In the last 10 days, I’ve participated in almost 120 hours of meetings with international development workers from over sixty countries. All official meetings were simultaneously translated into Arabic, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. I read the articles for this unit on the night before the conference. The ideas from the text have simmered in my mind as I’ve had entire conversations consisting of Google Translate messages and participated in dozens of conversations requiring constant informal translation of spoken and written information. I’m in the hotel lobby now, the morning after the conference ended, getting ready to fly from Kuala Lumpur, to Bishkek, to Almaty, and back home.
Some background on the method
Before going further, I should give a little background for my perspective. I grew up in a sign-language oriented household. My father was the pastor of a small church unique for its use of sign language in all activities. Until I started school, I believed that most adults were deaf. Using signs simultaneously with speech seemed natural to me, and this was before the ASL (American Sign Language) movement became a political force to drive out SEE (Signed Exact English), so my native language was a form of ASL heavily influenced by the English grammatical structures. I didn’t notice a problem with this until late in high school when I was asked to translate a for guest speaker. He said, “God is everywhere,” which I translated with ease: simple grammar, simple vocabulary, and a common concept. However, he followed the sentence by clarifying, “God is not everything.” [original emphasis] That brought me to a pause. Sign language allows the complexity of distinguishing the concepts of “everywhere” and “everything”, but the natural way of signifying “everywhere” and “everything” are the same sign unless you are trying to differentiate the two concepts. I had translated “everywhere” with a sign that could also mean “everything,” so I had to reverse my previous interpretation, clarify the problem, gain understanding, and catch up to the speaker before his next big point.
Noticing incongruities between sign and meaning became a sort of hobby as I entered college. I noticed things like the disappearing and reappearing “u” in words like “honour” by my immigrant friends. I noticed the way friends would seemingly unconsciously vary between “OK” and “okay.” This eventually led me to study linguistics in graduate school under Elaine Tarone, whose work with Larry Sassingler on “interlanguage” linked language acquisition studies to the emerging field of General Systems Theory. (Selinker & Rutherford, 1992; E. Tarone, 1983; E. E. Tarone, 1985)
Interlanguage theory states that, while we may have innate cognitive structures guiding the categories and progression of language acquisition (Chomsky, 2014), language acquisition is guided by a constant attempt to identify the patterns that will allow us to produce and decode meaningful utterances. This process of testing patterns often results in overgeneralization of common rules (such as a child saying, “I sleeped” instead of “I slept” even though the child has probably never heard “I sleeped” as a model sentence). It also results in overgeneralizing notable exceptions as if they were rules (such as a child noticing the eat/ate pair for present-past verbs and generalizing it to thinking that “bate” is the past tense of “beat”). When applied to language teaching, this theory means that students are not simply making mistakes, but that certain types of mistakes may indicate a fairly sophisticated grasp of language, so the teacher should not focus on simply minimizing mistakes, but in fostering environments in which increasingly complex mistakes are encouraged.
How does this apply to writing systems and cultural adaptability?
1.5 billion people communicate in English today, but only 375 million of them are native speakers, (Statistica, 2017) and this number includes people whose speech may be nearly unintelligible to each other – and this group does not agree on questions such as okay vs. OK or honor vs. honour. Although irregularities are natural and essential for humans learning language, the digitized world does not allow them. In the world of ASCII and UNICODE, okay if not OK. A simple lack of coding for spelling variations may result in real loss, as nearly occurred for my friend, Kent Mathieson, a long-time development worker in Kyrgyzstan and author of one of the few novels set in the region. He recently came near losing a large sale to an American group that reported his, Thieves of Honour, was not availableon Amazon.com. The Americans had forgotten the “u,” and the Amazon programmers forgot to tell the system to accept honor as honour.
In normal human language, cultural settings allow for the negotiation of meaning required by interlanguage speakers or users of abbreviated spellings. Computer languages, however, do not allow this negotiation. Computer codes are based on mathematical precision. As Pulitzer-Prize Winner Douglas Hofstadter has pointed out, mathematics, logic, and the codes they spawn depend on the idea that one symbol represents one, and only one, idea that cannot be equally expressed by any other combination or sequence of symbols. (Hofstadter, 1999) The chain 1 + 1 = 2 has precision, clarity, and definition unencumbered by the messiness and poetry of life.
Translating the symbols into language clarifies, but the clarity loses meaning. For instance, does + mean the cumulative in addition to, or the numerical plus, or the mysterious and? Does = mean make, makes, equals, or results in? As linguist and philosopher George Steiner pointed out, language serves humanity largely by hiding meaning. (Steiner, 1998) This hiddenness or ambiguity does not cloud the truth, but illustrates the complexity and fluidity of what we call knowledge and meaning. For instance, I have told one woman, “I love you,” for over twenty-five years, but we don’t know the words mean something different now – and something very much the same. I doubt a computer code could reflect that.
