i think i mentioned that in my previous post. there are more and more attempts at organizing a translinguistic effort by real but volunteer translators/interpreters. attac organizes one, babel is working on the social fora, there are groups in japan (tup for ex). and the solution is _not_ to get everything into english (since english would then have to be translated to any other language) but to translate it to the necessary target language. can your attempt at putting english at the center of all things efficient be a reflection of your monolingualism ? it seems to me the only people who think english is the basic world language are people who can only interact in english, from that follows that they only interact with english speaking locals and the conclusion is that the world speaks english...
> BTW, on your comment about the insularity of Russians: my son has just
> gone to the Czech Republic for a few months' stay, and is planning to
> get an English teaching job. I hope he finds that there are more
> Czechs interested in studying English than there are Russians
> interested in the outside world. (Perhaps Russians, like Americans,
> are so incurious about the outside world because both countries are
> very big and powerful, so they have been used to throwing their
> weights around without having to listen to other countries.)
hopefully czechs will learn english and other foreign languages that will obviously be more important to them if they want to have interaction with the populations the most likely to interact with them: german/russian tourists etc.
besides, as i mentioned in another mail, japan has been totally locked into a "english as the only possible foreign language" pattern for decades, english private teaching makes a huge lot of money but the result is that the average toefl level of japan is one of the lowest in the world. language is about necessity and obviously japanese people have absolutely no use of english language (not even to mention participation into an anti-globalization movement, they are not even aware one exists). to get a grasp of the reality of any "anti-global" thing they'd better start with a consciousness of "proximities" involving korean/chinese/russian language teaching but that, the gvt does not want it. because consciousness is political.
jc helary