Posted on 25 April 2025 by BaerbelW

As mentioned in the recently published prolog to EGU2025 article, I submitted an abstract to talk about some of our translation activities and the challenges we have been facing with those. This blog post is a "companion article" to that presentation in session EOS4.3 Geoethics and Global Anthropogenic Change: Geoscience for Policy, Action and Education in Addressing the Climate and Ecological Crises and will go into somewhat greater details than is possible in the 8 minutes available during the oral session which will be happening on May 2. Please note that what follows is by no means meant as a crtiicism of the many volunteer translator teams, of whom we are very appreciative for the work they did over the years, creating the many translations available on our website!

Some statistics

When John Cook launched Skeptical Science in 2007, the website was only available in English. During 2009 some regular readers floated the idea to also offer translated versions of the rebuttals and John added those capabilities towards the end of the year. The first translations added were Finnish, Spanish and Czech. A while later, options to also translate blog posts and pages were added. People worked on their own or within small teams and many translations were added during the first few years as can be seen in the statistics of number of rebuttals added per language and year:

During 2010 - the first full year of rebuttal translations being possible - more than 430 rebuttal translations were created and 40 translators were active in the system tackling 19 languages. In 2011 those numbers went down to 250 rebuttals created by 25 translators in 15 languages and even further down in the following years:

The picture is similar for translations of blog posts but on a much lower level of activity than for rebuttals. These translations became possible in 2010 and 70 translations were created in 11 languages by 12 translators. Numbers fell to a bit over 20 translations in the 2 following years. The little spike of blog post translations in 2024 is due to 20 German fact brief translations created by a translator course at the University of Heidelberg - a successful collaboration mentioned in more details here:

For most languages, only one translator has created blog post translations during a year and at most there were two. There never were more than 12 translators of blog posts across languages in any given year.

Discussion

What do these numbers mean? There obviously was a big push to create rebuttal translations by many people in many languages shortly after the option to do so became available. The activity however apparently wasn't sustainable in the long run, as shown by the quick and deep drop after the first two or three years of activities. Most likely reasons are that the volunteer translators had to turn their activities towards other tasks on their plate and they just no longer had the time to work on translations.

Another thing, the statistics above show, is that many more rebuttal translations than blog post translations have been created over the years. The reason might be that creating translations for long-lived rebuttals is seen as more worth the effort than for transient blog posts (even though some of those are very often referred to from elsewhere).

What the data also show: once created, rebuttal translations are rarely - if ever - updated to reflect changes in the English original version. This holds true for tedious tasks like fixing broken links but also for much bigger changes in the English versions, like when we added the "At-a-glance" sections in 2023/24 to more than 70 rebuttals. Only a fraction of those saw updates in one or two languages:

Other translation projects

In addition to coordinating translation activities for our own website's content, I have the pleasure to coordinate translations for several other projects which at least have some connection to Skeptical Science. For each of these projects, we have dedicated pages or blog posts, so I'll only list them here briefly:

The Cranky Uncle game

Connection to Skeptical Science: John Cook is the creator of both. As of this writing, the game - available for Android, iOS and browser - can be played in 16 languages and more are in the works. In addition to the game, the accompanying Teachers' Guide has by now been translated into 6 languages.

The FLICC poster

Connection to Skeptical Science: the FLICC-poster is a collaboration between us and our German-language partner website klimafakten.de. Right now, the poster is available in 10 languages and most translations are created without direct involvement of translators active for our own content. How helpful these translations can be, became apparent in 2021 during the COVID-pandemic when #PLURV - the German #FLICC - became quite popular in Germany and the poster was circulated widely on social media. See also my blog post about our collaborations.

The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

Connection to Skeptical Science: John Cook co-authored this handbook with Stephan Lewandwosky. The Conspiracy Theory Handbook was first published in 2020 and has been translated into 20 languages since then.

The Debunking Handbook 2020

Connection to Skeptical Science: John Cook is one of the coordinating lead authors of The Debunking Handbook 2020 which was first published in 2020 and has also been translated into 20 languages since then.

We've seen in our statistics that the translated handbooks get downloaded thousands of times each year, indicating that creating the translations is really worth the effort and helps to get important information into the hands of many people across the globe. Last year's review article of our activities has some numbers.

Challenge(s) and Outlook

The biggest challenge as far as translations of our own content goes is to make translation activities more sustainable in the long run. Ideally, we'd have one team per language to create new rebuttal translations and - equally important - update existing rebuttal translations where the original English version was updated since the translation was first created. In addition, we plan to add the FLICC-fallacies as a new content type related to the rebuttals when we eventually re-launch our website. And while we already have some of these translated into a few other languages, there'll be a lot of texts which would really be "nice" to get translated as well!

Perhaps, the German translations created by a translator course at the University of Heidelberg could serve as a good example of how translations could turn into collaborative activities and a win:win situation for both the students and us? The students gained experience with tackling translations with varying complexity (short fact briefs vs. longer rebuttals) and specific topics (climate change and renewable energy myths) and we gained 20 "Kurze Faktenchecks" as well as 33 translated rebuttals.

Interested in helping us to tackle these challenges?

Is this something up your alley you’d like to help with? If your answer is 'Yes', then please let us know by filling out the short form below. I'll then be in touch to let you know about the next steps, depending on your preferences of where you'd like to get involved.