[lbo-talk] Protection of Chinese language urged

suzume at mx82.tiki.ne.jp suzume at mx82.tiki.ne.jp
Thu Jun 3 02:23:48 PDT 2004



> And if a Czech person (businessman/woman or not), who is not
> necessarily one of the "elite," needs to communicate with a Chinese
> person, what language will they use? Just finding Czech-Chinese
> translators would be difficult enough. Often enough, relay
> translations need to be used. You could say that such cases are rare,
> but if you believe that it is a good thing for people to communicate
> at the grass roots across borders all over the world, they ought to
> become less rare. You say that activism should be local, but is there
> no place at all for actions that are coordinated world-wide?

if you are interested in translating/interpreting at the anti-globalization coordination level maybe you should check babel.org. they have been in charge of most of the interpreting going on since the first european social forum. and you can sure find the weirdest language pairs in their team. with sometimes intermediate languages if the pairs are not present (chinese-french/french-czech). etc. there is a need to think anti-globalization action outside english language. and this is happening.


> Also, AFAIK, English is still the principal language of aviation, and
> much of the Internet/computer industry, among others. You could say
> that these are "elites" (i.e., small percentages of the world's
> population) but they play rather crucial roles in tying the world
> together.

you are not talking "language" per se here. only code. just like the language for postal affairs is french. i doubt post office heads anywhere in the world master french.

jc helary

ps: but your point is _not_ absolutely invalid. in fact i work as a translator/interpreter for a japanese company who had to sign a contract with french partners. the contracts were written in french and english (???). it only occurred to them later on that they should have requested a japanese version (after i made them realize that there were discrepancies between the two versions...)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list