Development of an inclusive scientific community necessitates doing more than simply bringing science to diverse groups of people. Ideally, the sciences evolve through incorporation of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and worldviews. Efforts to promote inclusion of historically underrepresented racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and socioeconomic groups among science scholars are currently underway. Examination of these efforts yields valuable lessons to inform next steps in engaging diverse audiences with science. The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative may serve as one example of such efforts. The Dalai Lama invited Emory University to develop and teach a curriculum in Western science to Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns. As the science curriculum has been taught and refined over the past decade, monastic scholars increasingly have taken ownership of the material. As Western scientific ideas and practices take hold in this setting, the experiences of monks and nuns offer unique insights into the process of translation, modes of communication, and long-term impacts of integrating diverse systems of knowledge. Given that the dominant language of science is English, Tibetan interpreters have been essential throughout the implementation of this project. Through the process of translating scientific terms, interpreters have considered differences in how words categorize, and therefore how people conceptualize, the world. Through comprehensive, culturally-responsive communication, scientific language is used as a tool to build and strengthen connections between monastics and their local and global communities. The intertwining of these complementary systems of knowledge iteratively informs translation, modes of communication, and broader impacts in the community.

The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) has embarked on a historic endeavor of introducing a systematic and sustainable science education program within the traditional Tibetan monastic institutions. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who conceived and supports this initiative, calls it a hundred-year project. From the very beginning, translation from English to Tibetan has been an integral part of this project because of the need to prepare course materials as well as to facilitate on-site classes and lab activities in the Tibetan language. Our translation process involves not just conveying novel and foreign concepts across cultures but doing so with a scientific language peppered with technical terms that are not readily representable in the target language. In addition to the linguistic barriers, cultural and technical ones further complicate the process of communication. A case in point is the concept of life, or correlation versus causation, or the view that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, where each construct has its corresponding but differing concept in Tibetan Buddhism. When engaging with such existing parallel yet divergent terms or concepts, the translators must strike a delicate balance and avoid forsaking the distinctive characteristics and connotations involved. In this article, the ETSI translation team shares its journey—highlighting the needs felt, challenges faced, and solutions sought. We discuss the translation principles guiding our work and the handling of such scientific features as graphs, acronyms, units, chemical names, and formulas. We hope our work will inspire other similar projects around the globe and encourage them to continue bridging barriers to cross-cultural dialogues, promoting cross-fertilization of knowledge for human flourishing.

Early in the planning the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, we realized that the encounter between Buddhism and contemporary science demanded that Buddhist logic and epistemology encounter Anglophone philosophy of science. A titanic clash of world views was anticipated, but as we began the conversation, we found something different. Many philosophical concerns were shared, but these problems were understood differently. While fundamental elements of epistemology, like observation and inference, had similar functions in both traditions, subtle differences in conceptualization challenged mutual intelligibility. Through thousands of years of erudite debate, each tradition had honed their tools. While each cut cleanly, they carved in different joints. This essay will briefly discuss the linguistic, philosophical, and pedagogical adjustments that made for mutual comprehensibility.