These tools are powered by the same natural-language-processing models that underlie capabilities such as predictive text and voice-to-text transcription, and are largely targeted at ordinary users. But she has other options now.Ī growing suite of free or low-cost online tools can translate text, check spelling, correct grammar and even detect whether the tone of the text is appropriate, providing crucial aid to people who are not proficient in written English. The fees were astronomical, Bellini Saibene says, and she couldn’t justify the expense. At the time, her only recourse was to ask colleagues for writing help or to pay for manuscript-writing and editing services.

The comment of one reviewer for an English-language journal, suggesting that she “go back to school”, left a particularly nasty sting that lingers 15 years later. Her early efforts at written English often landed poorly. “Sometimes I wonder how much humanity loses because we are redoing things that aren’t published in English,” she says. English is the universal language of science, yet Bellini Saibene was limited to publishing in Spanish-language journals, making her work largely invisible to a wider audience. That lack of English mastery, she says, held her back.

She had learnt a little English at secondary school, but her family couldn’t afford the extra courses she would have needed to master the language, and at university she focused on science. When Yanina Bellini Saibene began her career in data science at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in La Pampa, Argentina, she was not fluent in English.

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