Language? No Problem.
By Geert Lovink 
 
McKenzie Warks brilliant nettime-piece on the ever changing role
of the English language in the age of the Net was being posted in
the dark days before Christmas of 1996. But then people rushed to
do shopping, gathered with friends and family. In most of Europe
it started to freeze and snow, life slowed down and so did
nettime too, at least for some days. I and many others might have
forgotten the computer for a while, but the 'language problem'
remained. Have you also tried to discuss recipes with friends,
feeling socially disabled because you never learned the English
names for all those kitchen garnitures, deluxe herbs and
flamboyant birds? For gourmets, language can be a true obstacle 
in the enjoyment of the self-made haute cuisine. The careful 
pronounciation of the names is a crucial part of the dining
pleasure. Naming is the social counterpart of tasting and a
failing attempt to find the precise name of the ambitious
appetizer can easily temper the mood. 
 
McKenzie Wark has introduced the term 'Euro-English', being one
of the many 'englishes' currently spoken and written. It's a
funny term, only an outsider (from Australia, in this case) can
come up with. Of course, it does not exist and Wark should have
in fact have used the term in plural, 'Euro-englishes'. The term
is also highly political, if you put it in the perspective of
current Euro-politics in Great Brittian. 
Is the UK part of Europe, and if so, is their rich collection of
'Englishes' (Irish, Scottish etc.) then part of the bigger family
of Euro-english 'dialects'? That would be a truely radical,
utopian European perspective. Or is 'Euro-English' perhaps the
20th century Latin spoken on 'the continent'? 
 
Continentals can only hear accents, like the extraordinary
French-english, the deep, slow Russian-english or the smooth,
almost Brittish accent of the Scandinavians. It seems hard to
hear and admit one's own version. One friend of mine speaks
English with a heavy Cockney accent (not the Dutch one) and I
never dared to ask him why this was the case. 
Should he be disciplined and pretend to speak like they do on
BBC-World Service? I don't think so. What is right and wrong in
those cases? Should he speak Dutch-english, like most of us?
Switching to other Englishes is a strange thing to do, but
sometimes necessary. If you want to communicate successfully in
Japan you have to adjust your English, speak slowly and
constantly check if your message gets through. Mimicking 
Japlish is a stupid thing to do, but it comes near to that if you
want to achieve something. 
 
BBC Worldservice is my point of reference i must admit. The BBC
seems to be the only stable factor in my life. It's always there,
even more so than the Internet. In bed, I am listening carefully
to the way they are building sencenses and guess the meaning of
the countless words I am not familiar with. Since a couple of
years they started to broadcast 'Europe Today' where you can here
all the variations of 'Euro-english', even from the moderator.
Sometimes it's amusing but most of the time it is just
informative, like any other good radio program. Would that be the
'Euro-english' McKenzie speaks about, beyond all accents and
apparent mistakes, a still not yet concious 'Gesamtsprachwerk'? 
 
According to Mckenzie, within this 'bastard language' one can
'sometimes see the shadows of another way of thinking.' This
might be true. We all agree that we should not be annoyed by
mistakes but instead look for new forms of English the Net is now
generating. But for me, most of these shadows are like the
shadows in Plato's cave story. They are weak, distorted
references to a point somebody is desperately trying to make. 
We will never know whether the 'charming' and 'strange' outcomes
are intentional, or not. Non-native English writers (not
sanctioned by editors) might have more freedom to play with the
language. But finding the right expression even makes more fun,
at least for me. At this moment, I am writing three times as slow
as I would do in Dutch or German. Not having dictionaries here,
nor the sufisticated software to do spell checking, one feels
that the libidinous streams are gettting interrupted 
here and there. On-line text is full of those holes. At sudden
moments, I feel the language barrier rising up and I am not
anymore able to express myself. This is a violent, bodily
experience, a very frustrating one, Wark is perhaps not aware of.
He could trace those holes and ruptures later, in the text. But
then again we move on and the desire to communicate removes the
temporary obstacles. 
 
How should the Euro-english e-texts be edited? At least they
should go through a spell-checker. Obvious grammer mistakes
should be taken out, but they should not be rewritten be a naive
English or American editor. If we are in favour of 'language
diversification', this should also be implememented onto the
level of the printed word. 'Euro-englishes' or 'Net-englishes'
are very much alive, but do they need to be formalized 
or even codified? I don't care, to be honest. At the moment, I am
more afraid of an antropological approach, an exotic view on
Net-english, that would like to document this odd language before
it disappears again. But our way of expression is not cute (or
rare). It is born out of a specifical historical and
technological circumstance being the Pax Americana, pop culture,
global capitalism, Europe after 89 and the rise of the Internet.
Globalization will further unify the English languages 
and will treat local variations as minor, subcultural deviations.
As long as they are alive, I don't see any problem, but should we
transform these e-texts onto paper, only to show the outsiders
that the Net is so different, so exciting? I would propose that
the Book as a medium should not be used to make propaganda for
the idea of 'hyper-text' or 'multi-media'. A discussion in a news
group, on a list or just through personal e-mail exchange is
nothing more than building a 'discourse' and not by definition a
case for sophisticated graphic design to show all the
(un)necessary cross references. 
 
