The consequences of "google translate" on the ignorant

Post date: Apr 12, 2016 10:42:40 AM

A Nature news story describes an article in PLoS One that has attracted a lot of attention for supposedly putting forward the creationist point of view in a scientific description of the human hand. However, on close inspection, the article, which was written by Chinese authors, seems to have suffered from extremely bad translation. To me, it seems highly unlikely that these authors were truly touting what is essentially a western philosophy, especially since there are other examples of confused writing in the article. Here is an example of an offending sentence "the mechanical architecture [of the hand] is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years". As you see in this example of the use of the word "Creator" (one of 3 with the capital "C"), they also mention evolution in the same sentence. The Nature story suggests that the authors did not understand the connotation of this usage.

Interestingly, PLoS One's response once this was pointed out was to retract the paper. You might think that retraction is an over-reaction to a case of poor word choice, but I think the bigger issue is that if no one noticed such a egregiously inappropriate insertion, there is reason to question whether anyone (let alone the peer-reviewers) read the paper at all before publication.

Another commenter points out that even high profile journals contain poorly-written articles and that filtering these out would unfairly discriminate against non-English speakers. I disagree: scientific papers need to be written as clearly as possible and it is the editor's job, not necessarily to rewrite the paper in an effort to improve the style, but to correct spelling, grammar, and context errors. Based on my experience with higher level journals, they do exactly that.