On May 12, 2008, at 6:32 PM, ss wrote:
May I point out that you have contradicted yourself?
If 50% of people in the world speak Chinese, how does one reach the
conclusion
that more than 50% of all knowledge exists in English?
One could easily conclude this depending on how one defines
"knowledge" for the sake of this analysis. For example, scientific,
technical, and medical publications are overwhelmingly English, even
from publishers in non-English countries with no significant native
English reach. I can easily imagine that some kinds of prattle in
some languages easily exceed English by volume, but that is only
slightly related to the total value of the content in the language. A
large population of a language's speakers does not imply knowledge,
but the economic product of said people does.
1) You are making this assumption as an English speaker who does not
really
know how much knowledge is locked up in French, German, Russian,
Mandarin,
Sanskrit, Tamil or Arabic for that matter.
See above. Most scientific, medical, and technical publications are
published in not more than four languages (Chinese being the sole non-
European language), and the majority of content is only published in
English. The number of languages of publication for this type of
knowledge have been dwindling very rapidly, and most such publishers
have plans to publish exclusively in English within the next ten
years. Ironically, most of these publishers are not based in English-
speaking countries.
We may not be able to quantify how much knowledge is locked up in a
language, but we can pretty easily quantify how much knowledge is
published in a language which is a fine proxy.
2) The reason why a lot of knowledge exists in a particular language
such as
English is precisely because English speakers have taken the trouble
to learn
non English languages and have translated non English works into
English.
How much knowledge has really been translated into English in the last
few decades? I would make the observation that for many types of
publication in most countries manuscripts are required to be submitted
in English, even if the author's native language will be a translation
target. More than a few authors have had the misfortune of having
their works translated into their native language from English
manuscripts by translation services.
The assumption that English has all it takes to survive forever is
comforting,
but might not be true.
It might not be true, but there is a strong economic pressure to
converge on a single set of standards, whether it is SI metric units
or English language. The purveyors of many kinds of knowledge have
already chosen their one language, English, out of the around twenty
that were routinely supported a few decades ago. Translation is no
longer economical, as both the cost overhead and latency are too high
to be viable in modern markets. Back when the state-of-the-art
knowledge did not change much over intervals of several years it was
plausible, but we work on much shorter timeframes now for most things.
Cheers,
J. Andrew Rogers
