The centre Mersenne and the Académie des Sciences have once again joined forces on a semi-automatic translation project, supported by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the French Ministry of Culture, which combines the production of translation corpora and the development of a tool for semi-automatic translation of scientific articles.
Project background
- An idea from the Académie des Sciences
This project is the brainchild of the Académie des Sciences, whose mission is to improve the dissemination of scientific French. Although most of the manuscripts submitted to the Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences are written in English, the idea is to allow any author to choose to write in French. Consequently, the two languages sometimes coexist within the same annual volume or special issue. The aim is also to meet the expectations of the second Open Science Plan: to promote multilingualism and the circulation of scientific knowledge by translating the publications of French researchers.
- The expertise of the centre Mersenne
- Funding from two ministries:
- The Ministry of Higher Education and Research, for whom the project’s objective was to produce a bilingual corpus of articles, in HTML and PDF formats, which could eventually be used as datasets -> English – French corpus in the disciplines of Chemistry, Geosciences and Biology.
- The French Ministry of Culture: which wanted to encourage the multilingual dissemination of scientific articles.
Aims of the project
- Promote the French scientific language (Statutes, art. 2 paragraph 5, the Académie des Sciences is attentive to maintaining the role and quality of the French scientific language).
- Meeting the expectations of the 2nd Open Science Plan: promoting multilingualism and the circulation of scientific knowledge by translating the publications of French researchers. In particular, to encourage the writing of articles in the authors’ native language and the multilingual distribution of published articles.
Project funding
The one-year project, which began at the end of 2021 and ran from May 2022 to May 2023, was funded by two ministries to the amount of 96,000 euros.
Two people have been recruited for this project:
- A developer to build the tool
- A translator to translate a selection of articles in English into French and French into English.
Situation in May 2023
- A bilingual corpus (English – French) of 25 articles was sent to the Ministry of Higher Education and Research,
- A semi-automatic translation tool was initially developed for use by the Académie des Sciences.
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