Friday, February 6, 2009
More Questions than Answers.
Today, after viewing another student's blog, I began to search for more popular literature on Dr. Medina to see if I could get a more informal perspective that might help to answer some questions about her, her work, and information seeking behavior. Lexis Nexis Academic database and all various EBSCOhost databases were searched but few results were brought up and none were very informal. Some were articles by other people that had permission to use photos/diagrams accredited to Dr. Medina. (This did bring up an interesting point. If these other authors knew to ask Dr. Medina for these materials they must have a connection, possibly a networking connection, somewhere. Perhaps I will research this a little for a later post.) Going back to the Medina Lab website for some inspiration, I started combing through the "News" section to see if their was any mention of her being featured in any interviews or articles. Low and behold there were about two citations of such articles that look exactly what I what I was hoping for! The problem: they are all in Spanish. I searched the newspapers' website and could not find anywhere to switch languages. Now I did take a couple of years of Spanish in high school but have retained very little beyond a few key conversational phrases. So as I sat feeling frustrated from being thwarted by a language barrier, I began to ask: what do scientists do if they know there is an article out there that is pertinent to their research but they cannot read the language it was written/printed in? I would think this might happen quite often seeing as there seems like there are so many different places where research is conducted, no one could possibly know all of the languages required. So it makes me wonder: do scientists make impromptu friends within the modern language department of their university or university libraries, employ translation services, or possibly just take their skills from a few years of a language, dust them off and try to fight their way through the article, hoping they don't mistranslate and only seek assistance if they determine it is really important?
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Did you try any of the online translator services? It seems like the major search engines (yahoo, google, windows live) all have a version. I've tried alta vista's (now yahoo's I guess)babel fish (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). It was far from perfect since it seems to do a word by word translation - as opposed to the entire phrase, but they may have improved it since. They may still help you get the gist of the articles. I did stumble across a professional translator service that would probably be more what a scientist would require when doing research but I'm blanking on the name. Post it later if I can find it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.languageline.com/page/products_and_solutions/. Language line was the interpeter service I came across before. It's not free but that means the results should be accurate, right?
ReplyDeleteI know I'm a little late to this thread but its an interesting question that I never thought about. I just assumed that searchers would only look for articles in a language they know. I wonder how good these electronic translators are. I think there probably is some informal connections with speakers of other languages, either in the department or out.
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