Decolonising Digital Spaces through Multilingualism in Open Science

Batool Almarzouq

Multilingualism is vital for a healthy, inclusive, and diverse digital open infrastructure. "Open science" is a movement rooted in developing tools and practices aimed at reshaping the production and dissemination of knowledge globally. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science urges member states to promote "multilingualism in scientific practice, publications, and academic communications". Internationalisation, endorsed by W3C, involves designing tools, applications, or documents to facilitate adaptation across languages and regions without extensive redevelopment. Internationalisation empowers local communities to drive their own development. 

Localisation further shifts power to actors in the Global South, promoting inclusive spaces focused on decolonising development. Emphasising agency and operational frameworks, multilingualism and internationalisation are integral to digital infrastructure design from inception. Despite over 7,000 languages globally, only a fraction are officially used on World Wide Web pages. Funding models often fail to promote internationalisation, inadvertently de-internationalising digital open infrastructure. This perpetuates English hegemony within the open-source ecosystem, disempowering local Global South communities using these tools. The result is a power dynamic that excludes diverse forms of knowledge, particularly from marginalized groups, promoting harm to minority languages and normalising monolingual tech practices. 

While progress has been made in representing various languages online, non-Latin script languages like Arabic and Hebrew face specific challenges in accessibility and usability. This talk explores these issues, advocating for inclusive web design practices and technological adaptations to ensure equitable global access to scientific knowledge.