Translations and Open Science: Translation as a Collaborative Practice at the Heart of Open Science

When it comes to multilingual dissemination of research, translation may be seen as one of the easiest solutions. Yet, translation in the SSH is a complex practice in reality: various highly specialised profiles need to be involved (authors, translators, researchers, editors), requiring resources that publishers and universities do not always have. It may thus seem that there are more challenges than opportunities in translating scholarly publications. But what if it is possible to mutualise human skills, language resources and translation technology in a single collaborative translation environment? What if, instead of being a challenge, translation becomes a practice to foster collaboration in the scientific community? The Translations and Open Science project explores translation as one possible way to disseminate research in different languages, with a focus on translation technology that can be used to optimise and mutualise processes, resources and tools. The goal is to establish a scientific translation service combining human skills and specialised translation technologies, in particular machine translation engines, corpora and vocabularies, to support a collaborative, human-centred translation process. The service is intended for different scenarios: researchers in need of support to write or translate their results, publishers planning to translate scientific works, readers submitting a translation suggestion for a scientific paper, etc. Imagined as an open and modular digital environment, the service will foster collaboration between international publishers, researchers and translators, thus allowing not only the optimisation of the translation process but also promoting the interaction between different actors of scholarly communication in an unprecedented way.