm not very comfortable with what you are doing. Are the non-open access or the traditional journals helping edit or polish language for the accepted manuscripts? Probably not. Nothing other than the point to different editing services that make a lot of money out of it. They charge you for open access but even for open access articles there is a lot of crappy writing out there. It has not been polished for languages and stuff like that. So the third question is can journals be lenient to any language bed decisions should not be taken and not point to editing services? Yes, this can be done but it needs a much bigger initiative and somebody needs to make sure that this happens that your science is not solely rejected based on the language quality and stuff. So yeah, I'll stop there and let others speak through. Thank you. Sorry, it was muted. Thank you very much for enlightening, I think. So now we're going to listen from Clarissa. Yes. Thank you, Margarita. Well, I'm Clarissa Rios. I'm from Peru in South America. Peru is here, Brazil, Chile, Colombia you more or less can have an idea where I am, where I come from. So I left Peru in 2006 and the first place that I went to study as an exchange student was in Finland. And my boss still remembers my ex boss still remembers that when I arrived I was speaking like Tarzan like I want that and things like this. So with that example and another our biggest enemy is fear. Fear to go out, fear to look silly, fear not to look so intelligent and so on. And I think that's one of the first things that I'm going to talk about in this video. And I'm so glad that my previous colleague already talked about the scientific part so maybe I can focus a little bit more about the tips and recommendations that I would suggest for you to open up opportunities for yourself. So being honest I have applied to many different scholarships and fellowships and all of them were in English. I think there were only three in English so I think this is something that you have to know if your English is not very good it's something that you have to work on. How can you work on that? I guess that if you have connection to the internet you can go to the YouTube there are many tutorials you can chat in English with people from abroad through different sort of platforms and you can download apps that are for free that I have to improve your English as well and I think that the best teacher that you need that need to feel that you need to speak the language because otherwise you will not survive and that was what happened to me in Finland it was rather I speak Finnish or I speak English so it was really really for me a motivating to don't have many Spanish speakers or my family around because that was what really put me on course you have to learn English in shop otherwise you are and at the beginning I like to make jokes so I remember that I wanted to say something and I was translating the joke and then everyone was in another conversation already so these are the things that you are going to face but that doesn't matter I mean that would pass quickly and there are sometimes things that for example one day I was with flu and I went to my PI to my principal investigator and I say sorry I couldn't come because I was constipated and I said constipated because in Spanish when you have the flu you say constipado so in my brain my PI looked at me and was like ok and these things are going to happen you know so you have to relax embrace that you are you have a second language that you are learning and you have to forget about all that it would pass and you would become a very speaker with time I have a friend from Spain that went to Finland and he didn't speak any English after one year he was super fluent so if she can do it you can also do it other recommendations that I can also suggest is to do networking networking in English and you have to practice it by going to different open seminars by going to the exact webinar where you have to listen different accents in English that sometimes they are much easier than the native speakers I remember that at the very beginning my Spanish friends told me that the only ones that don't speak good English are the people from UK and US because I understand everyone from India, from Colombia, from Belgium but I don't understand people from UK so just try to watch Netflix and things like that other thing that I would suggest to you is to try to jump into a mentoring program and as it was probably mentioned author 8 is one of them because I had all these struggles with the language is that I founded an organization in Papallet that is for Latin American students and what we do is to do mentoring in the language they speak so now we have Spanish we have some videos in Portuguese and some articles and videos on Quechua which is the second important language in Peru and it's from the Indian Empire so I also wrote an article in Nature talking about this why is it important that we do this type of guidance to students in the language and some of the critics or the things the comments I saw on Twitter were like well the English is much easier and I have learned English at the school so why are you saying that in another language so just to open up your minds in this sense I would like to say that even if you receive English at your school this is not the case for large part of the population in the world in Latin America if you have no money you probably don't have access to have English courses in my case I was privileged that even though my parents didn't not have enough money they would cut the holidays, we never want holidays that's for example and they would put me into English classes so even these English classes make me go to Finland speaking like Darson but still it was good enough the other recommendation that I would like to tell you is that you can use social media in a way that is not just for catching up with friends and connecting with your favorite celebrity I think there are much better ways that you can use social media you can follow different websites that are not just about English but about the topics that you are interested in for example I follow UNESCO, UNITAR the WHO and I always receive constantly in my feed I can see all the posts in English of course you also have the one in your own language but this is a way for you to start looking at English every day and every moment that you open your social media also another thing that I would like to suggest you to do is like you have to become become a science communicator and that's something that is in the real need in this moment because most of science communication is happening in English but not in other languages so for example at we have a blog in Spanish we have a YouTube channel in Spanish