A couple thoughts. First, most researchers, of course, speak and read
English as their second language, and are well used to having to cope
with language issues. Second, my experience (as a native English
speaker) is that a little knowledge of a few other languages can go a
long way, if you simply have the courage to try, and keep the right
friends. Knowing German and French means that I can get the gist of
what is written in all the Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Danish,
etc.) and the romance languages, and can then ask a friend who is a
native speaker of one of those languages to help me out, if I find
something interesting. It's a lifelong project. I am still hopeless
with anything Slavic, or non-European, and want to learn Arabic and
Russian by the time I am 50, and then move on to Chinese by the time I
retire.
Tony
"Simon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Thursday, April 13, 2006 at
10:10 AM -0500 wrote:
“I'm doing a project for a spanish translation class that i am in and
I
was wondering how frequently you are faced with a lack of translated
documents, or quality translated documents, (in any language) while
doing
research. Do you know if this is a major problem in the study of
global
environmental politics?"
I'm with Ron -- where I've run into the problem most (and have had to
simply eliminate some cases from a database) is regional treaties in
languages like Czech that I can't speak.
I'm sure there are articles in other languages that would be useful if
I
could access them in translation, but if I don't know the languages I
may
not even be aware that they exist, so I don't know what I'm missing.
Beth
