The scalability of language and conversations

There is a game that every American kid plays in school at one point in time called telephone (also known as Chinese whispers). The idea is that all of the kids line up in a single-file line and then the person on one end of the line whispers a sentence to the person next to them like "Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, pass it on". What always happens though, is as the message is passed along it evolves and changes until the last person has something like "Apples are oh so good for you". (The game only works until the age when kids know what the experiment is and then they start intentionally changing it.)

Now, imagine you were playing the same game in a room where nobody spoke the same language. One of the biggest challenges for most marketers, journalists, advertisers and PR practitioners who leverage the Web to operate in the global economy is the scalability of language. This is something that I think about often as I blog, record videos and audio and I work day-to-day on global campaigns for major brands.

Machine translation is nearly useless. What I mean by machine translation is the use of automatic translation scripts (like Google Translate or Systran). This is almost 100% useless unless you only need a vague idea of what is being talked about. There is no substitute for localized translation by a native speaker.

The normal tactic for most marketers, when dealing with language, is to create multiple versions of content all translated into the local dialect under a global umbrella. This works well for written content (outside of having multiple copies of content), but you end up with divergent conversations even though the ideas overlap and each would benefit from the other's experience.

The limitations of video
One area that I feel the effects of more often than not is the limitation of video. When I create a video in English, I am almost entirely locked in to only reach English speakers. It doesn't do much good to Spanish speakers or German speakers, because so much of the value is in the spoken word.

At the same time, video is a superior tool to bridge distance and make people feel like they are together. It's also great for education purposes. So, how can we bridge the scalability of language as marketers, content creators and human beings?

The challenge of conversations
Another big challenge happens when organic customer conversations cross languages. Right now there is no real good way to combine conversations from language silos. Imagine the perspective we could have if people from around the world could have cross-language conversations. That would certainly be powerful.

Most social networks are separated as well where each language is kept separate from each other. Bi-lingual users have a very hard time crossing back and forth. The experience is certainly not fluid. Word of mouth suffers the same limitations.

Over the next couple of days I am going to feature a few of the ways that language is slowly and methodically starting to scale with content.

In the meantime, how do you deal with language? Do you ignore it for now or is it something that is always at the back of your mind? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Google, marketing, Matt Dickman, PR, social media, Techno//Marketer, conversations, language, social networks

Comments

[mvellandi]

I'm trilingual and must say that although I adore languages, especially English, there are many phrases that are culturally bound and cannot be translated without some serious human assistance to the computer. Sometimes it's metaphors and similes.
Other times, humor and irony are at play. Then there's slang and trend/fad language...
It's crazy, but fun

[Matt Dickman]

Mario -- You're so right about the cultural boundaries that some terms have. Slang and trendy language is even worse. Thanks for your multi-lingual perspective.

[Ryan Karpeles]

If we all just learned how to speak Elvish...

But seriously, I think this an interesting issue that will continue to pop up as the world gets smaller and smaller. If we wish to connect with those who speak different languages, we currently have very limited options... math, visual diagrams, pictures and (maybe) music.

Like you said, the translation apps aren't quite up to speed, and they also gloss over many of the nuances that Mario pointed out.

At the moment conversations lack almost any chance of scaling. As our technology improves in this area, hopefully dialog across lingual boundaries will start to fade away. But who knows how long that might take - 10 years? 20? 100?

[Neil Vineberg]

Matt,
For me, music is a universal language. A song, even with words, translates globally, and how many musical cultures live on your own iTunes? Mine has African, Brazilian, Western classical, blues, R&B, jazz, and what's cool is all the cultures seem to be mixed into one another. Language was no barrier to entry. Maybe there's a clue there?

Images also can be universal, like still prints and art. Then there's non-language dependent video. Nature, too. Grand Canyon at Dawn, Monument Valley, Sedona's Red Rocks, and Niagara Falls all speak with a universal language. Then the Zen of Meditation. Finally love itself.

I look forward to reading more.
Neil