and this is a way to keep promoting in our own language and not have access to English to see and know about what is happening in science around the world what are things that you could be looking in the future if you want to look for a post dog or for a PhD or a master for example in 2006 MicroRace was a boom in technology nowadays it has been replaced by our technologies that are a little bit better so if someone is thinking this is so much in the past and these are things that you can do for your own community to try to give back if you don't have much time then the English can reach you and you want to reach a broader audience you can also use for example Instagram in my case I have opened last year an account that is called being a scientist is cool with the aim to show that scientists are always at the lab and are not always with the glasses and these stereotypes that are really good on one sense but on the other sense you know people have the idea that we are some people that is in the caves and never see the light so I try to show some pictures and for example talk about this webinar and events that I go and things that are up to date in English in this case because I feel that already I'm doing it in Spanish in the other cat form but anyway it's another your recommendation that I could give you whatever fits you, whatever suits you is something that you should definitely at least try and see if it's something for you if it's not you close your account and that's it some recommendations that I also have for PI for principal investigators it's very important that you have a big variety in your group so I mean I cannot talk about myself but I can talk about also people coming from different parts that have really enriched the labs and the working groups where we have been rather because they have other type of ideas because they see a topic for a different angle and then when we are brainstorming a really nice technique or a really nice idea comes to the table and also because culturally it's really enriching and really beautiful to be with people from all over the world so my recommendation for PI or everyone that is in a position of power in USA is to embrace diversity embrace intergenerational communication and I think that we can reach more in terms of science in that sense what else I would like to talk about maybe I can tell you more stories if you are interested on that and how I try to overcome difficulties with the language as you can see I still have a very strong accent in Spanish and I remember I was doing my three minute thesis and some French PI came to me and said like okay it was nice but can you do it in English now because my accent was so strong of course I laugh because you have to take these things lightly and I just prepare better and I actually won the three minute thesis on my institute so don't feel discouraged by these things sometimes people say it's a joke sometimes they don't react to those things and I think that I will stop here and maybe we can have more room for questions thank you Maria Yuta thank you very much Clarissa that was very nice now we'll have Tatsuya to talk about his experience and his experience can I show my slide can you see my slide can you see my slide so I can't hear you is it okay yes yes yes so I have been working on this variation of language barriers in science and actually in environmental sciences which is my own discipline and obviously as we have been discussing today this is a very important issue for the development of career for non native English speakers but I'm actually focusing on this issue of language barriers from a slightly different direction which is a barrier to the application and the compilation of scientific knowledge at the international level so as we all know English is now playing a key role as a ringer franca in science but actually it is also true that many scientists and the users of scientific knowledge still quite often communicate scientific findings in languages other than English and if this is the case there is a huge barrier between these different communities communicating in different languages and in this case languages can represent a huge barrier to the compilation of non-English scientific knowledge at the international level for example in 2016 we published this paper in biology where we found we investigated the number of scientific documents published in 2014 such with these two key words by the vastian conservation in 16 different languages and what we found was that about 64% of the scientific documents was published in English which is not that surprising but the remaining 36% of the scientific documents was actually languages other than English particularly Spanish, Portuguese Chinese French etc so this simply means that by ignoring non-English scientific knowledge we might lose up to 36% of the scientific knowledge available around the world so this can be a huge role to the scientific community and on the other hand English languages can represent a huge barrier when trying to apply English-based knowledge to local issues such as policymaking or conservation practices for example in the same paper we did a quick survey with directors of protected areas in Spain and we found out that over half the directors actually recognized language barriers to the use of scientific papers for their management of protected areas so this clearly indicates that languages can represent a huge barrier to the application of English-based knowledge is now scientific knowledge is more and more published in English language only so the question is how we can solve this problem and that is what I have been exploring in my current project and first of all I think most importantly we should not assume all the important information is available and communicable in English this is such an important point but we still tend to assume important information is available only in English and communicable in English so we should change this assumption definitely and having this in mind secondly, for example we can always try to involve speakers of multiple major languages in research synthesis such as when conducting systematic reviews or trying to develop global databases this is a very simple straightforward potential solution to this problem get really adopted in the scientific community for example in my current project called the Translate Project we have been trying to develop global collaboration to develop important conservation literature published in languages other than English and to date we have already developed collaboration with a wide range of native speakers of these languages in different countries around the world and we already identified over 600 important papers that are providing important information