---
title: "Languages of science"
chunk: 4/13
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:39:42.114015+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

It seems wise to assume that in the long run the number of significant contributions to scientific knowledge by different countries will be roughly proportional to their populations, and that except where populations are very small contributions will normally be published in native languages.
The expansion of Russian scientific publishing became a source of recurring tension in the United States during the decade of the Cold War. Very few American researchers were able to read Russian, which contrasted with a remaining widespread familiarity with the two oldest languages of science, French and German. "In a 1958 survey, 49% of American scientific and technical personnel claimed they could read at least one foreign language, yet only 1.2% could handle Russian." Science administrators and funders had recurring concerns about their ability to efficiently track the progress of academic research in the USSR. This ongoing anxiety became an overt crisis after the successful launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1958, as the decentralized American research system seemed for a time outpaced by the efficiency of Soviet planning.
Although the Sputnik crisis was relatively brief, it had far-reaching consequences for linguistic practices in science—in particular, the development of machine translation. Research in this area emerged precociously: automated translation appeared as a natural extension of the purpose of the first computers, which was code-breaking. Leading figures in computing, such as Norbert Wiener, were initially reluctant. Nevertheless, several well-connected science administrators in the US, such as Warren Weaver and Léon Dostert, established a series of major conferences and experiments in the nascent field, out of a concern that "translation was vital to national security". On January 7, 1954, Dostert coordinated the Georgetown–IBM experiment, which aimed to demonstrate that the technique was sufficiently mature, despite the significant shortcomings of computing infrastructure at the time. Some sentences from Russian scientific articles were automatically translated, using a dictionary of 250 words and six basic syntax rules. It was not disclosed at the time that these sentences had been purposely selected for their suitability for automated translation. At most, Dostert argued that "scientific Russian" was easier to translate, since it was more formulaic and less grammatically diverse than everyday Russian.
Machine translation became a major priority in US federal research funding in 1956 because of an emerging arms race with Soviet researchers. While the Georgetown–IBM experiment did not have a large impact in the United States initially, it was immediately noticed in the USSR. The first articles in the field appeared in 1955; only a year later, a major conference was held that attracted 340 representatives. In 1956, Léon Dostert secured significant funding with the support of the CIA, and he had enough resources to overcome the technical limitations of existing computing infrastructure. In 1957, automated translation from Russian to English could run on a vastly expanded dictionary of 24,000 words, and it could rely on hundreds of predefined syntax rules. At this scale, automated translation remained costly, since it relied on numerous computer operators using thousands of punch cards. Nevertheless, the quality of the output did not improve significantly: in 1964, the automated translation of the few sentences submitted during the Georgetown–IBM experiment yielded a much less readable output, since it was no longer possible to tweak the rules for a predefined corpus.

=== English as a global standard (1965 onward) ===