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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Translating the Commons: Negotiating Openness and Difference
Chris Salzberg (Japan) · Jul 26th, 2008 2:32 am · 20 votes · 1 comment
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Open content, according to the largest open content project Wikipedia, describes "any kind of creative work published in a format that explicitly allows copying and modifying," by anyone and not just by a single organization or individual. With the explosive growth in open content over recent years, organizations such as Creative Commons have invested a great deal of energy in "cultivating the commons" – i.e. in establishing a common legal framework for expressing the freedom to remix. Described by Lawrence Lessig as the "essence of what it is to be human," this freedom to remix is at the very heart of what open content is all about [1].
What happens, however, when information is published in a format which, while "open" in a technological sense, is "closed" in a linguistic one?
This is the situation faced by a majority of the world's inhabitants, for whom Internet society – and the bulk of open content with it – remains linguistically out of reach. Locked up in terms and modes of communication that are foreign and unfamiliar, the discourse of open content and open culture can turn into something every bit as "closed" as the technological barriers to creativity it rallies against.
The problem, and it is not a new one, is that living languages – regardless of how many levels of mark-up may embed them – are human at their core. And humans, contrary to popular belief, do not speak in a machine-readable format. Just as culture and history are more than tags, and politics more than a vote button, language itself – the expression of these things, and much else besides – is more than grammar, syntax, and a bit of vocabulary.
Language is more, and it demands more. If legal and technological frameworks require a vision of what can bring us together, of what can unite us, then language demands an understanding of, and a respect for, what ultimately keeps us apart.
It demands, in other words, an appreciation of difference.
Difference and openness may appear at odds with each other, but they are in fact closely related. Tied together through a profession that dates back almost as far as language itself, these seemingly contradictory ideas find each other in the act of translation, a quintessentially human endeavor that has received, today and throughout its history, precious little credit for the advancements it has quietly made possible.
If, as Lessig puts it, humans engage through writing texts and remixing them, then societies engage through reading texts and translating them. At a global scale, culture is created, and has always been created, through the synergy of these processes and not through the exclusion of the former over the latter. To ignore translation in the transmission of culture – open or otherwise – is to subsume the world's diversity in a unilingual monoculture of protocols, statistics, and consumption.
Given this background, it is no small coincidence that the world's leading gathering of thinkers on open culture and open content will take place this summer in a country deeply influenced by – and shaped through – the process of translation.
Difficult as it may be for some to imagine, many of the base concepts typically taken for granted in the West, things like “society” and “individual”, “beauty” and even “existence”, as well as some of the most powerful political ideas, no less that of “freedom” itself, are actually recent imports into the Japanese language. Incorporated and transformed by generations of translators, it is no exaggeration to say that these words and the meanings they convey – so familiar in the language of “global communication” that they pass largely without comment – have guided Japan to becoming the place it is today [2].
Set in this country shaped by translation, there is an opportunity with this year's iSummit conference in Sapporo to mark a turning point in the movement of open content and open culture, to shift the terms of debate about “commons” and make it global in a truly inclusive sense. But to do so requires that there be a certain change of perspective, and to the open culture of the West – particularly that of a certain monolingual superpower – this change may appear as unfamiliar as open culture itself appears to those unversed in the world's leading lingua franca.
A walk to the local bookstore in Japan provides an indication of what this change entails. For its role in shaping modern Japanese society, translation has been accorded a status in this country unheard of the English-speaking West; translations and translators, as well as books about translation, and about difference – cultural and semantic, political and historic – feature front and central among paperbacks that line the shelves.
Japan is not alone, however, in recognizing the importance of translation. With the exception of those who happen to speak the global communication standard, the vast majority of the world's nations spend a substantial amount of time and effort transforming texts for local consumption. The flow of culture through such transformation serves, among other things, to mediate between opposing ideas and beliefs, to bridge conflicting perspectives as much as to highlight their differences.
Where open culture has lessons to learn from the translation of books is in the imbalance of this flow, and in the significance of this imbalance. A glance at the statistics gives an indication of the former: while half of all book translations published worldwide are translated from English, only 6% are translated into English [3]. What this means is that cultural exchange, at a global scale, is overwhelmingly lopsided, to the extreme that some have labeled it linguistically “imperialistic” [4].
The online commons in many ways already mirrors this imbalance. The dominant direction of linguistic flow on the Internet, both in terms of content itself and in terms of the tools that carry it, originates from English. Articles, documentation, interface strings, video subtitles – the lion's share of such content, increasingly an integral part of the global commons, is based on translations from a single source [5]. Without such translation, open culture would not be global to the degree it is today, and open content would not have the international reception it currently enjoys.
The stakes at issue in this relationship are greater than they may seem. In the last ten years, the Internet has transformed dramatically along linguistic lines; no longer a majority, it is only a matter of time, with the rapidly growing influx of Chinese and Spanish, before English users are unseated as the Internet's leading language demographic. As this happens, new users of the multilingual Internet will have less incentive to bend over backwards learning the foreign tongue of a language community that, by and large, has up to now overlooked their very existence [6].