for the conservation of spaces around the world and these papers indeed provide very important information about the local but often threatened and endemic spaces so this simple example clearly indicates that by making a better use of non-English language and knowledge we can improve our understanding of the natural environment on this planet and suddenly we can always try to make a more concerted effort to disseminate findings in relevant languages as an example in this paper we recently published in Nature where we found that the loss of veteran biodiversity has been very severe in western Asian countries including Iran so we decided to provide multiple language versions of abstract of this paper including this example of Persian version so this is very simple attempt but actually recently more and more scientific journals have started to encourage and allow authors to provide multiple language versions of abstract and even main text as well so this is one potential solution one first step toward solving this problem so these are just some simple examples that I have been thinking about I'm happy to discuss these ideas potential solutions in an opportunity like this paper now and lastly most importantly I think we should definitely change our view toward being a non-native English speaker so being a non-native English speaker has quite often been recognized as a career disadvantage and this is certainly true we have to somehow overcome our own language value to develop our research career but at the same time as I have been explaining in this presentation being a non-native English speaker actually means that you actually have a special important skill for overcoming language barriers in the entire scientific community so this is a very important point for example you can contribute to the global research senses activities by increasing the visibility of non-English scientific language or you can disseminate very important research findings in your own language to those people who are non-native English speakers so being a non-native English speaker also has a very positive side and this change in our view toward being a non-native English speaker should be able to increase the contribution of non-native English speakers to the scientific community so that's it thank you great thank you very much great yeah yes it was a very nice quite impressive one third of just a bit memorable very nice talk thank you very much so now we have Jack thank you right now Yahunde is in Cameroon the capital city in Cameroon really just in the middle in the center of Africa so thank you I'm really happy really you can't imagine how happy I am to be part of this webinar to share part of our challenge and our challenge definitely is not a fight against English it's really the challenge of exclusion because of the multilingualism that is not there I will first start by asking Tatsuya because I saw in the slide that you were looking at different part of the world but I haven't seen anything happening in Africa so I would be happy to help you in any way possible so that you find those articles that might be relevant some might be in French other in Arabic other in Portuguese actually because you have all those language in Africa and definitely those are also the country where we have some of those rare disease neglected and even some of those outbreaks so it might be interesting to figure out what we are actually missing as part of those 30% that you mentioned so my challenge is really the motor it's no one left behind but then when you can see the language as a barrier it's actually excluding all the people who can speak English though we have to acknowledge that WHO is trying to have different language in all the document but still in global health if you don't speak English you are in trouble and then we were happy to push there was a conference in Kigali in Rwanda recently organized by the AMREF it's a big African NGO working together with Netherlands and it was Africa Health Agenda Initiative Conference but it was mainly in English so together with some friends from Alhoka from Lathet and Isabelle from WHO we push so that we can have a session in French and that was the first time that that kind of international English conference was having a small session in French and it was great because you were having all those researchers who came and attend that small session and share the challenge that they were facing I remember this guy I think it was from Guinea and he was saying that when he was trying to make his presentation in French it felt as if no one was paying attention to him at the end of the presentation he has no question and at some point he was kind of frustrated and then you move to a point where we all agree that there is a pleasure in giving and receiving so that guy has been working all a year or two years to have his result now you reach that time where you want to share but then no one is taking what he is sharing and it's so frustrating and that's one part of the problem. The other part is you might not know but Cameroon is one of the biggest countries producing cocoa. Cocoa that is made used to make chocolate and then what we realize is that the people who are actually producing cocoa have never tested chocolate because it's both from Cameroon and sent to Europe and so on and this is the same thing for research. You have researcher in Cameroon, Indonesia and many other countries that are going to produce some data in their language and then those data will be analyzed published in the New England in the Lancet in the language that they are not able to read so this is now inaccessible for them and I think that is really unfair. So as some of the solutions I think quite a number of solutions are already mentioned by Clarissa, Biswa and Tatsuya but I think this kind of webinar going to advocacy. We need to make more and more noise about the need to have every people to be able to communicate in its own language starting from the researcher. We agree English is the lingua franca so that's the fact as per now. But still we have to work together as Tatsuya was showing his article in Nature and then what we did in the Lancet so that they publish in English that's fine but always in the language of the country where the research has taken place. That's the only way for me that the people who have done the research will have access to the information. That's the only way the Ministry of Health will be able to read and say okay I'm going to change my guideline my policy based on this article if I can't read I cannot benefit from it. And then we should have in mind that we cannot solve a complex or a wicked problem using only technical solution. We need to have solutions that are more adaptive which mean at some point