A shortcoming in many ecological publications of
the past few decades is that they tend not to
cite relevant literature if it's not in
English. This trend probably has roots in the
move a few decades ago to abolish the previous
tradition of requiring that Ph.D. students
demonstrate competence in a foreign language as
part of their training. For example, as a
graduate student at the University of North
Carolina in the early 1970s I had to show that I
could read and then answer questions about a
French paper about bumble bees a few hours after
it was given to me to read (we could choose the
language and general area for our test
paper). As a postdoc I discovered that there
were several important papers about temperate
region ant-plant mutualisms that were not being
cited in the growing literature about
coevolution, probably because they were in German
and from the previous century. Although it's
certainly easier to gain access to scientific
literature now, thanks to the Internet, the
problem of a language barrier may remain.
I recently rediscovered a translation I made as a
graduate student of a paper in German, and
realized that it might facilitate access to this
paper by other researchers in the future if I
were to post the translation on a public site.
Thus there is now available a translation of this
paper (with help from Dr. Nick Waser) about the
courtship display of Broad-tailed Hummingbirds in Mexico:
Wagner, H. O. 1948. Die Balz des Kolibris
Selasphorus platycercus. Zoologische Jahrbücher.
Abteilung für Systematik, Ökologie, und Geographie der Tiere 77:267-278.
In order to make the translation (and the
original paper, because it's not easy to find)
accessible, I first obtained permission from the
publisher, and then got permission to post them
in the Digital Repository at the University of
Maryland, a site hosted by the University's
Library. So they are now accessible at
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/10113. and
can be found through a Web search for the German title.
I suspect there are other ecologists who have
translated papers from other languages to
English, who might be willing to share their
translations as a way of facilitating access to
them in the future. I encourage you to do
so. This might even be a good example of a
Broader Impact to cite on your next NSF proposal!
David Inouye
Dept. of Biology
University of Maryland
