Are there some fields where having skills in a language other than English is necessary to perform research at an international level?

Question

When I went to college, an old-schooled teacher of mine insisted that, because I was interested in chemistry, I needed to work on my German as it was the lingua franca of that trade. It turns out, there is absolutely no need to speak German anymore to be a successful researcher in chemistry.

I somewhat thought that, since at least two decades, English was the only language required to be a researcher in any field (excepting, maybe, literature). However, seeing this question made it apparent that some graduate programs still have requirements for other languages. How useful are they?

In a word: are there some fields where reading/writing/speaking a language other than English is necessary to perform research at an international level?

(Let's exclude fields related to literature and linguistics. Let's also forget about teaching, and focus the question on research.)

Answer 1

Are there some fields where speaking a language other than English is necessary to perform research at an international level?

It depends on what you mean by "speaking" and "necessary". In mathematics, there is no need to speak any language but English and the language of the country you are working in, but there's a real benefit to being able to read other languages. It's not strictly necessary, and its importance varies between fields. In my case, I don't use other languages on a daily or even weekly basis, but probably read French on a monthly basis and German a little less frequently.

In my view, the reason for language exams isn't that these languages are required to be a researcher, but rather that they are helpful. The best argument I've heard for requiring language exams is as follows. Learning how to read mathematics in French or German is not very difficult, but it's still a burden if you just want to read one paper. Usually you can get around it by finding another exposition, finding someone to explain the paper to you, or just deciding the paper is not relevant enough to bother with. However, even though this is a rational solution to a one-time dilemma, it's a bad idea if you are going to be faced with these dilemmas repeatedly. At that point, you'll gain a lot in flexibility and convenience if you can read the papers you want to read. The purpose of language exams is to keep people from repeatedly making short-sighted choices.

I'd guess that language skills are more important in mathematics than in most scientific fields, because the mathematics literature has an enormously longer half-life. In my work, I frequently use and refer to papers that are 50 years old, and sometimes quite a bit more. These results have not always made it into textbooks, and even when they have the original papers sometimes contain valuable insights.

Answer 2

I'm going to cherry pick a bit.

In the area of robotics, the Japanese have one of the best journals and conferences (their journals were about 10%-20% acceptance rate about 3 years ago). Yet, many of those journals are written in Japanese. Here in Japan, students in robotics do not need to present their work at international conferences or journals, since they consider theirs good enough.

Many of the best robotics work in things like ICRA and IROS (from the Japanese) was presented in some form about 1-2 years ago.

That said, I do not think knowing Japanese is necessary for a successful tenure in robotics, but it certainly can help to have some competitive advantage.

Answer 3

In my field (mathematical physics), it is certainly true that most research is published in English, although there certainly is a non-trivial amount published in French, for example. Although being able to read French might not be required in many institutions, it still is very useful. I expect that for the other sciences the picture is similar (for the humanities on the other hand, I expect it may be very different).

Another issue however that becomes more important when looking for tenure(d) (track) positions are the teaching requirements. In many countries almost all teaching is done in the native language, at least at the undergraduate level. So it is important that you will be able to teach in this language, or at least be willing to learn the language in the near future.

Answer 4

Let's exclude fields related to literature and linguistics.

I would say that in most Academic Departments you can find a research topics that can be done exclusively in English, but that in many departments you could also find topics that cannot be done exclusively with English. Even with Computer Science (e.g., speech recognition in a non-English language) and Biology (genetic mutation common in a foreign country where you need to collect samples) there are projects where a foreign languages is required. I would venture to say there are more departments where a foreign language could be critical than ones where it couldn't. I am hard pressed to think of a Chemistry or Pyshics research question that would require a foreign language.

