The Royal Society of Chemistry has tested a machine translation tool, called RSC Translate internally, to help authors whose first language is not English. The tool uses a bank of chemistry terms in several languages so that specialist terms are translated correctly, and it can translate a whole paper at once. Copyeditors’ corrections to translated papers are used to improve the tool. In November 2023 it was a proof of concept being tested with a small group of researchers in China.
Benefits & outcomes
- The RSC reports that in most of its experiments, the machine translation read better than the author’s own English version.
Notes & quotes
- Anastasia Toynbee, a product manager at the RSC, presented the work at the NEC Software Solutions Publishing Conference in London on 7 November 2023.
- Her talk drew on a 2023 PLOS Biology paper, which found that researchers with English as an additional language take 51% longer to write a paper, and have papers rejected for language reasons 2.6 times as often as researchers whose first language is English.
- “We might kill it.” Toynbee, on whether the proof of concept will continue.
Publisher / company: Royal Society of Chemistry
Date of case study: 2023
Status: Pilot
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