Multilingualism has been gaining importance in the digital humanities and scholarly communication, but the infrastructure used to disseminate scholarship has mostly remained in English. Monolingual research infrastructure creates a language barrier for non-Anglophone speakers to access scholarly outputs and reinforces the idea that English is the only legitimate language for disseminating scholarship. Drawing from the debates on multilingual DH and scholarly publishing, we argue that any digital research infrastructure purporting to support knowledge diversity across disciplinary and national contexts must actively work to provide tools to facilitate, publish, and promote research in languages other than English. To show how multilingualism can guide infrastructure development and foster connections with diverse audiences, we describe the translation process of the interface of a research infrastructure, the Humanities and Social Sciences Commons, into four languages: French, Spanish, Bangla, and Portuguese.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Colin-Arce, A., Jensen, G., Amell, B., Siemens, R., (2026), "Multilingualism as Infrastructural Imperative: Language Diversity in Digital Knowledge Commons", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.25547/1NVW-6728)

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1. digital knowledge commons
2. digital research infrastructure
3. globaldh
4. multilingual digital humanities

Originally published in Digital Humanities Quarterly:

Colin-Arce, Alan, Graham Jensen, Brittany Amell, and Ray Siemens. 2026. “Multilingualism as Infrastructural Imperative: Language Diversity in Digital Knowledge Commons.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 020 (1). https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/20/1/000850/000850.html#