Increasing Accessibility to Neuroscience through Translation: Going beyond the English Language

Abstract

Declaring the 1990s as The Decade of the Brain put the field of neuroscience at the forefront of public attention, with the nervous system becoming a subject of increasing interest in popular media. Although this has generally brought large swaths of the public closer to neuroscience, most current research is published and disseminated in a single language: English. This is unsurprising as English is indeed the lingua franca in scientific circles, but people around the world communicate in many other languages. To make neuroscience accessible to a larger audience, we share an initiative to translate the Knowing Neurons platform into a second language: Spanish. This collaborative project integrates humanities and STEM academic programs to make use of bilingual university students, in association with professional linguists and neuroscientists, to translate scientific content into a relatable format to Spanish speakers regardless of their country of origin. The translation effort was piloted within the framework of undergraduate outreach courses at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is coupled with outreach components targeting the Spanish-speaking community to promote this new resource. This project aims to foster an environment where the neuroscientific interests of the public, college students, instructors, and researchers coalesce in a unified space. We hope that opening new lines of communication with traditionally underrepresented communities might help combat the persistent lack of diversity in neuroscience (and STEM) that is currently seen in academia. We also provide an outline to inspire others to translate these, and similar resources, into other languages.

Keywords: Spanish; communication; education; neuroscience; translation.

Figure 1.

Knowing Neurons structure and organization. Knowing Neurons is led by a chief executive officer and an editor-in-chief who collectively provide the vision for the organization and delegate strategic tasks to teams of graduate student volunteers with the relevant expertise.

Figure 2.

Outline of the translation process. A, Overall, students enrolled in two undergraduate courses (see Extended Data 2-1 and 2-2 for the syllabi) in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UCLA translate articles from English to Spanish, which are then published on the Spanish version of the Knowing Neurons platform: https://knowingneurons.com/es/ (see Extended Data 2-3 for the inaugural list of translations). To promote their work, students conduct an outreach activity locally in Los Angeles, California (United States). B, Timeline of the translation process during a 10-week quarter (which includes an 11th week, corresponding to finals week). Students translate an article at the rate of one every 2 weeks, starting in week 2, and they conduct their community outreach activity between weeks 8 and 9 (see Extended Data 2-4 for the lesson plan template), to allow time during week 10 for a debrief. In between translation draft submissions, biweekly meetings with the students are scheduled to review the translation work, offer feedback, and suggest edits.

Figure 3.

World map of visitors to the Knowing Neurons Spanish and English domains from January 1 to June 30, 2023. The top panels show world maps of readership in the English (A) and Spanish (B) sites. The shaded scales represent the number of times the sites were accessed by a user. The bottom panels indicate the top 10 countries accessing the English (C) and Spanish (D) sites. Percentages of the total number of site visits are shown above the bar plots. The top 10 countries visiting the English language site represent 79.23% of all users, while the top 10 countries visiting the Spanish language site represent 83.4% of all users.

Figure 4.

Number of users to the Knowing Neurons Spanish and English domains from January 1 to June 30, 2023 based in the United States. The top panels show US maps representing the number of users from each state accessing the English (A) and Spanish (B) sites. The shaded scales represent the number of times the sites were accessed by a user. The bottom panels show the top 10 states accessing the English (C) and Spanish (D) sites. Percentages of the total number of site visits are shown above the bar plots. The top 10 states visiting the English language site represent 60.44% of all users, while the top 10 states visiting the Spanish language site represent 78.37% of all users.