Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ukma!rutgers!columbia!cs!kan
From: kan@cs.columbia.edu (Victor Kan)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: foreign language requirements for PhDs
Summary: they're quite useful and should be required
Message-ID: <134@cs.columbia.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 89 17:25:58 GMT
References: <7287@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <2851@eos.UUCP> <401@rb-dc1.UUCP> <21572@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <1280@wpi.wpi.edu>
Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 47
In-reply-to: lfoard@wpi.wpi.edu's message of 11 Mar 89 21:12:45 GMT


Why was this mini-discussion on comp.arch?

Since I don't know where it belongs, here goes.

Literacy in a foreign language for PhDs is not just some
arbitrary, nice idea for a magic solution to the world's problems
as Lawrence Foard suggests.

Foreign language requirements (FLRs) are meant to give
undergraduates in the liberal arts an appreciation for other
cultures and to make the students better human beings.  But at
the PhD level, FLRs are intended to provide students with the
ability to read important works in their original form.  Granted,
technical research papers don't have the same level of linguistic
complexity as Cervantes' Don Quixote.  But technical translations
can suffer just as much as literary ones, particularly in clarity
and truth.

Consider this hypothetical example:
-----
Let's say Dijkstra's 1965 "Co-operating Sequential Processes"
work was written in Dutch.  The translators at Academic Press in
London translate it into English, retaining P and V as the
semaphore operations.  CS PhD students in the U.S.  read this
translation, get confused and wonder "What the hell do P and V
mean with respect to mutual exclusion?"  If the students had no
experience with foreign languages, they would might beat
themselves over the head trying to figure it out.  Then some wise
guy who knows Dutch says P is short for wait and V is short for
signal in Dutch.  BOOM! it's perfectly clear to everyone that P
means if I can't have access, then I'll wait in the queue, while
V means signal the next process in the queue that I'm done.
-----

I'm not suggesting that everyone learn every language so they
won't be confused by translations.  But knowing a little about
many languages or a lot about one foreign language will certainly
make a PhD student more receptive to foreign works.

I'm in favor of FLRs for PhD students.  I intend to be a PhD
student someday and I know four languages, at varying levels of
fluency.  Unfortunately, none of the FLRs I've seen would accept
those four languages.  Looks like I'll have to learn French.
Yuck!!!!!

Victor