The Linguist

FEATURES In a space-facing era, popular science translators have a duty to make knowledge accessible, says Maureen Cohen Beyond the horizon thelinguist.uberflip.com exoplanets isn't likely to draw interest from the broader public – but I could spice it up by contextualising it as part of the search for life on other worlds. (A draft of that article remains half-written on my laptop.) As for my German source texts, they were responsibly written but ran into some of the problems of communication I'd encountered in my training sessions. I recall a press release reporting on a large study of the effect of ivermectin on the disease course of Covid. The article headline stated that ivermectin reduces the duration of the disease. Further down in the body of the article, the text gave the size of the effect: very small, found only in a sub-group of patients without severe disease and with low statistical significance. I dutifully rendered the text into English, but I would have framed it quite differently were I the original author. (On searching for the study while writing this article, I found that it has been retracted, and the German and English press releases no longer exist on the university's website.) Cool meanings As an example of how problems of science communication and translation can overlap, let's look at a press release about the results of a telescope survey of M-class stars. Astronomers classify stars by their size and brightness, which are related: larger stars glow brighter (and burn out more quickly as glosses that convey the essential meaning. Science communicators must be aware of 'false friends' – phrases heard differently by the general public than by specialists. As an example, in general parlance 'positive feedback' implies a job well done, but in climate science, it means an increase in an environmental quantity that leads to a further increase, indefinitely – a dangerous, runaway process. Beyond the textual level, science communication raises deeper issues of framing and emotional valence. Should climate scientists use fear-based messaging to talk about climate change? Should an exoplanet scientist mention a 'one-sigma detection' (indicating very low certainty) of a 'potential biosignature' (which could also have non-biological origins) in a press release for an upcoming paper? The way scientists talk to each other differs from how science communicators talk to the public because the scientific community has a shared context for interpreting information. Responsible communication I wrestled with these issues directly when writing articles for my blog and press releases for my own published papers, as I did when translating recent press releases about scientific research put out by German- language universities. My work on the atmospheric fluid dynamics of tidally locked T ranslators of popular science are, in a sense, translating a translation. Scientists speak a dialect of their own, with both terminology specific to their field of inquiry and a broader idiom shared by the community as a whole. Science communicators approach their subject matter with many of the same basic problems as translators: How can I ensure the audience of my popular science article understands the content the same way a scientist understands the content of a peer-reviewed paper? How do I account for cultural differences in the meaning of fundamental concepts, like what knowledge is, what it means to be authoritative or how criticism is expressed? Where do I position my text on the spectrum ranging from accessible-but- fluffy to faithful-but-incomprehensible? My PhD training as a planetary scientist included workshops on media, science communication and outreach as a mandatory part of the degree. As STEM fields take up ever more cultural space and our society moves towards data-driven decision making, academic scientists feel a stronger ethical imperative to communicate the meaning of their research to the public. As a freelance translator of over 15 years, the training echoed problems and solutions of communication I had already encountered in my career. Untranslatable jargon must be avoided at all costs and replaced with

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