@MetaROR@scicomm.xyz recently organized peer review of our CRediT translation manuscript, which resulted in positive reviews!
Our two Iranian co-authors, Saeed Shafiei Sabet of the University of Guilan and Marziyeh Amini Fard may not know about these positive reviews for our manuscript, because my emails to them continue to bounce. I wanted to recognize them here because I'm very concerned about their future.
https://metaror.org/article/facilitating-multilingual-research-publishing-translations-of-the-contributor-roles-taxonomy-credit/
And thanks to the staff at MetaROR for organising peer review! Note there is a small error in their post, as the reviewer raised the general risk of translating anything by any means, not automatic translation (we used humans for all translations, not machines).
We have drafted a new short section of the manuscript to address this. Let us know if you have thoughts.
RISKS OF TRANSLATION
Translation faces trade-offs between accessibility, accuracy, and consistency. Not translating CRediT would hinder adoption and understanding by forcing non-English users to essentially create their own translation. Conversely, any specific translation might fall short, and even mislead. For example, some terms will not have close equivalents in some languages, so distinctions may be lost or distorted. Moreover, some languages are spoken in more than one country and may use different expressions for the same contexts, which can further hinder comprehension (e.g., Portuguese). For this project, we needed to prioritize keeping the translations approximately as short as they are in English, as the journal management systems and other publishing user interfaces in which CRediT is used often have very limited space dedicated to the fourteen CRediT terms. Additionally, we prioritized terminological consistency and meaning preservation over localization, which we apply judiciously only where it enhances clarity without compromising academic precision. One reason for this is that in the context of scientific publishing, most users know that scientific publishing standards originate in English, making users aware that these terms reflect distinctions and practices rooted in English-language scholarship and information technology systems. Therefore, in cases where no appropriate local phrase was available, or where a functional equivalent could not be identified within local-language academic discourse, we retained the original English terms (via transliteration) to preserve alignment with the source taxonomy and maintain interoperability.
