Multilingualism and open science: how the GoTriple platform can support scientific translations

Scientific translation is one of the ways in which the academic community, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities, puts the principle of multilingualism into practice. Because of this, projects such as Translations and Open Science, which is part of the OPERAS infrastructure, are being developed to provide greater support for translation — in the case of the aforementioned project, with the support of machine translation engines. Another initiative being developed within the OPERAS infrastructure — and coordinated by the University of Coimbra — is the prototype of a collaborative translation service for the Social Sciences and Humanities. This initiative is part of the OPERAS-PLUS project and has also collaborated with Translations and Open Science, to explore synergies and complementarities.

Created to be a central single access point for discovering research artefacts relevant for the Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), the GoTriple platform is yet another initiative, stemming from the efforts of more than 20 partners in Europe, which exploits multilingualism and multiculturalism at its core. The GoTriple discovery service, already available in its final version, is the main result of the TRIPLE project, which lasted for 36 months and comes to an end on 31 March 2023. To explore the different ways GoTriple can support scientific translations, the scientific coordinator of the Translations and Open Science project, Susanna Fiorini, has written an article (originally in French and translated into English) where she discusses three use cases of GoTriple to support translations. In addition to introducing use cases, the publication sought to identify synergies between the two projects (TRIPLE and Translations and Open Science).

Three different use cases are highlighted and explained in the article:

1. The possibility of extracting terminology from GoTriple disciplinary vocabularies to be refined, converted and imported into assisted translation tools. Data can be downloaded from this link to the Semantics platform, which contains other potentially interesting open lexical resources. Although there is still room for improvement, 3,375 terms translated into several languages remain a significant starting point, in particular for those looking to train and specialise in scientific translation, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

2. The search for reference documents for the creation of specialised corpus in selected languages; (GoTriple's material is available in 11 languages). GoTriple makes it possible to carry out multilingual searches and thus find publications in a given language by using keywords in one of the supported languages. This means that by searching for a term in Spanish, it is possible to find publications containing the same term not only in the language of the search but also in other languages. While it may seem trivial to explain to a translation specialist how useful such a resource can be, the demonstration of use cases made in the article helps to introduce methods and working practices to non-specialists, students or disciplinary experts who wish to engage in translation work, among others.

3. The possibility of interdisciplinary (and also multicultural and multilingual) collaboration between researchers, specialists and translators from different areas of the field of Social Sciences and Humanities, via the public profiles and skills displayed on the GoTriple platform. Opportunities for networking and collaboration, as well as professional valorisation, are indeed urgently needed, according to the stakeholders involved in scientific translation processes. GoTriple could help meet these needs through its functionalities, such as the creation of user accounts and profiles, the assignment of publications to authors, the possibility to easily connect and communicate with disciplinary experts (and linguistic experts), the document annotation system, etc. In such a scenario, an editor or an author wishing to have a publication translated or reviewed could have access to a directory of expert profiles, with their expertise and project history visible with just one click.

Besides presenting in detail the use cases briefly presented here, Susanna Fiorini addresses the limitations of the platform, contributing with suggestions for the next steps in the development of the tool in the SSH community in Europe.

Read the full article:

French - Translations and Open Science project blog

English - OPERAS infrastructure blog