The Linguist

@CIOL_Linguists WINTER 2023 The Linguist 9 FEATURES both the German and the science. In fact, the meaning of the terms 'cool' and 'hot' varies depending on the sub-field of astronomy or planetary science. A 'hot Jupiter' is much cooler than a 'cool star', while a 'cool sub-Neptune' is much hotter than a 'warm' rocky planet. While the English text translates the terminology with a more sensitive ear for the target audience, both press releases communicate only part of the science. They report that the survey discovered 59 new exoplanets, but they do not explain that it estimates a planet occurrence rate of 1.24 to 1.64 planets per star. Given the abundance of M-class stars, this points towards a vast number of exoplanets in our galaxy – hundreds of billions. A new Golden Age While we may never explore or even observe all these worlds, the space sciences are expanding rapidly. The James Webb Space Telescope has ushered in a golden age of exoplanet science, and will soon be followed by other purpose-built observatories such as the Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Space enthusiasts can look forward to a constant stream of discoveries for the rest of their lives, including claims and rejections of signs of life on other planets. But this new golden age of space science is not limited to the public sector: the commercial space industry is booming. Telecommunications and Earth observation satellites are becoming a routine part of the information economy. New space ports to launch them are springing up, including in Sutherland and Cornwall in the UK. Space tourism is a growing luxury business, with cruises to the Moon already planned by companies like Space Adventures (at a price of $150 million per seat) and dearMoon. On the more distant horizon, private companies have ambitions to launch their own space explorations: RocketLab has announced the first private mission to Venus for 2025, and a number of companies are developing asteroid mining technologies. All these activities, internationally networked and funded as they are, require multilingual communications. In the coming decades, it may well become possible to specialise as a space translator, blending linguistic, cultural and scientific expertise to offer the skills required for a global space- facing civilisation. Notes 1 Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrograph; carmenes.caha.es they exhaust their fuel), while cooler stars have lower luminosities (and lifetimes spanning hundreds of billions of years). The survey, called CARMENES, 1 was searching for rocky temperate planets orbiting M stars – the coolest stellar class – known colloquially as red dwarfs. Rocky planets, like Earth and the inner planets of our solar system, usually consist of a metal core, a rocky mantle and a thin atmosphere. 'Temperate' means the planet is the right distance from the star to be warm enough for water to exist in liquid form and not entirely evaporate away into vapour. M-class stars are considered ideal candidates for discoveries of these kinds of planet for several reasons (there are a lot of them and they are cooler than the Sun, so any temperate planets would have to be orbiting very close, making them easier to detect). The CARMENES team published a peer- reviewed paper in 2022 with the first findings. It refers to 'cool stars', which the German- language press release from the University of Heidelberg called kühle Sterne. The English translation of the press release, on the other hand, uses the phrase 'nearby stars that are relatively "cool"', cuing readers that the word 'cool' does not have its everyday meaning – these stars are still around 3,000 Kelvin or 2,700 degrees Celsius! The translation thereby injects context which was absent in the source, translating STAR SCIENCE Orion nebula (above) and Eagle nebula (left) © UNSPLASH

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