we need to government because there is the need of a political will. At some point the Minister of Health of Niger for example taking Niger as an example that's a Francophone country should say there is no way a research can be done in my country if the results are not published in French because that's the language we know the same thing for other countries so bringing all those different solutions together that's the way I think we will be able to limit to reduce the exclusion that some of us are facing and I'm happy to take any question okay thank you very much yeah thank you all very much so now we are open for questions I send them to me and then I can hear ah there are lots of questions sorry so not a passing by comment from Mila saying unfortunately there is an invisible barrier prejudice against people with Latin surnames we have been rejected work without even being read how to face the barriers of English in English is a minority science needs to be accessible to all so I think I completely agree I mean I don't know what you think but we have a problem in Chile so just a small minority the more wealthy you will get to learn English and if you don't know how to communicate in English you cannot do real science and there is a big against surnames are not in English I would say more than just in Spanish but different language so if I go to the next question in a globalized in a globalized world where you can access a lot of information and you can opt for self-learning which you think would be the role of the mentor this is for Clarissa so Clarissa what will be the role of a mentor in a world where you can actually get lots of information sorry I didn't catch up the question what's the role of the mentor in the world that in the meantime I can answer the other question that was about discrimination on surnames in Latin surnames I think they mentioned so I have a friend in the Netherlands that she is using the surname of her partner in order to get interviews in the Netherlands and what I told her is that when I look for jobs in the Netherlands I'm going to put my surname because if that person discriminates against my background then I don't want to work in that laboratory or in that institution so I'm not applying to any other institutions and remember that for any type of opportunity PhD, master program etc. you have to do a lot of applications I have a friend that told me Clarissa is 5 years that I don't get a PhD and I said like oh my god how many times do you apply and she said like I made 5 5 applications and I'm like even more I cannot conceive that 20 should be enough so please just keep applying as many applications that you can do and if they are going to discriminate for your surname just go in another place Margarita I was like why are you maybe you are better now yes I think your mute is on I cannot hear you here wait in the middle of the winter so we got on I think so I put the question in the chat if you want to read it would you prefer to read it in the chat in this globalized world where you can access a lot of information and you can offer self-learning which you think will be the role of the mentor there are many things that you cannot learn online for example in the mentoring program that we have that the mentees only contact the person because they are studying economy and the mentor is an economist they contact the mentor because they want to know how did they get there and I think these stories you only know about achievements of your friends right you know like oh this person got this job this person now is a CEO this person is whatever but they don't know that in the background there are so many rejections so many things that you have to you don't do in order to achieve your dream so what we do in the mentoring the mentor has to be open the mentor has to tell the truth has to guide the person and how the different pathways that they can take what is the one that fits better to this person so maybe as you say there is open access to a lot of information maybe there should be more blogs to talk about what are the real struggles how did they come up how did they overcome the struggles and then maybe you can learn from there if you go to that blog you have a lot of these stories how many people have made it in science and non-scientific careers and by clicking right you can translate it to English so this is accessed by anyone really sorry for my voice but thank you Karisha for that I think there is a question for Tatsuya that I just posted on the chat can we read it loud if you want can you get that chat it's would you like to read it loud or it's about international seminars or congress it says my mute was on so can I read it yes please I have some question about international seminars or congress could it be possible that non-native speakers are participating less in this type of events what can we do about it other question that I have just for discussions it is known that language changes language changes are a way of thinking could it be possible that conserving multi languages in changes offers diversity to the scientific questions that could be asked and the last question I did a research about the consequences of publishing in English for Colombian graduate students but I have not found a journal that wants to publish the research in two languages Spanish and English do you know experiences or journal publishing in two or more languages the same paper okay so there are three questions the first one is the participation in seminars or congress and could it be possible that non-native speakers are participating less in this type of events I'm not sure so obviously non-native speakers tend to I'm not sure I have there are obviously many non-native speakers at international congress but probably the main problem is the presentation itself because many people find it difficult and challenging to speak in English frequently so there is a huge barrier in that sense but I'm not sure if there are less participants from the non-native speakers maybe people can answer this question maybe Tatsuya if I may add something to contribute on that you know my perspective is that conference is also a market which depends on the demand and the supply what we've realized is that the conference I mentioned in Rwanda is that quite a number of French speakers apply for the conference in French and at some point the organizer realized that actually those people are quite a number therefore we can allow them to have their own session in the language so I believe that if at some point there is more and more demand of people speaking French, Portuguese or Spanish and whichever language applying for those conference in the non-native language at some point they will feel that okay we have a