Saturday, July 04, 2009

The Future Is Multilingual


The Internet is the future. And that future is multilingual. This is the Internet century, and this century is multilingual. This world was always multilingual. But in this century, for the first time, we will see that lingual diversity celebrated as the natural order of things instead of a nuisance or worse. America is Europe, the Internet is America. The Internet is the new country. The Internet is the new frontier, the wild wild west. The Internet is the new moon to reach out to.

You could learn new languages if you wanted to but you don't have to. You don't have to wait for all the world's knowledge to get translated from English into your local language by really smart human beings who put out tomes of translated literature. Machines will translate on demand in real time. That changes things.

You should be able to chat with someone in their own language without learning their language, in real time.

All knowledge is local. All local knowledge is global. And that too in real time. That is the Internet way.

Communication and creation/consumption will go unhindered. Languages will not get in the way. The idea that the smartest people in every culture need to learn English first, that is passe. That is so 20th century. Many still might, but not because it is demanded of them.

I love the English language, but I love linguistic diversity more. Linguistic diversity is the humanity flowering the way it is meant to flower. Each human being is unique just like each snowflake is unique. Each sentence each human being naturally speaks is unique. Is that something or is that something? Finally we have the technology to map that uniqueness. The Internet is mapping software.

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