At the origin of the project (Académie text)

Plurilingualism in the Comptes Rendus of the Académie des sciences

The Académie des Sciences and French as a scientific language Since its creation, the Académie has devoted itself to the development of science and has advised government authorities in this area. It is particularly committed to encouraging scientific life through the production of knowledge, through various publications such as its journal Comptes Rendus. It is also responsible for "maintaining the role and quality of French scientific language" (art. 2 of the Statutes of the Académie des Sciences, approved by decree of the President of the Republic on 31 January 2003, no. MENS 0300009D).

As such, although most of the manuscripts submitted to the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences are written in English, any author may choose to write in French. As a result, the two languages sometimes coexist within the same annual volume or special issue.

French-English bilingualism, from metadata to full text

In order to facilitate the referencing of their articles in academic search engines and international bibliographic databases, the Comptes Rendus also endeavour to provide titles, abstracts and keywords in French and English. When these metadata are not supplied directly by the authors themselves, they are translated by the journals' editorial teams using automatic language processing software, and then submitted to the authors for approval.

The articles in Comptes Rendus Biologies are published entirely in French and English, and the journal's editorial team is available to help authors who may have difficulty using either of these languages.

The Comptes Rendus translation project

Since 2020, six of the seven series of the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie deFGoods sciences (Mathematics, Mechanics, Physics, Geoscience, Chemistry and Biology) have been published in partnership with the Mersenne Centre. In 2022, these two partners obtained financial support from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Culture's Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France for the development of a semi-automatic translation platform for articles in these journals. This joint project had two objectives:

• To produce a corpus of fully bilingual French/English articles (the original article may have been published in either of these two languages), and to make it available to the Translations and Open Science project led by the OPERAS consortium (open scholarly communication in the european search area for social sciences and humanities) and funded by the Fonds national pour la science ouverte: this objective was achieved in spring 2023 and notably concerns the special issue Face au changement climatique, le champ des possibles published in 2020 by Comptes Rendus Géoscience;
• To develop a computer-assisted translation interface to enable volunteer contributors or professional translators to translate articles from the Comptes Rendus published in French or English into any language, by post-editing automated processing: this objective was achieved in autumn 2023, and currently concerns the Geoscience, Chemistry and Biology series, as they are the only ones to distribute the full text in JATS-XML format. This pivot format is essential for the software to function properly.