sufficient number to allow to have those kind of session and maybe also to take the service of interpreter because that's also a possibility if the number is big then they will say okay we have a big number of Chinese who are coming for the conference let's make sure that we have the translation program during the conference so that's why I will encourage more and more people to apply to those in the language and then it will appear more and more that it's a challenge I think that's a very good point and in a slightly related point I think it is quite important to organize such an international conference in the non-native English speaking countries but now many international conferences quite often are organized in English speaking countries but if you can organize such conferences in non-native English speaking countries you can have more relaxing mood relaxing atmosphere in that conference and that might encourage non-native English speakers to speak more in such a conference okay shall we go to the next question could it be possible that conserving multi languages and changes offers diversity to the scientific questions that could be asked so this is a very important point and I would say yes so I think the diversity of languages or diversity of cultural background can definitely add something to the scientific community I think the diversity of languages can be linked to the diversity of opinions or approaches, ideas so in that sense conserving or keeping the diversity of languages in the scientific community is a very important and promising approach to have diverse solutions to the global challenges I am very keen to know what Azal think about this yeah Bishra here I completely agree with you I mean there could be you know not only addition of thoughts but you know new research topics and new traditional knowledge can come into context and people can add in their traditional say traditional medicinal plants and all those research I am doing that kind of research in phytochemistry and biology and all that so given somebody's country of origin or geographical landscape they might come with a different research approaches of their traditional knowledge and traditional values and those can really help us so it depends on the research question if you are doing more computational research maybe not because it's still computer languages and more advanced studies but then when it comes to more of field research on biodiversity or medicinal plants or therapeutics and all that of course a lot of diversity will help in that beyond all this I think in a lab environment to make it more inclusive and diverse I think no matter whether it contributes to scientific knowledge or not it will definitely contribute to the healthy growth and you know mutual understanding of each other sociocultural and other backgrounds and that helps making stronger ties and bonds between different countries cultures and nations and all that so it's a plus plus and win-win for everybody so I don't see a downside to it at all thank you I think there are even some studies after quite a few studies that linked the diversity of ethnicity and cultural background and scientific productivity so I think this is quite an important point and definitely true and the final point is if there are any journals that publish papers in two languages and I think there are actually many journals particularly in Latin America I guess as far as I know many journals in Latin America publish papers in Spanish and English as well and in other languages I haven't come across any journals doing this but at least for Spanish I think there are those opportunities those journals and actually the Lancet started from the Lancet Global Health to give the opportunity to people to publish in English of course and then in the supplementary to have the opportunity to make the translation it's a process that is ongoing and the more and more the demand will be there the more different journal will have to do that and there is also another journal on tuberculosis and lung disease and usually they will make sure that you have abstract in three to four languages and then to have the same article published in the language of the country so I think it's something that is starting that has started and we need to push more and more so that it becomes everywhere I would expect obviously we would need this initiative, this movement hopefully I think just to wrap up a bit of what we have been talking I would say please stop me if you don't agree with something but I think the problems are that first that many non native English speakers they don't get an occasion or they don't get a training to speak in English and even worse as Wiska said we are not trained to have English scientific writing so that those are two problems that were highlighted and also that if all publications are in English they will not go to the places that they should go so policy makers they need them to have their own language to get to see the data and some of the solutions that have been given here is first, well to try to learn English which is very hard to all of us but there are lots of online courses and scientific writing courses so maybe we could encourage Eli to give some sort of training or we could have them to create an online course for scientific writing then I thought a very good idea that there are lots of comments about it is to make the effort to publish your reports whatever your publications with your abstract not only in English but in other languages as they have said and pointed out there are some journals doing it so maybe you can put a bit more pressure on that and then I thought it was a great idea to try when you are writing reviews to try to involve people from non-English natives to have lots of many different languages to have many different point of view when you are writing a review and a summary of the literature so then you get all these people even if it is written in English you get all the different point of views and then well make a lot of noise about these problems so to talk about that I think that was part of the solution given and then also to put attention to non-English scientific journals something else missing? No, that's perfect It was a quick brief up I think we don't have time to have lots of questions but I guess we won't have time for going through them so I just say many thanks for coming and for joining us for this webinar and I guess we can continue the discussion online or through emails or through social media Maybe before we close some of those questions you can send it to us and then we can respond on the website so that people can have access to it later on Perfect Our last corner too Elsa to do it for us so we can all get the questions Thank you Bye Bye