Gaps & Opportunities for Inclusive Multilingual Data Science

On 11 February 2022, 14:00 - 15:30 UTC, the next fireside chat will take place on the topic: “Gaps & Opportunities for Inclusive, Multilingual Data Science”. Chaired by Anelda van der Walt and Malvika Sharan, this panel will feature insights from Batool Almarzouq, Bobby Shabangu, Camila Rangel-Smith, David Pérez-Suárez, Langa Khumalo and Yanina Bellini Saibene. These researchers represent different communities with expertise and insights from working in multilingual research and data science projects (read their bios below). We will also facilitate open discussions with attendees to learn about their perspectives on the topic via a shared document (links shared upon registration).

The Fireside Chat series features experts, champions and their projects from across different international communities in reproducibility, open research, ethics, collaboration and everything in between. This event is hosted by The Turing Way - a community-led handbook on data science and research. We invite interested communities to get in touch with us to host a next session (email: theturingway@gmail.com) and help catalyse cross-community collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Panellists for this fireside chat come from diverse backgrounds and experiences across academia, industry and communities in research and data science where the translation aspect is one of their main focus areas. As members of multiple open sciences and research groups across the Global South and North, they will explore a range of questions including:

• why we should invest in translation work?
• what challenges do researchers in multilingual communities face and how do they address them?
• what danger of exclusion or imbalanced representation from different communities exists if we only promote resources written in or translated from English?
• how we can explicitly support different forms of knowledge production and exchange across multilingual communities?
• how to emphasise the importance of contextualisation rather than “just translation” of resources in research and data science?
• what technical as well as ethical requirements we must consider when working in the translation and multilingual research space?

They will bring their combined perspectives as community builders, educators, trainers, researchers and engineers working on projects at both local and global scales.