Breaking language barriers: ‘Not being fluent in English is often viewed as being an inferior scientist’

Biologist Tatsuya Amano works to make science a fairer place for non-fluent speakers.
By
  1. Mariana Lenharo

    1. Mariana Lenharo is a news reporter for Nature based in New York City.

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Japanese biologist Tatsuya Amano has always struggled with English. But he accepted that, as a scientist, he would need to make an extra effort to communicate his research in science’s lingua franca. After moving to the University of Cambridge, UK, as a postdoc studying biodiversity changes at the global scale, Amano realized that most of his colleagues whose first language was not English were facing the same challenges, spending considerably more time reading papers, polishing their manuscripts and preparing oral presentations than those who were fluent.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00157-5

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 26 February 2025: Ref. 3 has been updated to provide the peer-reviewed version of the paper.

References

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  4. Amano, T. et al. PLoS Biol. 19, e3001296 (2021).

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