Choosing the College of Arts and Sciences at UPenn as a random sample of research fields the following broad categories become apparent. There are language studies (e.g., French, Spanish, German), which to me do not fall into the literature category, where there is an obvious need for a foreign language. There are cultural studies (e.g., Asian Studies and Latin American Studies, but also things like Anthropology, Archeology, Art History) where you are likely required to live in a non-English speaking country for at least a while. I would expect language studies and cultural studies to have language requirements. Then there are research areas in which you may be studying a non-English speaking culture (e.g., Criminology, Economics, Environmental Studies), for which languages are essential for some individuals, but unlikely to be required for all. There are also art topics (e.g., Fine Arts, Cinema studies, Music) where your research topics may not be in English and foreign language skills may be required. There are "old" topics (e.g., History, Classics, and Folklore) where sources are unlikely to be in English so programs often have language exams.

Answer 5

I do research in chemical engineering. The journals one submits to depend on field. For the most part, work related to systems, simulation, optimization, etc., are published in English. I am pretty sure its that same way with health/biomedical/medicine type research, since a lot of that is funded by NSF and/or NIH.

The only foreign journal I've heard of anyone submitting to was Angewandte Chemie (I think that's German for Applied Chemistry). But, I do not think they submitted in German. Those people did research in the field of self-assembly and nano-scale systems.

I am pretty sure English is fine for publishing — but hey, a second language is always helpful to know, if you've got the time and commitment it takes to get fluent.

Answer 6

Let's approach this question from another direction: When is it ever a disadvantage to know more languages?

Every translation is already an interpretation and beyond mathematics I don't see any field where interpretation would not matter. In other words: You are always closer to the original meaning when reading a paper in its original language than when reading a translation of it.

I'm in philosophy and theology right now and it is for either a must to know English, German, French, Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek. The works of Plato, Nietzsche, Luther, Macchiavelli, Sueton, etc. are simply not the same anymore once you translate them.

As an academic you should never wonder why you should put any effort into learning something new - learning new things is your daily job! That's what you chose to do. Therefore the need to learn a new language should be seen as a chance. Expand your horizon!

Answer 7

It depends on the field.

My ongoing PhD work is in applied mathematics, where English is pretty much all you need. Sure, knowing some Russian, French and German can be useful, if you want to read various older seminal papers in their original form, but the actual results from those papers have usually been widely reproduced (often in a more modern and readable form) in textbooks written in English. For more modern research in my field, English is pretty much the universal choice of language, perhaps the only halfway significant contender being Chinese.

(In pure mathematics, the situation is somewhat different, partly due to the "longer half-life" of pure math papers noted by Anonymous Mathematician in their answer. Indeed, typically the non-English papers one occasionally encounters in applied math tend to be on the theoretical side.)

I'm also an amateur cryptographer, and within that field the dominance of English in academic writing is even more complete. This is partly due to historical reasons: the modern academic study of cryptography, as opposed to clandestine military research and occasional hobbyist dabbling, is a relatively new field, and emerged from applied mathematics and computer science at a time when especially the latter field was strongly dominated by the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. Basically, within crypto, the only thing you may need languages other than English for is historical (meta)research.

On the other hand, in the last few years I've also dabbled in the humanities, specifically in assyriology. Within that field, at least rudimentary knowledge of French and German is all but essential (some of the central reference works and dictionaries are written in those languages), and Latin isn't completely useless either. And of course, you also need to learn the ancient languages that you're studying (for me, that's Akkadian, some Sumerian and a bit of Hittite so far), and familiarity with their neighbors and (ancient or modern) relatives can be pretty useful, too.

So, yes, that's at least one field where knowing only English would be a significant impediment. I'm not saying it would completely prevent you from studying the field, but it does deprive you of access to some fairly useful sources and references. And besides, the general attitude in assyriology seems to be that a researcher should be polyglot as a matter of course. For example, the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (an important encyclopedia of the field) happily mixes together entries written in German, English and French, depending on each contributor's preferred language, and expects the reader to be able to make sense of any of them.

Answer 8

History

Without any access to first-hand translations one is sentenced to rely only on other translators' interpretations.

Even for english history one needs to look for foreign resources either to fact-check the record or understand the topic from others' perspective.