The Lingua Franca of Technology

To be well-informed computer scientists, do we need to follow the Russian, Chinese, or Romanian computing literature? Can we say our field is truly international when we publish most of our results in English? Must a global community rely on a common tongue—a lingua franca—to support its activities? I’d never thought about Romanian computing literature before I stumbled upon it at the Library of Congress— which has a substantial collection of computing journals, as they come in handy when preparing legislation. As one might expect, about 80 percent of the computing journals are in English. Most of these come from four collections: the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, the ACM Digital Library, and libraries of two for-profit publishers. English has been the dominant language of computing since its inception. “The bulk of the popular and archival literature in computer science is published in English,” noted a 1970 report on foreign language requirements for computer science students. “The next most important publication language is Russian, and most relevant Russian journals are published promptly in English translation,” the report continued. Indeed, the second-largest computing collection in the Library of Congress comes from Russia, and each journal has English translations or abstracts. Beyond these, the Library has a smattering of computing periodicals in German, French, and Japanese, all of which have English translations or summaries. Since 2010, it also has a small but growing collection of Chinese and Korean journals— few of these periodicals provide English translations. When I last visited, the Library of Congress had four Romanian journals, and none had English translations. Judging from the words that were borrowed from English, each periodical covered a fairly standard set of topics. However, it seemed odd that a country with such a small technical community would want its own journals, and that it wouldn’t want to spread its ideas to the wider community by translating them. In fact, the scientific and technical community has traditionally utilized a lingua franca to circulate its ideas around the world. The lingua franca of science was Greek in classical antiquity, Arabic in the early Middle Ages, and Latin from the late Middle Ages to the early 19th century. Following Napoleon, German and French competed to be the lingua franca until English emerged as the dominant mode of communication in the 20th century. There are some obvious benefits to a common language for science. It helps spread ideas to the widest possible audience, gets more feedback and results, and allows the greatest number of people to build upon its accomplishments. But it has one substantial drawback: it can separate the practice and teaching of science and technology from the development of those subjects. In many parts of the world, the lingua franca is neither the language of instruction nor business. Hence, you’ll find Romanian teachers clinging to journals with tiny audiences and Chinese publishers creating a spate of new journals to support the East Asian technical community.