This blog post is a call for help to get our translations ready for the planned website relaunch. If you are a native speaker of any of the listed languages and if the tasks described below are up your alley, please let us know by filling out this Google form. Here is the list of languages we'll need help with: Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Thai.
Translations have made Skeptical Science rebuttals accessible to people all over the world. All told, we have published almost 1,100 rebuttal translations in 25 languages, created by generous volunteers since 2009. The number of translations for each language varies greatly from 1 to 213 depending on language but most languages feature between 10 and 60 translations at the moment. As we mentioned in our annual review article for 2025, we've been working on a complete relaunch of our website. While the actual launch is still a few months away, we recently realized that some preparatory work will be needed to update and add information to the existing translations.
On the current website, the setup for translations was created when there was only one rebuttal version in English. Later we introduced advanced, intermediate and basic rebuttal treatments, but translations were never adapted to that. The new website will however offer the option to create all levels of translated rebuttals - as long as a counterpart already exists in English. Likewise, "one liners" - short summaries of what the science says - were introduced for translations later but were mostly left empty unless new translations were created. For translations, we also only have one title while the English version has both a myth and a science title, which will be used on different screens and for different purposes on the new website.
With all of this in mind we ask for your help, as we can only do this for a few languages with our own resources and a few currently active volunteer translators. Unfortunately, we have no translators working on translations for most languages at the moment and it's highly unlikely that volunteers who were creating many translations in several languages 15 years ago are still available today. We're counting on fresh recruits to bridge our gap.
For this exercise, we do not intend to update translations across the board in order to for example bring them up to date with the English originals. A comprehensive update will be a mountain of work, better done when the revamped translation admin system is available after re-launch. For the smaller and immediate task of making our current content ready for the new website, I have set up a Google sheet listing all the translations where some information is missing and needs to be filled in. I'll share an editable link once you've signed up for the task, but you can take a look at how all this shakes out in this preview of the spreadsheet. Translations for which the currently missing information cannot be provided will most likely be migrated as unpublished, because the information displayed on the new website would otherwise be at least confusing if not misleading. That's certainly not what we want to start out with, but it's also a conundrum because shrinking our valuable content is also very undesirable!
Screenshot showing a snippet of the spreadsheet - clicking on it opens a preview in a new tab.
With the website re-launch, a major innovation to our rebuttals will be adding fallacy explanations. So as well as the boxes we already have for fact and myth, we'll also have a box for fallacies, based on academic work such as "Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors" (Cook et al. 2018). We would very much like to "hit the ground running" and it would therefore be very helpful to already have fallacy information available for as many languages as possible when we launch. We already have the full set of fallacy translations available in a few languages, currently in blog post translations for German, Dutch and French which can be leveraged for this task. For several other languages, we can provide translated lists of a subset of fallacies used in the Cranky Uncle game as a starting point. The more translations we have, the better it'll be for the relaunch!
For each fallacy we'll need a short one liner which cannot be longer than 150 characters, a generic introduction with a length of up to 300 characters and a longer description which can also include an example. We will also need a rebuttal-specific introduction which explains how a certain myth employs the fallacy. So, this is something else we can use your help with.
Mock-up from testing of how a translated rebuttal including fact, myth and fallacy boxes will look like (details likely to change)
As mentioned above, the number of translations varies greatly from language to language To give you an idea how much work this task could entail, the following table shows the number of published translations we already have per language. In addition, there are at most 35 fallacy definitions to translate plus 72 rebuttal specific short fallacy explanations for each language.
Clicking on a flag icon takes you to the list of available translations for that language.
| Flag | Language | Translations |
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Chinese | 1 |
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Croatian | 10 |
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Czech | 37 |
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Danish | 5 |
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Dutch | 23 |
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Finnish | 52 |
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French | 10 |
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German | 213 |
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Hebrew | 57 |
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Hungarian | 39 |
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Icelandic | 17 |
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Indonesian | 60 |
 |
Italian | 135 |
 |
Japanese | 25 |
 |
Korean | 8 |
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Macedonian | 11 |
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Norwegian | 17 |
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Polish | 46 |
 |
Portuguese | 99 |
 |
Russian | 108 |
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Slovak | 14 |
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Slovenian | 60 |
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Spanish | 38 |
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Swedish | 10 |
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Thai | 3 |
All together the translation work we've just described may sound like a frightening amount of effort. But this job is also "chunky" in another way; each major part can be broken into many small pieces, meaning that a person with commitment and passion but not much time can still make a valuable contribution. With enough people working together, no one person will be facing an unpleasant slog. Meanwhile at the end of our task there's a big brass ring to reach together as a team: when we're finished, our result will be an enduring and valuable help in boosting public understanding of our climate change challenge.
Ready to help with this? Then please fill out this short Google-form to let us know which language(s) you can help with. I'll then be in touch to provide the details to get you started or join others already working on a language.
Posted by BaerbelW on Friday, 30 January, 2026
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