I think the situation is grainier than you imply—there has to be a motivation to translate, whether for love or money. “Worth translating” isn’t floating out there in the aether. Instead, translation only happens if someone cares enough to make it happen.
Take the blog which has criticism of American and Israeli politicians in English and criticism of Arab politicians in Arabic. Who’s going to translate the Arabic parts into English? Someone who’s fascinated by Arab politics? Someone who wants to get the politicians and/or the blogger into trouble? There might be other motivations as well, but whatever it is will have to be fairly strong, especially if much of the blog is going to get translated.
I think the point of the article is that everyone adopting the same language has such a high upfront cost that it isn’t going to happen any time soon, and it’s interesting to look at the consequences, including the unexpected consequence that the web lowers the barriers to connection so much that minority languages are less disadvantaged than they used to be.
What advances in IA would be needed to make learning languages easier?
I think the situation is grainier than you imply—there has to be a motivation to translate, whether for love or money. “Worth translating” isn’t floating out there in the aether. Instead, translation only happens if someone cares enough to make it happen.
Take the blog which has criticism of American and Israeli politicians in English and criticism of Arab politicians in Arabic. Who’s going to translate the Arabic parts into English? Someone who’s fascinated by Arab politics? Someone who wants to get the politicians and/or the blogger into trouble? There might be other motivations as well, but whatever it is will have to be fairly strong, especially if much of the blog is going to get translated.
I think the point of the article is that everyone adopting the same language has such a high upfront cost that it isn’t going to happen any time soon, and it’s interesting to look at the consequences, including the unexpected consequence that the web lowers the barriers to connection so much that minority languages are less disadvantaged than they used to be.
What advances in IA would be needed to make learning languages easier?