Episode: 709
Title: HPR0709: The Language Frontier Episode 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0709/hpr0709.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:17:56

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Episode three, an inefficient system.
Hi everyone, welcome to the language frontier.
What is it about languages that is so beautiful?
And what compels us to keep using an inherently inefficient medium as a communication vehicle?
Could it be necessity, but then why? Why an medium so inefficient?
Is it a function of the new millennium that language would just all of a sudden prove itself outdated,
in an emerging infrastructure that connects the six and a half billion human citizens of planet Earth?
We use language or languages because they are our only option.
William S. Burrows said that language is a virus.
That language has infected the entire human race and it does more harm than good.
That is, language came down from outer space and lifted the beings of this planet up to a higher level of existence.
And furthermore, that language spreads like a virus until it covers everything it touches.
That is, an idea will spread by way of language until it covers everything in its wake.
If there were no language barrier, what would the world sound like?
What kind of a richer existence would we humans enjoy by default alone?
What would science accomplish?
It takes an average of one month to curb language to translate the study.
It will study, it will translate into twelve different languages.
It has one year delay in the inception, the research, and the dissemination.
Delays in disseminating information.
That is an interesting point and timely when you think about distributing medical research,
for instance, all over the world within the medical community.
If you think about dissemination of medical knowledge all over the whole world,
it's one thing to just distribute the research and information among your colleagues.
If you're a doctor, you publish a paper, you let all your colleagues know about your discoveries.
But that's just within the university circuit of, say, the United States and Great Britain.
But getting it out to the far reaches of Asia, or even just to Germany, there's going to be a delay there.
When scientists and doctors cannot share their information for a year,
because of translation logistics, that affects all of us in terms of new developments in healthcare.
Not that I have health insurance or anything, but anyway, it might not seem like a big deal to you,
but if you're the one in a hospital bed waiting for a transplant or a medicine or some kind of discovery,
it's pretty damn important to you.
And it just seems like such a waste step. I mean, how hard can it be to just learn a scientific language for science?
Translation. It's a bitch.
You ever read a book that was written in a different language?
Translators notes are always included for a reason.
There are debates over which translation adheres closest to the author's original intention.
I'm going to read from the translator's notes of this Camille book here.
It's The Stranger by Albert Camille.
There's some irony in the fact that for 40 years, the only translation available to American audiences
should be Stuart Gilbert's fritanic rendering of the stranger.
This is the version I read. The version we all read as a schoolboy some 20 years ago.
And as all translators do, Gilbert gave the novel a consistency and voice all his own.
A certain paraphrastic earnestness might be a way of describing his effort to make the text more intelligible,
to help the English-speaking reader understand what Camille meant.
In addition to giving the text a more American quality,
I have also attempted to venture farther into the letter of Camille's novel to capture what he said and how he said it,
not what he meant.
In theory, the latter should take care of itself.
I've taken Marceau, the protagonist, at his word,
and to preserve the peculiarities of perception on Marceau,
it is by pursuing what is unconventional in Camille's writing that one approaches a degree of still startling originality
and that's by Matthew Ward, the translator.
And for the stylistic difference between part one and part two of this novel,
the translator of the first American version of the story reports that an impossible fidelity has been my purpose.
I mean, this guy's seriously taking this seriously.
In fact, the translator has a lot of power.
Choice of words can change the whole nature of a character.
Until this translation came out, the opening sentence of that English version read,
the curious feeling that a son has for his mother.
In this translation, that word has been changed to momo,
which is the French equipment for mommy,
which is in keeping with Camille's choice of words for that character and constitutes all of Marceau's sensibility.
For it to change the word to mother would be to change the nature of Marceau's curious feeling for her,
connotations of words too. That's powerful stuff.
Some words evoke heavy feelings or ideas when people hear them.
Negative or positive.
And that just enters another variable into the proposition of communicating effectively by virtue of language.
Translations are, well, anyone in the position of being multilingual will tell you
that a translation from a German book to English or Arabic to English,
it's like you're reading a different book.
