Translating the Global Village

#18
Pretty much agree with you @Harvey Lloyd - though in my case my life has always been about two galaxies colliding because I while I was born in England, I did not speak English until I was about eight years old, and that is because my parents guarded us from the gangs that marauded in the ghetto town I was born in. That meant that I have always come home to an Eastern culture and walk out my home to a Western one. I remember what it was like not knowing English when I went to junior school and yet I was born in England and then when I learned English, I nearly lost my mother tongue, and I remember as a teenager realizing how much I was cut off from the stories and experiences that were discussed in Indian. Once I got married at the age of 24, my wife had spent her younger years in California but she was born in India - and it is through her that I reconnected with my mother language. Now add to that I am not much of a traveler and even when I went to places like France, Belgium or Brazil - it was for business and yet again I stayed in the hotel and did not venture out, unlike my brother who is way more cosmopolitan. These experiences have shaped the galaxies that have collided in my life. I do see myself as a global citizen, yet still live an extreme local existence. It is through these differences I have whole new frontiers to discover - which is a good thing. I don't see an Italian represent Italy, or a Nigerian represent Nigeria - it is through the individual quirks of a human being that these relationships unfold and constantly provide fresh and hopefully incrementally transforming insights. Reply

#18
Pretty much agree with you Harvey Lloyd - though in my case my life has always been about two galaxies colliding because I while I was born in England, I did not speak English until I was about eight years old, and that is because my parents guarded us from the gangs that marauded in the ghetto town I was born in. That meant that I have always come home to an Eastern culture and walk out my home to a Western one. I remember what it was like not knowing English when I went to junior school and yet I was born in England and then when I learned English, I nearly lost my mother tongue, and I remember as a teenager realizing how much I was cut off from the stories and experiences that were discussed in Indian. Once I got married at the age of 24, my wife had spent her younger years in California but she was born in India - and it is through her that I reconnected with my mother language. Now add to that I am not much of a traveler and even when I went to places like France, Belgium or Brazil - it was for business and yet again I stayed in the hotel and did not venture out, unlike my brother who is way more cosmopolitan. These experiences have shaped the galaxies that have collided in my life. I do myself as a global citizen, yet still live an extreme local existence. It is through these differences I have whole new frontiers to discover - which is a good thing. I don't see an Italian represent Italy, or a Nigerian represent Nigeria - it is through the individual quirks of a human being that these relationships unfold and constantly provide fresh and hopefully incrementally transforming insights. Reply

#16
Deep thinking is certainly a critical part of what makes translation meaningful, because in that translation also exists diversity. Diversity can teach us to level set our thinking to the receiver of information. That is why I have a problem with political correctness because it couches diversity in terms of limitation rather than range and variety. Once I have understood this variety, it is at this point I can embrace the diversity that enriches us across different groups and cultures. Sometimes this actually leads us to realize how we have learned to underestimate people - and as we see anew - we translate differently and then see that the overly simplistic man we dismissed for his simplistic views - was actually a very deep thinker who had refined meaning to such a level, that simplicity becomes a greater wisdom than complexity. Then we have met the great thinkers who can say much by just saying so little - and this is where appreciation and unpacking diversity is profoundly meaningful. So even before we encounter the richness of diversity within translation that can be unpacked through depth of thinking, not all thinking is the same - and here thinking can be viewed as horizontal no matter what culture or world that thinker grew up in. While there are limits to how well we can think, education rips out what would otherwise have been latent abilities - that hidden talent that through a desire for learning and growth we can even surprise ourselves. If that is we have the desire to level set and participate at the appropriate horizontal. I learned this lesson the hard way because I did not realize that I can end up talking over people's heads - and in that case it does not matter how brilliant my own thinking is when people do not have a clue what it is I was talking about :-) Reply

