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Asked by rennit to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: Scientist.
Question: Science is an international Language; but do you ever have problems communcating ideas with Scientists of a different nationality?
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Sheila Kanani answered on 15 Mar 2011:
Great question! I’ve worked with scientists from all over the world and we’ve never really had a problem. We tend to use graphs and pictoral representations if we need to, or mathmatical equations (as maths is the language of physics!). Also I am lucky because generally scientists are expected to know English! And if we have some language barriers they tend to fall as we discuss science over a pint in the pub 😀
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Suzie Sheehy answered on 15 Mar 2011:
This is an excellent question because you’ve picked up on the very international nature of science. You’re the first one to ask a question along these lines, so well done!
I have colleagues in my office from Romania, Ireland, England, Japan and Germany and I myself am from Australia! All my colleagues at the moment speak excellent English so I have no problem communicating with them. I have had one colleague in the past whose English wasn’t great, but I could understand him pretty well anyway, as I’ve always had a lot of friends from different countries and am pretty good an interpreting what someone is trying to say (Australia is very multicultural!). It can start to be a bit more difficult if non-native English speakers are trying to communicate with one another and sometimes I have had to “interpret”.
It’s certainly not a problem though, I see it more as a good thing. I get to learn about alot of different cultures and often, if I go to a conference with my colleagues having a native Japanese/German/whatever speak can be really really helpful!
Besides, I always feel a bit ignorant when I travel to another country and don’t speak the language, so I never have hard feelings toward anyone in terms of language!
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Adam Tuff answered on 15 Mar 2011:
Haha, funny story – I went to a conference last year. I’m from Newcastle, so I have an accent like Cheryl Tweedy (but less annoying). My work colleague is from Oxford, and has a very posh accent. The German people were with could understand my accent better than him!
Usually it’s not a problem – a lot of people know English as their first or second language, so most conversations where there are people from different nationalities are done in English. I speak a little French and Japanese, but no where near as good as my colleagues from other countries speak English!
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Geoff McBride answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Many of us from the UK struggle to communicate ideas. For example in my research in computer systems to create decision making programs we steal the termanologies from genetics but it doesn’t always work.
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Robert Simpson answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Sometimes, but usually we get along fine. Most Europeans speak some English and I have a fairly neutral ‘English’ accent that can process fairly well. I used to work in Cardiff where some people had very strong Welsh accents and I’ve seen non-English speakers struggle to understand.
When talking to Americans I always forget that they don’t use the metric system and so don’t use Celsius, kilograms or metres very much. This has caused confusion for me before. Luckily astrophysics has a way of getting around this by using different units anyway, such as Kelvin for temperature, solar masses and light years and astronomical units for distance.
Science is very international though and it is a lot of fun learning about the subtle differences between cultures. We have a lot of people from all over the world using our Zooniverse sites and contributing to our research.
On a trip recently I met one them, a dutch lady called Hanny. She taught be a dutch phrase that I really like: “maak dat de kat wijs”, which means “tell it to the cat”. It’s a bit like a cross between “I’ll eat my hat” and “talk to to the hand”.
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