nettime: Language? No Problem.

[Geert Lovink <geert {AT} xs4all.nl>]

Language? No Problem.
By Geert Lovink

McKenzie Wark's brilliant piece on the ever changing role of 
the English language in the age of the Net was being posted in 
the dark days before Christmas of 1996. But then people rushed 
to do the shopping, and gathered with friends and family. In 
most of Europe it started to freeze and snow. Life slowed down 
and so did nettime too, at least for some days. I and many 
others might have forgotten the computer for a while, but the 
'language problem' remained. Have you also tried to discuss 
recipes with friends, feeling socially disabled because you never 
learned the English names for all those kitchen garnishes, 
deluxe herbs and flamboyant birds? For gourmets, language 
can be a true obstacle in the enjoyment of the self-made haute 
cuisine. The careful pronunciation of the names is a crucial part 
of the dining pleasure. Naming is the social counterpart of 
tasting and a failed attempt to find the precise name of the 
ambitious appetiser can easily temper the mood.

McKenzie Wark has introduced the term 'Euro-English', being 
one of the many 'Englishes' currently spoken and written. It's a 
funny term, only an outsider (from Australia, in this case) could 
come up with it. Of course, it does not exist and Wark should 
have used the term in the plural, 'Euro-englishes'. The term is 
also highly political. If you put it in the perspective of current 
Euro-politics in Great Britain. Is the UK part of Europe, and if 
so, is their rich collection of 'Englishes' (Irish, Scottish etc.) then 
part of the bigger family of Euro-english 'dialects'? That would 
be a truly radical, utopian European perspective. Or is 'Euro-
English' perhaps the 20th century Latin spoken on 'the 
continent'?

Continentals can only hear accents, like the extraordinary 
French-english, the deep, slow Russian-english or the smooth, 
almost British accent of the Scandinavians. It seems hard to 
hear and admit one's own version. One friend of mine speaks 
English with a heavy Cockney accent (not the Dutch one) and I 
never dared ask him why this was the case. Should he be 
disciplined and pretend to speak like they do on BBC-World 
Service? I don't think so. What is right and wrong in those 
cases? Should he speak Dutch-english, like most of us? 
Switching to other Englishes is a strange thing to do, but 
sometimes necessary. If you want to communicate successfully 
in Japan you have to adjust your English, speak slowly and 
constantly check if your message gets through. Mimicking 
Japlish is a stupid thing to do, but you have to come near to that 
if you want to achieve anything.

BBC World Service is my point of reference, I must admit. The 
BBC seems to be the only stable factor in my life. It's always 
there, even more so than the Internet. In bed, I am listening 
carefully to the way they are building sentences, and guess the 
meaning of the countless words with which I am not familiar. A 
couple of years ago they started to broadcast 'Europe Today' 
where you can hear all the variations of 'Euro-english', even 
from the moderator. Sometimes it's amusing, but most of the 
time it is just informative, like any other good radio program. 
Would that be the 'Euro-english' McKenzie speaks about, 
beyond all accents and apparent mistakes, a still not yet 
conscious 'Gesamtsprachwerk'?

According to McKenzie, within this 'bastard language' one can 
'sometimes see the shadows of another way of thinking.' This 
might be true. We all agree that we should not be annoyed by 
mistakes, but instead look for the new forms of English that the 
Net is now generating. But for me, most of these shadows are 
like the shadows in Plato's cave story. They are weak, distorted 
references to a point somebody is desperately trying to make. 
We will never know whether the 'charming' and 'strange' 
outcomes are intentional, or not. Non-native English writers 
(not sanctioned by editors) might have more freedom to play 
with the language. 