#13
Joyce, as a society we use words "diversity" and "multiculturalism" more as a defensive response to racism, but as long as the roots of those words are exercised because of the presence of racism, they unfortunately get defined as a group effect rather than as an individual relationship or even freedom. When you are engaged in multicultural exchange, it is you has a human being simply having a relationship with another human being who happens to speak a different language or whose culture is different. In that regard we exercise REAL diversity, what diversity should mean before those professional morons who adopted political correctness as their lens created these knee jerk responses to racism, which simply brushed racism under the carpet, only for a Trump like character to lift up the rug and create a perverse political populism from what got airbrushed out with a PC definition of "diversity". You are the actual example of diversity in its full meaning and glory, someone who understands that we learn from people who are different from us and who are not the same as us - and in so doing openly welcome the variations in our humanity - because in nature variety is a really, really good thing ! If the world was full of minds like yours we would be living in a paradise of diversity, but diversity today is channeled through the lens of prejudice and professional lens like human resources - and here even the very words "HUMAN RESOURCES" is an anethema to diversity, because I am not a resource to be consumed, neither are you - and in that we express the full extent of our humanity, without wearing a T-shirt with the platitude "Be Human". We don't wear that T-Shirt because we unmistakably human ! The diversity in this humanity only serves to add even greater dimensions to our humanity. In that is what I see packed in the word you used "ADVENTURE". Life should be such an adventure - and if it spread like this - that is TRUE diversity. Reply

#11
Thanks Debasish. Like everything I write there is personal impulse and challenge written within this buzz. The chief challenge of opening the door to the world is how we maintain our attention and focus - and the consideration here is that our attention and focus gets subverted or directed in existing and traditional digital avenues. No matter how much we think we individually do not participate in groupthink, the group dominates our attention. It is really challenging to cross boundaries and step into worlds were maybe even the digital natives that occupy that world would be surprised to see us engage with them. Reply

#8
Most people have good intent, but wise intentions is the development challenge. The creation of television as a one-way medium led us towards the comfort zone rather than societal enlightenment, but the web and interactive technologies mean our fingerprint is involved in creation to and no longer just to twitch a remote control. So there are personal growth and development choices that were easy to skip over in the rise of television as technological force, but the networks we see being created around us is actually a continuation of "social media". (Television simply made it more expensive to be a marketer) rather than a conscious form of learning media. That is the challenge I view and it is a personal view. The challenge in the case of translating the global village, is going beyond what the mass are paying attention to and to continue travelling on the road less travelled - but a virtual road that is far easier to travel upon. Reply

#4
Part 1 of 2 Bill, I have always said that NEWS is best when it is an acronym for North-East-West-South, but when it lacks direction the question still remains is who is it that actually contributes to the ratings for that news, because if cool media is media that demands our attention, it is clear from ratings alone that the principal desire of media watchers today is still hot media. It is the same habit of hot media preference that has allowed the proliferation of misinformation and lazy opinion. The loss of channel from traditional media to new media has been a thoughtless process in terms of education. That education of how best to utilize new media has been driven through one primary doorway - which is called "Social Media". That term is a marketing term and not one that denotes interactive discourse - it is simply transposing marketing as we once knew it, on the new steroids of a digital platform - so it is hot media replaced by digitally powered hot media. One of the victims of this "social media" focus has been blogs, which were in the early days of the internet a good example of what cool media should be - interactive, makes you think, gets you involved in the thinking. Reply

#4
Part 2 of 2 When social media used its hot rods to flush news through Google, Facebook and Twitter - that further dried up attention and desire for blogs. The power law prevailed for the digital behemoths that are now capitalized in billions of dollars and blogs became a remnant on the long-tail. There is still good blogs out there but finding them also means navigating links with potential malware - and while social media does get hyperlinks - how many people invest time in those links - for the hot media effect of social media is to share more and not search deeper. So now lets take it the rest of the world - and here listen to Alisa Miller of PRI - if she has described a quintessential map of hot media about US news focus : https://www.ted.com/talks/alisa_miller_shares_the_news_about_the_news/transcript?language=en Reply

#1
The most important translation is am I human and are you human and in that translation Pascal we are both 100% :-) Reply