Towards a follow‐up care program for ad hoc translations

In his book The foreign language barrier in sciences and technology (Aslib, 1962), C. W. Hanson wrote about ‘the desirability of using one international language for scientific publication, whether it be an existing natural language or a constructed one’. ‘This global approach to the language problem has some support,’ he continues, ‘but even if international agreement were achieved progress would be slow and it would probably be several decades before the international language was in anything approaching universal use.’ Exactly ten years later, Prof. A. I. Mikhailov, director of the All Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) concludes, speaking about ways to overcome linguistic barriers: ‘the final solution of the problem lies in developing a universal language of science which will develop into a single language common to the world scientific community’ (Invited Papers of the 36th International Congress of FID, Budapest, 1972). After ten years the problem of overcoming linguistic barriers in international exchange of information by means of introduction of a universal language appears to be as vivid as a full decade ago.