Lost in translation: is research into species being missed because of a language barrier?

More focus on non-English language reports would be good for conservation and help close the gap between global north and south, argue researchers

Valeria Ramirez Castaneda, a Colombian biologist, spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous frogs without getting ill. Although her findings come in many shapes and sizes, in her years as a researcher, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their biological discoveries out to the wider scientific community. With Spanish as her mother tongue, her research had to be translated into English to be published. That wasn't always possible because of budget or time constraints -and it means that some of her findings were never published.

It's not that I'm a bad scientist," she says. It's just because of the language."