Winner, Best Paper (Tie)English plays the key role in scholarly communication and resource distribution, but using a single language for research has consequences for scholars, science and society. To create a more equitable and linguistically diverse scholarly communication ecosystem, support is needed to ensure that scholars can read each other’s work. Language technologies such as machine translation tools (e.g. Google Translate) could potentially play a role, but little is understood about whether, how and to what extent these tools are used by scholars. This systematic review focused on the current state of language technologies within the scholarly communication ecosystem, uncovering both leaps and stumbles in the process.