A return to symbology?
With the advent of UNICODE, allowing increasingly complex representations of human speech sounds, and the amazing tools for linguistic analysis and transcription developed by SIL International (“Linguistics Software,” 2012), it has never been able to envision a world of text-speech inter-connection. The world of human spoken communication has the potential of merging with text on massive levels. At the same time, though, the advent of smartphones and non-verbal intuitive design and vowel-less and even wordless text messaging seems to be pushing cultures again toward the primacy of symbols for communication. The speed at which communication through avatars, memes, and emojis has spread has left us with a world of untested and imprecise communication.
But, one may ask, is this the way of the future? If an infographic can describe a doctoral program in educational technology at BSU more effectively than a page on the school’s website, then should the website should lighten up on text? If a text message comprised of abbreviations and images can organize an event, then is anything else necessary?
Culture, curriculum, chaos, and humor among us: an anecdote
I attended a workgroup on this a couple days ago. There were twelve of us. I was the only native-English speaker. I mostly listened. I’ll conclude this post with the following story from some of the Middle-Easterners in the group.
A foreign organization approached them with a new curriculum that would teach math, science, and civic values to elementary children. (As they told the story, they illustrated key parts on a large flip chart. “Foreign organization” was abbreviated “FO.”) The FO defined civic education as training children to become engaged in their communities through volunteerism, group petitions, and eventually voting. The FO had a curriculum that they had tested on other countries, and they wanted to adapt it to the Mid-Eastern contexts. They assured the target audience that all illustrations were electronic and could be manipulated to ensure gender, age, and racial neutrality. Also, information was usually conveyed in a graphic-novel or cartoon format to emphasize the visual communication and reduce the need for pictures. They also had online games developed to encourage mastery of key concepts.
The first problem came with the applied math unit. The text required students to count their family members: parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and siblings. However, did not allow inclusion of the myriad relations included in the typical Middle-Eastern or Central Asian family, or the common categories of “older male relative” or “younger female in-laws”, and similar groups that are, culturally, never combined with other groups into catch-all phrases like “uncles and aunts”. When challenged on this, the FO said they would provide a definition of “family,” “aunts”, “uncles”, and other key familial units that students could use for their math exercises.
The target audience also objected to the way in which the science curriculum portrayed the use of fossil fuels negatively, as their economies depend on exporting oil. They objected to the portrayal of women in short skirts or pants as supervisors of men. They objected to the way characters in the graphic novel greeted each other with one or two polite phrases (the equivalents of “Hi, how are you? Fine.”) instead of the elaborate traditional greetings that would probably require several frames of a comic but are expected of polite children. Finally, they objected to the entire graphic and comic layout: In Arabic, texts are read from right to left, and pages are turned from left to right.
The FO concluded the meeting by stating she would take care of it. Proof texts arrived electronically several days later. The graphic artists had gone through the entire text, copying and pasting frames and images so that the book could be read in reverse order of its English pagination. Since many common images included characters pointing toward questions, puzzle pieces, or answers, and those images had changed, the artists flipped all the character images on the y-axis so that they would be pointing in the right direction.
However, this resulted in the characters pointing with their left hands. In the target cultures, pointing with the left hand is equivalent to pointing with the middle finger in English. The culturally-appropriate revised textbook showed cartoon characters visibly damning every question, puzzle piece, and answer.
At the end of the long anecdote, the audience chuckled appreciatively, and we all added our own anecdotes of such well-intentioned missteps by FOs. Near the end of the conversation, someone asked which FO this had been. The speaker smiled quickly toward me and nodded in friendly apology, and then wrote on the flip chart, in script, the highly poetic and ambiguous letters us.
References
Chomsky, N. (2014). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
Hofstadter, D. R. (1999). Gödel, Escher, Bach : an eternal golden braid. Basic Books.
Linguistics Software. (2012, August 22). Retrieved September 18, 2017, from https://www.sil.org/linguistics/linguistics-software
Selinker, L., & Rutherford, W. E. (1992). Rediscovering Interlanguage (1 edition). London ; New York: Longman.
Statistica. (2017). Most spoken languages in the world | Statistic. Retrieved September 18, 2017, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/
Steiner, G. (1998). After Babel : aspects of language and translation. Oxford University Press.
Tarone, E. (1983). On the Variability of Interlanguage Systems*. Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 142–164. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/4.2.142
Tarone, E. E. (1985). Variability in Interlanguage Use: A Study of Style-Shifting in Morphology and Syntax. Language Learning, 35(3), 373–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1985.tb01083.x
