OAK RIDGE, TN — Now you can find non-English sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture from data­bases in China, Rus­sia, France, and sev­eral Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries and have your search results trans­lated into one of nine lan­guages. With the beta launch today of Mul­ti­lin­gual WorldWideScience.org, real-time search­ing and trans­la­tion of globally-dispersed col­lec­tions of sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture is pos­si­ble. This new capa­bil­ity is the result of an inter­na­tional public-private part­ner­ship between the WorldWideScience.org Alliance and Microsoft Research, whose trans­la­tion tech­nol­ogy has been paired with the fed­er­ated search­ing tech­nol­ogy of Deep Web Technologies.

 

Microsoft Research Cor­po­rate Vice-President Tony Hey said, “We are extremely pleased to have our Microsoft Trans­la­tor tech­nol­ogy used with World­WideScience. Built at Microsoft Research, this trans­la­tion tech­nol­ogy already pro­vides trans­la­tions to mil­lions of users. Part­ner­ing with World­WideScience is an oppor­tu­nity to advance sci­ence across lan­guage bar­ri­ers and improve sci­en­tific discovery.”

 

While a large share of sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture is pub­lished in Eng­lish, vast quan­ti­ties of high-quality sci­ence are recorded in lan­guages where the research is per­formed, and the pace of non-English sci­en­tific pub­lish­ing is increas­ing. Mul­ti­lin­gual WorldWideScience.org^BETA will ben­e­fit the English-speaking sci­ence com­mu­nity, enabling search­ing and trans­la­tion of non-English sources. It will also ben­e­fit native speak­ers of other major lan­guages (Chi­nese, French, Ger­man, Japan­ese, Korean, Por­tuguese, Span­ish, and Russ­ian) by trans­lat­ing search results into the user’s lan­guage of choice. More lan­guages will be added in the com­ing months.

 

Mul­ti­lin­gual WorldWideScience.org^BETA was offi­cially launched at the Inter­na­tional Coun­cil for Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion (ICSTI) annual con­fer­ence held in Helsinki, Finland.

 

Dr. Wal­ter War­nick, Direc­tor of the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy Office of Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion within the Office of Sci­ence, empha­sized both the “open gov­ern­ment” aspects and the poten­tial for accel­er­at­ing sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery with the addi­tion of mul­ti­lin­gual trans­la­tions across nationally-sponsored R&D results and other sci­ence. OSTI serves as oper­at­ing agent for WorldWideScience.org. World­WideScience Alliance Chair­man, Richard Boul­der­stone from the British Library, noted that WorldWideScience.org has become “the world’s most impor­tant sci­en­tific resource, where the global sci­ence com­mu­nity can share knowledge.”

 

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