Appealing to these new users means turning the tables on ourselves and realizing that "content", in and of itself, is not "open" if it speaks in symbols, values and references that are foreign. Such content becomes open, in contrast, to the degree that these foreign elements are anchored to familiar landmarks, refashioned to local styles, adapted to recognized meanings – in other words, until they are translated.
Open translation is a new expression, but it will be an increasingly important one [8]. It has to be. A global commons grounded in assumptions of a single linguistic "default" is open only in a very narrow sense, one that is increasingly at odds with the demographics of its users. To act as though languages do not exist – or, more commonly, to assume that language communities will simply "pass on the message" – is a privilege that only a small group, the linguistic elite of today's technological Tower of Babel, can afford to enjoy.
If open is to truly be open, however – comprehensible, meaningful, inclusive – then languages must exist. And if language exists, then so too does difference. A fact of life for most of the world, it is only when ignored that this difference – and with it, the voices of the future commons creators – comes into conflict with open culture. And it is this conflict, as much as any technological barrier, that threatens the opportunities for sharing and creativity that the global commons, and the community it represents, promises to make possible.
Notes
- Lawrence Lessig, The Vision for the Creative Commons: What are We and Where are We Headed? Free Culture, in Open Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, Brian Fitzgerald, ed., Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007. (link)
- See Akira Yanabu, Modernization of Japanese Language, Iwanami Shoten, 1982. (English translation here.)
- See the About page at Words Without Borders.
- See e.g. Robert Phillipson, English in the New World Order: Variations on a Theme of Linguistic Imperialism and "World" English, in Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus on English, Thomas Ricento, ed., Impact: studies in language and society, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000.
- See John Paolillo, Language Diversity on the Internet, in Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 2005. (link)
- There is evidence that this is already happening: "A few years ago, it was reasonably common for people in the developing world to blog in English because they had to assume their audience was an international one. But as more people come online, more people in developing nations are speaking to their friends and countrymen, and they’re often speaking in their mother tongues. These conversations aren’t for your benefit - you’d need more than translation to participate. You’d need context, explanations of what the conversation is about… and you’d need an invitation to participate in the dialog, a reason for your voice to be added to the debate." Ethan Zuckerman, Le Monde Parle. Écoutez-vous?, March 5, 2007.
- The first Open Translation conference was held in Zagreb, Croatia in late November, 2007. See Voices from Open Translation Tools 2007. (link).
tags: tokyo japan culture translation open-content language japan japanese isummit
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The message here - that translation is a crucial concern regarding the global commons - is right on target. The specifics regarding exactly how this issue is understood, and solved, are less clear. I can offer a perspective specific to the open education movement.
The core promise of open education is that relevant educational opportunities should be available for anyone, anywhere, at any time. This vision obviously fits nicely with the capacities of the internet, but this vision is not limited to technologically enabled education.... indeed, to meet the first premise (opportunities for everyone), the majority of the realization of open education will necessarily have to be offline.
But the more interesting part of the premise is the word "relevant". Presumably educational resources are only relevant if they can be understood and used effectively, meaning they must be translated as needed and also culturally relevant, which probably goes beyond translation. So, as Chris suggests, we either need to empower a global community to create resources that are birthed in the language and culture that is most relevant to the users at hand, or we need an open translation infrastructure that allows works to move freely from place to place while evolving to meet certain linguistic and cultural needs. In open education, we are advocating for both. Most importantly, we are advocating for people to feel empowered to share their local expertise, and to adapt the works of others according to the specific needs that they are best suited to understand. In order for all of this work openly and effectively, we need for our open educational resources (OER) to be free of restrictions on user behavior regarding derivative works. We advocate for people to create OER using CC BY (attribution only) and to avoid restrictive and non-interoperable terms like SA (share-alike), NC (non-commercial), and obviously ND (no derivatives, which outlaws translation). Lack of constraints means that the materials can adapt to nearly any circumstance, and experimentation regarding the form of an open translation commons is welcome and encouraged.
In education, this same logic is being applied for "translation" of OER to accommodate people with disabilities, to meet different jurisdiction requirements regarding formal educational standards, and so on. The expertise to do all of these things resides in different people, so we just need to make sure that each person is unencumbered by restrictions regarding how they might want to adapt any given work. Note that this vision of a global commons does not imply that we all adhere to a single "global" standard, at least beyond the license chosen. Nor does it imply that any single creator must pay attention to the global audience when crafting their works. Instead, it suggests that the global commons will be a massively heterogeneous corpus of materials, created and used by anyone in the world (ideally in the future with more proportional representation of the communities of the world), but in which any of the resources has the unfettered capacity to evolve, whether by humans or machines.
Ahrash Bissell · San Francisco (United States) · Jul 29th, 2008 11:57 am
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