To have an article published in the scientific journal Nature is a great achievement for any scientist, and for it to be the lead article is the stuff of dreams, but this is what has been achieved by a team of Spanish biologists, the first such article by Spanish scientists since 1985 (click here to read about it). Their genetic work with Drosophila flies has led them to find a link between genes that cause and suppress cancer, which will be of very great assistance in controlling and maybe preventing or curing it. But this is hardly a success story for Spanish science because it has turned out that two doctoral students on the research team were working without grants or any other financial assistance because none was available. A lot has been said recently about the parlous state of scientific research and R&D in general in Spain but not a lot has been done about it. It is to be hoped that this case will propel the Government finally to allocate more funds to research and to introduce the necessary reforms to the Spanish university system.
Unconnected with the scientific aspect but often overlooked in English-speaking countries is the fact that these researchers will probably have written their paper in Spanish, or perhaps in Valencian* as they were working in Alicante, and it has been translated into English; even if they wrote it in English, it will have been corrected by a translator. Like other journals Nature expects the articles that it receives to be ready for publication; it does not provide language services and however good your article may be from the scientific point of view, if it is badly written it simply will not be published. The time, cost and effort involved in learning English and in using professional translation services are additional hurdles faced by non-English-speakers who wish to operate internationally.
*Valencian is a separate language from Catalan; it just so happens that the official codified grammar of Valencian is word for word the same as that of Catalan. Such is the barmy nature of language definition, which is almost always political and does not conform to linguistic criteria. Last year the EU accepted two separate translations of one of the Treaties, one in Catalan and one in Valencian. The texts were identical.
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