Thirteen years ago, a deadly strain of avian flu known as H5N1 was tearing through Asia's bird populations. In January 2004, Chinese scientists reported that pigs too had become infected with thevirus—an alarming development, since pigs are susceptible to human viruses and could potentially act as a "mixing vessel" that would allow the virus to jump to humans.

　　13年前，一股名为H5N1的致命禽流感在亚洲鸟类中肆虐流行。2004年1月，中国科学家的报告称：猪也会感染这种病毒——这是一项很有警示作用的进展，因为猪很容易感染人类的病毒，而且可能会充当“混合容器”，最终使病毒传染到人类身上。

　　Yet at the time, little attention was paid outside of China—because the study was published only in Chinese, in a small Chinese journal of veterinary medicine. It wasn't until August of that year that the World Health Organization and the United Nations learned of the study's results and rushed to have it translated.

　　然而，当时在中国以外只有很少人关注，因为研究报告是用中文写的，刊登在中国一份小型兽医期刊上。直到当年的8月份，世界卫生组织和联合国才得知报告结果，紧急请人翻译。

　　Those scientists and policy makers ran headlong into one of science's biggest unsolved dilemmas: language. A new study in the journal PLOS Biology sheds light on how widespread the gulf can be between English-language science and any-other-language science, and how that gap can lead to situations like the avian flu case, or worse.

　　那些科学家和政策制定者们都一头扎进了科学界最难的一个未解悖论中：语言。PLOS Biology杂志的一项新研究关注了英语语言科学和其它语言科学之间有多大的鸿沟，以及这种鸿沟会如何导致出现像禽流感案例这样甚至是更糟的情况。

　　"Native English speakers tend to assume that all important information is in English," says Tatsuya Amano, a zoology researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author on this study. Yet particularly when it comes to work about biodiversity and conservation, Amano says, much of the most important data is collected and published by researchers in the countries where exotic or endangered species live—not just the United States or England. This can lead to oversights of important statistics or critical breakthroughs by international organizations, or even scientists unnecessarily duplicatingresearch that has already been done.

　　该研究的第一作者、剑桥大学动物学研究者天野达也说：“以英语为母语的人倾向于假想所有的重要信息都是用英语来传达的。”然而，特别是涉及到生物多样性及保护的工作时，天野达也说，收集和发表很多重要数据的研究人员都来自奇异或濒危动物生活的国家，而非仅仅来自美国或英国。这可能导致国际组织忽视重要的统计信息或关键性突破，甚至会让科学家们去做不必要的、已经做过了的重复性研究工作。

　　Even for people who try not to ignore research published in non-English languages, Amano says, difficulties exist. More than half of the non-English papers observed in this study had no English title, abstract or keywords, making them all but invisible to most scientists doing database searches in English.

　　天野还说，即使对于那些想努力不忽视非英语研究成果的人来说，也有很多困难。研究发现，半数以上非英语论文都没有英语标题、摘要或关键词，导致大多数用英语进行数据库检索的科学家完全找不到这些论文。

　　It's also worrisome that English has become so prestigious for scientists that many non-English speakers avoid publishing research in their own languages, Amano says. Federico Kukso, a MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow who has reported on science in Spanish and English for more than 15 years, says the bias extends beyond how scientists view studies; it also manifests in what science the media chooses to focus on.

　　天野说，还有一点令人担忧的是，英语在科学家们看来已经变得非常权威，所以许多非英语国家的人会避免使用本国语言发表研究结果。费德里科•库克索是一位麻省理工大学奈特科学新闻学者，他已用西班牙语和英语发表科学研究逾15年，他说语言偏见已超出科学家们如何看待研究的范畴;它还表现在媒体会选择聚焦哪些科学研究上。

　　Amano thinks that journals and scientific academies working to include international voices is one of the best solutions to this language gap.

　　天野达也认为期刊和科学研究院努力收入各国声音才是解决语言鸿沟的一种最好策略。

（编辑：何莹莹）