GLOBALIZATION
Language and Community
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By Curt Beckmann
Co-Founder
Appropedia
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Language is part of the connective tissue that holds communities together. Appropedia.org has a community of thousands of users. For historical reasons, most of our content is still in English. As such, most of our community is English-literate (though we have viewers in every country except North Korea). However, because we ultimately seek to reach everyone, we actively work with multilingual users to expand our articles and community to include several other languages, most recently
Kiswahili.
This newsletter is also in English. The Frost & Sullivan community is global, and English is the
“lingua franca” of the modern era, and the
largest “world language” spoken by more than a quarter of the world’s population. Though much of the F&S community is multilingual, a common language is a matter of convenience, and English is the obvious choice. For a newsletter with a subscription audience, this makes sense. But what about other content, like users’ guides, legalese, press releases, etc? English is clearly the best single language, right?
Maybe “which single language should we use?” is the wrong question. After all, if 25 percent of the world can speak English, then choosing English means excluding 75 percent of humanity from the dialog. But, choosing any other language would mean excluding even more. Not only that, English is the most widely taught foreign language. Though it’s a defensible choice, it doesn’t address the issue of a potentially off-target question. Consider that the dominance of English has led to the development in the early 1990’s of the
theory of linguistic imperialism, which suggests that a dominant culture can wield power by imposing their language on others, possibly offending a target market. But a single language is more efficient, and in business we’re all about efficiency, right? If we accept that efficiency is the goal, then we’ll just need to take our lumps.
Is efficiency the goal? Or is it the means to an end, such as cost reduction? If, instead, our focus moves toward growing market share, we may need to shift gears. Suddenly we’re optimizing for inclusion, participation and relationships. So do we then trade efficiency for growth? What to do?
These days we can hardly discuss the notions of community and globalization without including the internet in our conversation. Looking at some trends, we see that the online dominance of English is shifting, with
much higher growth of non-English usage. Predictable enough as the non-English world is rapidly coming online. Users are leapfrogging past PCs and crowded, pricy internet cafes, using phones for internet access instead. No surprise the number of users is exploding. And the pace is likely to accelerate as big players make overtures that cause quantum leaps in bandwidth and usage, exemplified by the
Google Global Cache efforts in Africa that quadruple local usage overnight.
How does this play into the question of language and community? First, the shrinking digital divide helps to accelerate another collection of technology advances. Not only is internet access becoming ubiquitous, but now you can find many
machine translation tools with remarkable quality, and many are free to use online. Users can often simply click their browser’s tool bar to view a website in their preferred language. Even if the translation is imperfect, it’s much easier than reading a semi-familiar language that one may not fully understand anyway.
Secondly, as
recent events have dramatically shown, non-English populations are flocking to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. New non-English users of the internet come online now with an expectation of community. If they can’t completely trust their understanding of some content, they can check in with their community, share some links, and get a crowd-based perception of whatever the topic at hand. They get more than a translation of the content; they get opinions on the validity of the content, and links to relevant native language content, which might be your competitors’.
Take the Internet’s increasing reach and more affordable access, mix in today’s community-orientation, then combine them both with the world’s 75 percent English non-fluency and you have the ingredients for a rapid and intense rebalancing of market dynamics reminiscent of, but different from, other dramatic tipping points.
As with any radically new situation, there are opportunities and threats. The complex opportunity available to us is that we can expand beyond our English-only orientation, develop multi-language skills in our teams and communities, and leverage those free online tools to accelerate the translation of the massive amount of content we have. We might build user communities in local languages, and seek (and possibly reward) their help with translations and feedback on translations. Along the way, we just might learn what aspects of our products and services are especially valued by each language community. Certainly all this multilingual effort will have costs, reducing the efficiency of our documentation cost center. But the ability to leverage community loyalty and viral spread of market awareness can bring some significant efficiencies to customer acquisition.
On the flip side, while we’re focused on our language efficiency, the threat is that our global rival or some local up-and-comer will be using native language outreach to build a community that will exploit any misperceptions in our English-language content. In short, our opportunity is also the other guy’s opportunity.
So consider investing in non-English languages and communities. And if you’d like to practice your Kiswahili (or other non-English languages), Appropedia would welcome your contributions!
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GIL 2011: Europe
London, United Kingdom
May 17-18, 2011
GIL 2011: Japan
Tokyo, Japan
July 12, 2011
GIL 2011: Korea
Seoul, Korea
July 14, 2011
GIL 2011: Africa
Cape Town, Africa
August 25, 2011
GIL 2011: Silicon Valley
San Jose, CA
September 11-14, 2011
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