Thursday, May 27, 2021

Wissenschaft(lichkeits)skompetenz als Metakompetenz: and a reflection on language

Thomas Hapke picked up a blog post in which I mentioned an article about science literacy and wrote his own interesting post (in German) referring to his own articles in which he discusses information literacy (Informationskompetenz) and e.g. this one in which he outlines his own concept of Wissenschaftlichkeitskompetenz. Wissenschaft can't be exactly translated into English (as Hapke also explains) - sometimes it gets translated as "Science", but it isn't confined to the "sciences" but could also be translated more broadly as "knowledge" or "scholarship". This is Hapke's blog post https://blog.hapke.de/information-literacy/wissenschaftlichkeitsskompetenz-als-metakompetenz/

With the wonders of Google translate you can get a good idea of what he says, even if you don't read German (I do understand German and just checked). However, looking at the Google translation also raises the important issue of how language and meaning are obviously intertwined. Google has evidently been taught that "Informationskompetenz" should be translated as "Information Literacy", but translates "Wissenschaft(lichkeits)skompetenz" more literally as "Science competence". "Kompetenz" is literally "competence", rather than "literacy" (2 words with different meanings in English) and the fact that the german word is "Informationskompetenz" is bound to have an impact on how that concept gets interpreted, just as English's lack of a word to match the very useful concept of "Wissenschaften" may end up with us using the word "sciences" (and thus emphasising the status of "sciences") to cover the concept of "disciplinary or knowledge areas which have a foundation in research and scholarship").

Photo by Sheila Webber: lovely tulips, April 2021

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