Plurilingualism in the Comptes Rendus journals of the French Academy of Sciences
The Académie des Sciences and French as a scientific language
Since its creation, the French Academy of Sciences has been dedicated to the development of science and advising government authorities in this field. It is particularly committed to encouraging scientific life through the production of knowledge, through various publications such as its journal Comptes Rendus. Its mission is also to "maintain the role and quality of French scientific language" (art. 2 of the Statutes of the Academy, approved by decree of the President of the Republic on January 31, 2003, n° MENS 0300009D).
As such, although most manuscripts submitted to Comptes Rendus are written in English, any author may choose to write in French. As a result, the two languages sometimes cohabit within the same annual volume or special issue.
French-English bilingualism, from metadata to full text
To facilitate referencing of their articles in academic search engines and international bibliographic databases, Comptes Rendus also endeavors to provide titles, abstracts and keywords in both French and English. When these metadata are not supplied directly by the authors themselves, they are translated by the journal editorial teams using automatic language processing software, and then submitted to the authors for approval.
Comptes Rendus Biologies articles are published in their entirety in French and English, with the journal's editorial team at the disposal of authors who may have difficulty handling either of these languages.
Comptes Rendus translation project
Since 2020, six of the seven series of the French Academy of Sciences' Comptes Rendus (Mathématique, Mécanique, Physique, Géoscience, Chimie and Biologies) have been distributed in partnership with the Mersenne Center. In 2022, these two partners obtained financial support from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (through the second call for projects launched by the French National Fund for Open Science in 2021) and the French Ministry of Culture's Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France for the development of a semi-automatic translation platform for articles in these journals. This joint project had two objectives:
- Produce a corpus of fully bilingual French/English articles (the original article may have been published in either of these two languages), and make it available to the Translations and Open Science project led by the OPERAS consortium (open scholarly communication in the european search area for social sciences and humanities) and funded by the FNSO): this objective was achieved in spring 2023 and notably concerns the special issue Facing climate change, the range of possibilities published in 2020 by Comptes Rendus Géoscience ;
- Develop a computer-assisted translation interface to enable volunteer contributors or professional translators to translate Comptes Rendus articles published in French or English into any language, by post-editing automated processing: this objective was reached in summer 2023, and currently concerns the Géoscience, Chimie and Biologies series, as they are the only ones to distribute the full text in JATS-XML format. This pivot format is essential for the software to function properly.
Using a translation
Translations of journal articles are made available to the public in order to increase their international circulation, but their scientific relevance and linguistic accuracy are not verified by the authors or the journal editorial teams. They do not engage the scientific responsibility of the publishers. For all research purposes, we recommend using the original published version.
Translations of Comptes Rendus articles are released under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license, authorizing anyone interested to share and adapt them, on the express condition of crediting the original work (the translation itself, but also the article originally published in Comptes Rendus) and its authors.
You will find at the beginning of each translation the citation information to be included for any redistribution or reuse.