Can we honestly go to some scientist and say
I’mnot saying that the language barrier is a good thing or a bad thing. All Iwould caution is that the belief that it is the cause of ignorance or underdevelopment is perhaps accepteduncritically by supporters of what one might euphemistically call “languagetechnology.”
Alate chapter in The Shallows analyzesthe attitude of Google’s founders toward information. Brin and Page are,famously, computer engineers. In Ken Auletta’s phrase, “Google's leaders arenot cold businessmen; they are cold engineers.” Of course, the dominant ideologyof Silicon Valley in 2012 consists in invoking lofty goals for very non-loftybusiness models. For instance, universal access to information is invoked asthe end, and the means is the sale of (slightly tawdry) online text ads. Thecure for cancer is invoked as the ultimate goal for selling mp3s, etc., etc. Whichprompts the question, if the ultimate goal is to cure cancer: why not, uhm,devote your life to cancer research? Inquiring minds might want to know. Butyou’ll never get a response.
Google’s goal is, as former CEO Eric Schmidt famously wrote, to “gather togetherall of the information in the world in a single place.” The current dispersalof information is an obstacle to knowledge, and that is true, to some extentThe key linkage between the Googlevi’s engineering backgrounds and the ambitionof digitizing every single bit of information boils down to efficiency of access and distribution.
Now, I would like to make a heretical assumption: perhaps the language barrier is notas much of a barrier to science as one would imagine. For almost a millenniumafter the fall of Rome, Latin was the lingua franca of learning in the Westernworld. The fragmentation of the Tower of Babel only entered the ivory tower of science until well after the Scientific Revolution was underway, probably due to theinfluence of the ever-increasing power of nationalism and the Reformation, but also because of thegrowing importance of science itself and the desire to get out from under theconstraints of Thomism, the heavy legacy of the Middle Ages, and its exclusive useof Latin. Perhaps if Latin had remained as the lingua franca of letters andscience, we would be further along the path of progress today, but I doubt it. Themovement away from a single pan-European language of knowledge that knittedtogether scholars from Toledo to Warsaw was in part due tofactors such as the Reformation and the rise of nationalism. But it was alsodue to the fact that the gentleman-scientist of the seventeenth century need not haveattended the major learning centres of his time. The exclusive use of the commonLatin language for learning might have actually shut out these individuals fromthe pursuit of scientific truth. Or it may have loaded up a scholar with a lotof prejudices about language and thought that were inconvenient.
Inour day, English is the lingua franca of science. I find it hard to believethat the language barrier is a problem when a pre-requisite for being ascientist is to be fluent in English. And, let’s face it, the only type ofknowledge that is crucial for the advancement ofhumanity is scientific. Helping sailors maintain email correspondence with thecutie they met at the last port may help humanity somewhat, but not as much asa cure for malaria. (Would it be churlish to ask to which of the twoCheap Localization has contributed more over the past decade, I wonder?)
IfEnglish as a lingua franca for science leaves you unconvinced, listen to thisargument about how connectedness inhibits inventiveness. This moresophisticated counterargument comes from novelist Neal Stephenson.It is a parable of how interconnectedness depresses innovation:
Most people who work incorporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A numberof engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Outof the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then somelaptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search,announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguelysimilar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If itfailed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spendingmoney trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to themarket is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of itwill have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.”The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way mustnumber in the millions.
Sois efficient information exchange a pure good? Not necessarily. Sometimes, thewalled garden and the solipsistic bubble are crucial for creation and innovation.Think about Descartes in his man-sized oven. Or Proust in his sound-proofbedroom. The absence of space for unmolested invention may be part of thereason for our current Great Stagnation, pace naïve connectivists such as MarkZuckerberg and his legion of wannabes.
The amountof information flow does not produce qualitativejumps in our knowledge or social wealth. Our current period is marked by the fastest transmission of the largest amount of information ever amassed in the history of mankind, and yet its is also marked by the slowest economic growth in many decades. The Scientific Revolution came after the invention of the press, but itwas not caused by the printing press,as is wrongly believed by a lot of people who know exactly diddlysquat abouthistory. Post hoc ergo propter hoc isa fallacy, but, as Roland Barthes wrote, it is the foundational premise ofnarrative.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.
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