And that's a work that has been translated for months,
laboriously looking for the right synonyms, like the Camille book here.
The same goes for films. So much is lost in a subtitling of a film.
Now considered, translators of the United Nations.
Those translators are doing that stuff on the fly and that actually affects our world.
Just like in the movies, they've got earphones and a microphone.
They're listening to what their person is saying and they're speaking it back out so that everyone can hear it.
And you can practically watch the nuance disappearing and being lost in the air out the window.
They're just not going to be getting the message that that person is intending. It's a given.
I don't really see how that's acceptable when you think about how that affects everyone quite literally on a global level.
Seems like it should be a requirement for everyone involved in that arena to speak some kind of common language so that they can understand each other.
It doesn't have to be English or French or something that someone can like to come up with a language.
Seems like that would be a bare minimum requirement to make a global policy decision.
In fact, you would think that a foreign language would be required in college for international relations majors.
But surprisingly enough, it's not.
But let's back up even further for a minute.
I mean, there are issues translating from one language to another. That's a given.
But how many of you watching have actually thought about how ineffectual language is itself to transmogrify your thoughts?
In just speech and words that in turn have to be deconstructed by the listener to be understood and grasped?
And how much of the meaning is lost among the way?
I'm going to read a little bit about this from the Cambridge Incyclopedia of Language Second Edition.
And we'll just explore briefly this type of thinking because some thought processes require language and some other types of thinking that we do absolutely does not.
The thinking which seems to involve language is reason thinking, which takes place as we work out problems, tell stories, plan strategies, and trips, and so on.
It has been called rational, directed, logical, or propositional thinking.
It involves elements that are both deductive and inductive. Language seems to be very important for this kind of thinking.
The formal properties of language such as word order and sentence sequencing constitute the medium in which our connected thoughts can be presented and organized.
The other kind of thinking does not require us to posit a relationship with language.
Most obviously, there is no suggestion that language is involved in our emotional response to the same object or event.
Such as when we react to a beautiful painting or an unpleasant incident.
We may use language to explain our reaction to others, but the emotion itself is beyond words.
Nor do people engaged in the creative arts find it essential to think using language.
Composers, for example, often report that they hear the music they wish to write.
Also, our everyday fantasies, daydreams, and other free associations can all proceed without language.
How many times have you felt at a loss for a word or even felt like making up a word?
Or just how words can diminish your experiences and feelings, hence the expressions the experience was beyond words or mere words could not describe what I was feeling.
That's just it. Their mere words, their just sounds and letters, and experience cannot be locked into those parameters.
And also, language is just so obviously limited in terms of anything new.
Those people who are unfortunate enough to witness, to be witness to Pompeii, had no word to describe the volcano that was destroying their city.
How many times have you been trying to explain something to someone it's taking you 30 minutes?
And then something happens that explains it all better than you could have ever explained it.
It's sort of like trying to describe a boulder about to fall off the side of a cliff.
I mean, you can describe how it will look and sound, but it's actually not going to hit home until the boulder starts rolling and in an instant they hear the rumble.
They see the dust cloud. There are many things like this that are bigger than life and just cannot be explained.
So what's the alternative? That's the question.
Now, what could happen if there was a universal speaking language, where people weren't losing a third of their meaning in the translation?
And even that group is an elite, those who are bilingual or have access to translators, most people are stuck in the world of one language.
To have luxury of a translator is huge. Only recently have translation services like Babelfish become available to the online community.
But everyone knows those are just jokes, really. They barely do the job. Those really just give you the gist.
And how many languages are we really talking about here, 7,000 languages on the planet?
Many people feel that ratio is a skew. Artists are responding to it in varying degrees. Babel, Rune, Borat, Lost in Translation, houses and fog. There are others.
What we're talking about is an unnecessary step. We already have the barrier between thought and speech.
Where so much is lost to that tenuous space between having an idea and putting that idea into words.
Not to mention 7,000 ways of speech than counting, because dialects are sprouting up every day. And then from those words to the person dear listening.
You're getting things through a medium that is subject to a lot of different things, none of which are the actual physical object.