McKensey Wark didn't want to speak about the right to express
yourself in your own language. He agrees with this and I guess we
all do. His native language is English, the lucky boy. But we do
have to speak about it. Specially US-Americans do not want to be
bothered about this topic. I haven't heard one cyber-visionary
ever mentioning the fact that the Net has to become multi-lingual
if we ever want to reach Negropontes famous 'one billion users by
the year 2000.' It is not in their interest to develop
multi-lingual networks. Okey, the marketing departments of the 
software houses do bring out versions in other languages. But
this is only done for commercial reasons. And the Internet is not
going to change so quickly. Still 90% of its users are living in
the USA. Rebuilding Babylon within the Net will be primarily the
task of the non-natives. 
 
Of course, many of us have found their way in dealing with the
dominance of the English language and think that newbies should
do likewise. But this attitude seems shortsighted, even a bit
cynical. If we want the Net to grow, to be open and democratic,
to have its free, public access & content zones, than sooner or
later we have to face the language problem. Until now, this has
been merely ones own, private problem. It depends on your
cultural background, education and commitment whether you 
are able and willing to communicate freely in English. This
'individual' quality goes together with the emphasis on the
user-as-an-individual in the slogan of cyber-visionaries about
the so-called 'many to many' communication. But the language from
'all 2 all' remains unmentioned. 'Translation bots will solve
that problem', the eternal optimist will tell you. Everything has
been taken care of in the Phantasy World called Internet. But so
far nothing has happened. At the moment, the ammount of languages
used in the Net is increasing rapidly. But they exist mainly
seperately. It can happen that a user in Japan or Spain will 
never (have to) leave his or her language sphere, or is not able
to... 
 
Languages are neither global nor local (like the proclaimed
qualities of the Net), they are bounded to the nation state and
its borders, perhaps shared by several nations or spoken in a
certain region, depending on the course history took in the 19th
and 20th century. Countless small language have disappeared in
this process of nation building, migration and genocide. But in
Europe we still have at least 20 or 30 of them and they are not
likely to disappear. So communicating effectively within Europe
through the Net will need a serious effort to build a 'many to
many' languages translation interface. A first step will be the
implementation of unicode. Automatic translation programs 
will only then become more reliable. At this moment, French and
Hungarian users, for example, seriously feel their language
mutilated if they have to express themselves in ascci. 
 
But let's not complain too much. Once I saw a small paper on a 
shopwindow in Amsterdam, saying 'English? No problem.' Rebuilding
the Babel Tower together should be big fun and I am ready to
spend a lot of time in the contruction of a true multi-lingual
Net. If you are also interested in this, I would like to do some
practical proposals, for nettime and beyond...
 
- Not all of you might have noticed yet, but since november there
is the nettime-nl list for 'dutch-only' texts. Soon the
'german-only' nettime-d list will start as well. These parallel
lists have been established because most us prefer to contribute
in our own languages, specially in the heat of the debate.
Sometimes there are local announcements or topics that need not
to be translated into English. But we have also established these
list to the translation issue on the agenda of nettime. The
groups involved in the Dutch language list (with 150 participants
so far, all over the world!) intend to have some crucial 
contributions translated. We will of course stop all attempts to
post new material in English on those lists and hope that more
languages join the the list family (nettime-jp? nettime-fr?). For
more information, you can look at the rearranged zkp-homepage:
http://www.desk.nl/~nettime. 
 
- In the past we have sometimes been posting articles in German,
French or Spanish. This is nice for the linguistic geniuses or
data dandies amongst us (or in ourselves). Some of us complained
about those postings (guess from what countries), for good
reasons, because it is indeed frustrating if you really want to
read something. Perhaps some of us could report about the efforts
to work with the translation programs. I have only heard that
correcting those automatic translations is a hell of a job. Is
the quality already satisfying enough? 
 
- To overcome the situation that translation is everyones own
business, it would be great if would could socialize this problem
and create a kind of 'virtual translation desk'. A place on the
Net where authors, translators and editors could meet. This could
even be a company with a strong component for mutual, non-profit
projects. Many people think that this allready exists, but this
is not the case. Yes, professional translators are there. They
work for big companies, like the simultaneous translators and
only big and expensive conferences can effort them. 
And there are the professionals doing literary translations. But
non of those are on the Net (why should they, anyway?). For
many-to-many languages translations we need the model of the
gift-economy (and some help of future bots). 
 
Anyone using this awfull phrase 'global communications' without 
mentioning the multi-lingual aspect of it, seems implausible for
me. Let's change this and put the translation on the agenda.
Seperated, bi-lingual systems, though, remind me of 'apartheid'.
The linguistic Islands on the Net should not become closed and
isolated universes. And our own cute basterdized Englishes
neither has a future. There will never be one planet, with one
people, speaking one language. 'Das Ganze ist immer das Unwahre'
and this specially counts for all dreams about English becoming
the one and only world language for the New Dark Age. 
Still many netizens unconciously do suggestions in the direction
of 'One language or no language.' (in parallel with the
eco-blackmail speech 'One planet or no planet'). The pretention
to go global can be a cheap escape not to be anymore confronted
with the stagnation and boredom of the local (and specially
national) levels. Working together on language solutions can be
one way to avoid this trap.
 
(edited by McKenzie Wark)