For il Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, I wrote an article called “Il Web è

tornato una Babele“. The underlying concept was that, far from going towards a single Internet “lingua franca” we are witnessing a babelization of the online world, with English being tailed by Chinese and other idioms in the creation of content. For the piece, I interviewed many experts, one of them being Michael Oustinoff, professor at Paris III, now on sabbatical at the ISCC, the CNRS Institute for Communication Sciences in Paris.  He told me a lot of interesting things that, for space reasons, I wasn’t able to insert in the article. So I thought it would be a good idea to post them, with his permission, here, for my non Italian readers. On this theme, I suggest you read the Net.Lang report as well, it’s a fascinating read, and the source of much inspiration.

But here’s the transcript of the interview:

Q: First of all, Mr Oustinoff, are we really going towards a “babelization” of the Internet?

A: In point of fact, we’re there already. In the 1990s people thought that English would be the language of the Internet. We are witnessing the opposite: English accounts for less than 30% of the Web, and when people use social networks, such  as Twitter, Facebook and the like, they use their own native languages. The Internet is getting more and more babelized with English getting caught up by rising languages such as Spanish/Portuguese, Chinese or Arabic, not to mention the 200+ languages you can now find on Wikipedia.

This is a paradigm shift which makes translation, to rephrase Umberto Eco, tomorrow’s language of the Internet. The rapid growth and development of online translation tools is a telling sign of that evolution. More and more translated content will be available via new technology, including oral messages, via state-of-the art voice recognition translation software. (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg).

Q: What is the current status of translation devices? Are they already good enough to substitute the humans?

A: it is a two-sided issue. First, translation is needed in the case of English. English is far from being a “global language” mastered by everyone everywhere around the globe with the ease of an educated native speaker. That is why websites like TED, first all-English, to add translations to their platform. Here is the link describing the project: http://www.ted.com/pages/287.

This is new media technology at its best: “Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter’s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages”.

In other words, it a reversible operation. If you look up “tetto verde + TED” on Google, you end up also with Vicki Arroyo’s TED talk: “Prepariamoci al nuovo clima” (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/it/vicki_arroyo_let_s_prepare_for_our_new_climate.html). You can bypass English altogether and use Italian only instead.

But the project goes beyond: “Rather than simply translate a few talks into a handful of major languages, TED developed a system that allows participants around the world to translate their favorite talks into their own language. This approach is scalable, and — importantly — allows speakers of less-dominant languages an equal opportunity to spread ideas within their communities”.

Still, the source language is English. To do a TED talk, you have to do it in English. So the second side of the issue is translating from other languages. Does it matter? It does.

This is the goal of Global Voices which was “was founded in 2005 by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University.” (Link : http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/).

This is their presentation:

“Global Voices is a community of more than 700 authors and 600 translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.” (…) “Global Voices
seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.”

Q: On a more abstract level, what do you think could be the consequences if every kind of content becomes instantly available, regardless of idioms? Could that change the cultural/political balance of power, giving neglected or secondary cultures more room, favour business and economical relations?

A: So far, I have only mentioned websites or projects that work with a team of freelance translators. In order to have “every kind of content become instantly available, regardless of idiom” is only possible via MT (machine translation) or CAT (Computer Assisted Translation). So far, MT
and CAT do allow you to translate a large amount of texts fairly accurately but it is still a long way before computers may deal with “every kind of content”.

Still, you can now do things which were quite unimaginable a few years ago. For instance, I used Google Translate to translate a passage on globalization in Finnish (a language I don’t know a single word of) into French. I revised the automatic translation myself and submitted the
result to a bilingual Finnish-French MBA Student of mine and he confirmed that the translation was accurate.

So the Age of automatic translation has, to some extent, already begun and is alive and kicking. Personally, I think that MT will never make “every kind of content instantly available, regardless of idiom”. But even if that world becomes a reality, there would still be the need for knowing foreign languages and human translation. In that context MT would be an invaluable tool, no doubt, but only a tool. Not an end in itself.

The frontier between the Internet and the medias tends to be increasingly blurred: “In the new, networked world, Horrocks suggested that mainstream media organisations might have to start opening up their structures to collaboration, not just with the public but with other news organisations and even bodies like NGOs. This is based on but goes beyond the idea of networked journalism production where newsrooms use user generated material and foster public participation and interactivity. This requires an institutional commitment to opening up
its resources and processes.” ( Charlie Beckett, Communicating For Change: media and agency in the networked public sphere, http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/POLIS/documents/Communicating-For-Change-.pdf  p.20).

Increasingly blurred and increasingly multilingual: “World Service English documentaries have been increasingly reported by languages teams, something that was unheard of ten years ago. A great example was the award winning “Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” about sexual abuse of
young boys. It was the kind of story that an English reporter would never have got near to. Another brilliant example is Rana Jawad, a reporter from the BBC Africa team, who was the BBC’s only person in Tripoli throughout the war and had to report anonymously for her own safety.” (ibid.).

This is what struck me most at the presentation of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013 which took place last June at the BBC during the Congress of the International Communication Association (ICA) where I had been invited to deliver a talk in the closing plenary. There were people from many different countries, including from Italy. Everything took place in English, but there was the underlying feeling that the all-English option was not THE option any longer. Just one among others.

This is all indeed in my view a major paradigm shift, that is already changing the “cultural/political balance of power, giving neglected or secondary cultures more room, favour business and economic relations” in an increasingly multipolar world. This is the paradigm shift we are studying at the ISCC here in Paris, the CNRS Institute for Communication Sciences with an international team of researchers.

Related articles

• Don’t Panic: Google has prototypes for ‘real-time’ translation device, ‘near perfect’ in some uses (engadget.com)
• Rumor: Google’s Babel Project To Be Universal Language Translator (intomobile.com)
• How much can we rely on translation software? (telegraph.co.uk)
• Launching the IJNet Collaborative Translation Project (ijnet.org)
• TED Found in Translation Sessions: Pico Iyer (globalloungeuoft.wordpress.com)
• With Acquisition Facebook Now Speaks “Jibbigo” (marketingland.com)
• Speech-to-speech translation: the next move in Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to make you a citizen of Facebook (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)