Including what the listener is bringing to the interpretation of each individual word from their personal interpretation.
Well, that's just opening a whole cat of worms that exist deeper within this subject. People's interpretations of words and their individual experiences in dissociations and perceptions that they bring to the conversation table.
And it seems so simple on the surface, but when you start to dig around, it's surprising how ill-equipped people are to deal with the simple prospect of communicating with one another.
Many, many people are impoverished in their ability to express themselves. Hence, master of language or it will master you.
So what you're talking about is that everyone has already an added setback from thought to word that you were discussing straight off the bat.
And then you add to that the language barrier, 7,000 languages strong for the six and a half billion people on the planet.
Well, how does this break down? Chinese makes up 20% of today's communications at Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, English, and Bengali, and 45% of communications are accounted for.
Factoring that French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, and Russian and the percent rises to 75% in the last 25% lie the additional 6,000 languages.
Some of them only spoken by a few hundred people. Think about what languages you speak. Think about how many people you have access to based on these figures.
When I first came, I didn't speak lots of things. I didn't speak a little bit, but not too much.
But I hung around mostly with people that spoke my language. And I had to work in jazz. I worked really hard.
Because I paid very little because I didn't speak English. So I had to take the most jazz, the bosses and the supervisors.
And all of those and it was not easy to communicate with them because I always had to ask some person that was bilingual to help me communicate with them.
Other ones I couldn't help them. That's the way that I was.
Then later on, after six months, I learned English and then I started working with jazz and paid a little more.
Mainly the friendliness is the thing that makes a person communicate with each other.
The feelings that people have is what counts. A lot of times the language is very good to know.
The attitude of the people is what is very important.
It's actually surprising, for instance, that at the time when people started doing transcontinental telephone calls in a common language wasn't developed.
And that was a major opportunity. Esperanto had already been around since 1887 and first overseas calls weren't made until 1915.
So Esperanto had been in use for 25 years. Could it be as simple as people were just too lazy to attempt to build an infrastructure when these new inventions were being developed?
An infrastructure that would have made intercontinental communication more realistic?
Even some kind of rudimentary form of universal signals for use by operators and callers.
Then there wouldn't have been hang-ups. For example, sorry, this operator only speaks 12 languages. You're going to have to speak with a different operator.
This is lazy innovation. Someone went so far as to develop a way to contact people across the globe but stopped short at developing a way for them to actually communicate.
Now, with the integration of the iPod and iPhone, this could actually be one of those rare times when the world is ready for a new language as it was with transcontinental calls.
What's fascinating to me, and I think fascinating to the artist addressing this issue, is that this is a time in human history where we might be ready for real progress in communication.
The iPod is a turning point in communication as were transcontinental calls. This is not happening very often.
The first trans-Atlantic telephone calls opened the door for this but didn't do it. But now there's an opening again with this new emerging technology.
It's surprising. I can actually see how the universal language would have happened, but for some reason it didn't. What can I say?
Hell, the Greeks 3000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential?
The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this. Which is the most universal human characteristic? Fear or laziness?
Thanks for tuning in everyone. We'll look at this stuff again in a forthcoming episode and even at some new languages that allow us to communicate already that you might not have even thought of.
While the wives and kids alone, while the wives and kids alone, see them shopping at the mall where all their husband's so strong and tall.
Do they wonder when their dad is coming home?
What are all that helicopters for? What are all those helicopters for? I feel them overhead when I'm lying in my bed, must be at the flight off to one more.
While the wives looking so sad, while the wives looking so sad, she was just a child herself with a child beneath the bed as she stuck without the only friend she had.
What are all those helicopters for? What are all those helicopters for? They're all in my house where they just fly at once and wonder what they do when you want more.
While the wives and kids alone, see them shopping at the mall where all their husband's so strong and tall.
While the wives and kids alone, see them shopping at the mall where all their husband's so strong and tall.
Where are all those helicopters now? Where are all those helicopters now? How much do they cost? Are they worth more than their love? And is anyone ever when I want it?
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