Ramirez Castañeda, a Colombian biologist, spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous frogs without getting ill. Although her findings come in many shapes and sizes, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their biological discoveries out to the wider scientific community. With Spanish as her mother tongue, her research had to be translated into English to be published. That wasn’t always possible because of budget or time-and it means that some of her findings were never published.

“It’s not that I’m a bad scientist,” she says. “It’s just because of the language.”

Castañeda is not alone. There is plenty of research in non-English-language papers that gets lost in translation, or is never translated. A research looked through more than 400, 000 peer-reviewed papers in 16 different languages and found 1, 234 studies providing evidence on biodiversity conservation which, because they weren’t in English, may have been overlooked. These included Japanese-language findings on the effectiveness of relocating the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl, the largest owl species.

Some experts argue that for the sake of the bigger picture, scientific knowledge should converge (转换) into one common language. Science is very globalised and becoming more so, so the use of a global language is enormous for that.

Of course, scientists can work with an English partner, or use a translator-but this ultimately strengthens the cycle of dependency on the global north, leading to inequality in international influence. The specific meanings of words can also pose a problem in translation. For example, it is difficult to find in English one single word to describe forest snakes and frogs in the work Castafieda does with indigenous (土著的) communities in the Amazon.

“So we’re losing observations for science, too, ” says Castañeda. “For me, it’s not possible to just have everything translated into English. We need multilingual (多语种的) science, and we need people that feel comfortable doing science in their own languages. It could be possible to switch to a world where, say, Chinese, English and Spanish are the three languages of science, just as English, French and German were the languages of science in the 19th century.”

The human eye can perceive about 1 million colors, but languages have far fewer words to describe those colors. Languages spoken in industrialized nations such as the United States, for example, tend to have about a dozen basic color terms, while languages spoken by populations in remote areas often have fewer. However, the way that a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages, according to a new study.

Among members of the Tsimane society, who live in a remote part of the Bolivian Amazon rainforest, the researchers found that those who had learned Spanish as a second language began to classify colors into more words, making color distinctions that are not commonly used by Tsimane who are monolingual (单语的).

In the most striking finding, Tsimane who were bilingual (会双语的) began using two different words to describe blue and green, which monolingual Tsimane speakers do not typically do. The researchers also found that the bilingual Tsimane became more precise in describing colors such as yellow and red, which monolingual speakers tend to use to include many shades (色度) beyond what a Spanish or English speaker would include.

Working with monolingual and bilingual members of the Tsimane, the researchers asked people to perform two different tasks. For the bilingual population, they asked them to do the tasks twice, once in Tsimane and once in Spanish.

In the first task, the researchers showed the subjects 84 chips (块) of different colors, one by one, and asked them what word they would use to describe the color. In the second task, the subjects were shown the entire set of chips and asked to group the chips by color words.

The researchers found that when performing this task in Spanish, the bilingual Tsimane classified colors into the traditional color words of the Spanish language. Additionally, the bilingual speakers were much more precise about naming colors when they performed the task in their native language.

“The bilingual speakers learned a different way to divide up the color space,” says Edward Gibson, the senior author of the study. “It’s a great example of one of the main benefits of learning a second language. You open a different world and understand different concepts that you import to your native language.”

In these times of worldwide communications, science is no different from other professions in that English is now the established “universal” language. Like it or not, most scientific reports are published in English, although some countries also have journals that are published in their native languages. But how did English develop into the dominant language of scientific discourse (会话)? Was it a joint decision or did it happen progressively and “accidentally”? And was it a positive move for all?

Arabic was used in all countries with an Islamic culture in the middle ages, while in Europe Latin was used for communication in science and education until the 17th century. During the Enlightenment, Latin lost favour as it was thought to be too complicated. Instead, scientific communication became more “provincial”; German, French, Italian and English were used in their respective countries and colonies, with different languages being more important in different disciplines — German, for instance, was widely used in physics, chemistry and some aspects of medicine and psychology. The relative use of these languages changed through history, reflecting the relative growth and decline of science, culture and economics in these countries. Thus, the use of French predominated in the 18th century, whereas German was most widespread in the 19th and English dominated the 20th. Social upheaval (剧变) also played a role — the use of French declined dramatically after World War I, whereas that of German increased in parallel until World War II. After World War II, and especially in the past 30 years, English progressively established itself as the primary language for scientific communication as America came to dominate both basic research and technology. In the 1920s the need for a universal language of science was debated, and a synthetic language, Esperanto, was developed but never widely used.

Despite the obvious appeal of having a common language that allows scientists around the world to communicate with one another, there can indeed be some drawbacks in using English for all communication — non-native English speakers can be at a disadvantage compared with native speakers when it comes to expressing and highlighting the interest of their papers and communicating with editors and referees. Careful copy editing can tackle the problem of accessibility of accepted manuscripts, but upstream of this stage it is down to all parties to ensure that they evaluate work on its scientific merit rather than its proper use of grammar.

The use of a universal language for communication in science is unavoidable as one obvious advantage is that findings can be more widely accessed, and resisting this concept for the sake of cultural difference would seem to be anything but productive. However, the use of national language and less technical language is useful in communicating science to the general public, as is the case with the Nature gateways in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and German.