On The Media

There will always separate narratives and different views of the same events, even if we all speak the same language. That's good. Bridging the language barriers is great, and people have been doing it since long before but computerized translation. Still, the Google and other translation tools are amazing. Imagine coupling a voice recognition system with a translation system.... Something that was once just science fiction.

I was very interested in visiting the Arabic/English site your interviewer discussed. To demonstrate the imprecision of spoken language I heard this site's URL pronounced as "midan.net" on several replays. Both Chrome & IE redirect to www.midan.net so I presume both names are registered. This is the home page of the Sudanese Communist Party. Could you email, post, or announce the actual home page of the Arabic/English news site?

@Michael -

The site is www.al-midan.net. Search for that in Google and click on Translate.

I am a longtime listener and supporter of WNYC. OTM is one of my favorite programs. But while listening to the "Bridging" program on May 1 I was agahst that the Princeton professor of translation studies (whose name I failed to catch) was so narrow as to only cite Latin as a "universal" or let us more accurately say "ecumenical" language.

Even in teh palmy days of the Roman Empire (300 years?) Latin had a powerful competitor in Greek; the much more affluent and cultured half of that Empire (Byzantium) switched wholly to Greek for a thousand years. Before the rise of Rome, Greek was an important but not dominant language as far East as Afghanistan where the Indian emperor Ashoka used Greek and Aramaic to address his subjects in the Kandahar (Afghanistan) area.

Then we have Sanskrit which for over thousand years was *the* language of culture, literature and science from (modern) Kampuchea to (modern Pakistan), and from Java to Khotan. This omission is all the more egregious because a recent (2007) book by Sheldon Pollock of Columbia has compared the civilizational history of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. (_The Language of the Gods in the World of Men_)

Finally, measured in terms of the sheer number of literate humans who oriented themselves to it and its chronological longevity in that role, Classical Chinese would easily be the most significant ecumenical language in human history.

Regrettably, your "expert" exhibited precisely the sort of narrow ethnocentric ignorance that your Program was deprecating!

Additional comment: Apologies - I hit the "submit" button too soon. I also need to mention Classical Arabic - still a language of some significance and one that in its heyday was spoken and read across an immense geographical span of the three continents of the Old World.

Just a point of correction, Michael and Kenneth. The site referenced in the piece is meedan.net not midan or al-midan. The hyperlink can clicked through at "bridge the language divide"--the last sentence in the story's description. It's an interesting site. Check it out!

"The bad news: it threatens to divide the web into separate Internets along language lines." -- I fail to see how this is necessarily a bad thing. It's a bad thing if people are forced to abandon their mother tongue because they want to be relevant for more people, but having "a Greek internet" and "a Tigrinya internet" etc. is not a bad thing at all. Diversity should be embraced. If not understanding something in another language gives you the willies, get an interpreter or a machine translation engine ;)

To diverge in slightly another direction, I think part of the value and the "universalism" of the internet has been the fact that English was the dominant language. Although it may be that now that the internet is "growing up", and that "one language" may become less important, there are still good arguements to keep some one language, English or some other (Esperanto?), as the "backbone" language that everybody can learn and use. So, why English? It may be argued that English, since the 1950s at least, is the most dominant international language in business, commerce, and science. But there is another interesting arguement that I never see made, and may or may not be true, but which I originally had prsented to me by my Great Uncle Jean Goldman in Paris in 1966 (to whom English was his second...or third or fourth...language): Jean translated scientific documents into and out of French, German, English, Russian, Hungarian, and a number of other languages, and he noted that if one took a few paragraphs in any one language and translated it into all of those other languages, the total length of the translated document was invariably shortest in English. He argued that there was an economy of meaning (not beauty...of course...he thought French to be the more "beautiful" language), of vocabulary and grammar in English that was unmatched in other languages. He felt that this economy was critical for, at least, progress in the technical and scientific communities. An interesting thought from an old man (as he already was in 1966) who was a great fan of all languages. Me, I have a hard enough time with American English; I praise spell-check!

Hearing about Google's translation algorithms and methods was extremely interesting. I have been tracking the improvements in Google Translate with Polish over the past couple of years. One interesting feature of a webpage translated by Google: if you copy and paste the translated text, you will find the original text phrases inlined with the translated text. This can be helpful for analyzing, understanding and improving the translation and your understanding of the original words and phrases.

I was pleased to see that Google uses one of "my" methods: if I am using Google Translate to help me write a phrase in Polish, I take the Google suggestion and then google **it** to see if it is a phrase actually used on Polish websites, and to get an idea of the context in which it is used. My Polish is very rudimentary, but I believe (and hope) that helps me formulate sensible Polish sentences.

On the topic of your shield law discussion, you implied that it is OK to deny protection to unimportant journalism. Instead of putting every prosecutor running for reelection in charge of this decision of importance, you should protect everyone. This way the important journalism is protected and if the journalism is not important, there can be no public good served by smashing down their door anyway.

By the way, if I loose my cell phone, or my business plans, can I get the government to smash down someone's door to find it? The fencing argument put forward by your guest is bunk as the unimportant journalist had offered to return the iPhone.

Thank you for you important journalism.

Best regards,

Ron Levin