Finding the right expression even makes more fun, at least for 
me. At this moment, I am writing three times as slow as I 
would do in Dutch or German. Not having dictionaries here, 
nor the sophisticated software to do spell checking, one feels 
that the libidinous streams are getting interrupted here and 
there. On-line text is full of those holes. At sudden moments, I 
feel the language barrier rising up and I am not anymore able 
to express myself. This is a violent, bodily experience, a very 
frustrating one that Wark is perhaps not aware of. He could 
trace those holes and ruptures later, in the text. But then again 
we move on and the desire to communicate removes the 
temporary obstacles.

How should the Euro-english e-texts be edited? At least they 
should go through a spell-checker. Obvious grammar mistakes 
should be taken out, at they should not be rewritten be a naive 
English or American editor. If we are in favour of 'language 
diversification', this should also be implemented on the level of 
the printed word. 'Euro-englishes' or 'Net-englishes' are very 
much alive, but do they need to be formalised or even codified? 
I don't care, to be honest. At the moment, I am more afraid of 
an anthropological approach, an exotic view on Net-english, 
that would like to document this odd language before it 
disappears again. But our way of expression is not cute (or 
rare). It is born out of a specific historical and technological 
circumstance: the Pax Americana, pop culture, global 
capitalism, Europe after 89 and the rise of the Internet. 

Globalisation will further unify the English languages and will 
treat local variations as minor, subcultural deviations. As long 
as they are alive, I don't see any problem, but should we 
transform these e-texts onto paper, only to show the outsiders 
that the Net is so different, so exciting? I would propose that 
the Book as a medium should not be used to make propaganda 
for the idea of 'hyper-text' or 'multi-media'. A discussion in a 
news group, on a list or just through personal e-mail exchange 
is nothing more than building a 'discourse' and not by 
definition a case for sophisticated graphic design to show all 
the (un)necessary cross references.

McKenzie Wark didn't want to speak about the right to express 
yourself in your own language. He agrees with this and I guess 
we all do. His native language is English, the lucky boy. But we 
do have to speak about it. Specially US-Americans do not want 
to be bothered about this topic. I haven't heard one cyber-
visionary ever mentioning the fact that the Net has to become 
multi-lingual if we ever want to reach Negroponte's famous 
'one billion users by the year 2000.' It is not in their interest to 
develop multi-lingual networks. OK, the marketing 
departments of the software houses do bring out versions in 
other languages. But this is only done for commercial reasons. 
And the Internet is not going to change so quickly. Still 90% of 
its users are living in the USA. Rebuilding Babylon within the 
Net will be primarily the task of the non-natives.

Of course, many of us have found our way in dealing with the 
dominance of the English language and think that newbies 
should do likewise. But this attitude seems shortsighted, even a 
bit cynical. If we want the Net to grow, to be open and 
democratic, to have its free, public access & content zones, than 
sooner or later we have to face the language problem. Until 
now, this has been merely one's own, private problem. It 
depends on your cultural background, education and 
commitment whether you are able and willing to communicate 
freely in English. This 'individual' quality goes together with 
the emphasis on the user-as-an-individual in the slogan of 
cyber-visionaries about the so-called 'many to many' 
communication. But the language from 'all 2 all' remains 
unmentioned.. 'Translation bots will solve that problem', the 
eternal optimist will tell you. Everything has been taken care of 
in the Fantasy World called Internet. But so far nothing has 
happened. At the moment, the amount of languages used in the 
Net is increasing rapidly. But they exist mainly separately. It 
can happen that a user in Japan or Spain will never (have to) 
leave his or her language sphere, or is not able to...

Languages are neither global nor local. Unlike the proclaimed 
qualities of the Net, they are bound to the nation state and its 
borders, or perhaps shared by several nations or spoken in a 
certain region, depending on the course history took in the 19th 
and 20th century. Countless small languages have disappeared 
in this process of nation building, migration and genocide. But 
in Europe we still have at least 20 or 30 of them and they are 
not likely to disappear. So communicating effectively within 
Europe through the Net will need a serious effort to build a 
'many to many' languages translation interface. A first step 
will be the implementation of unicode. Automatic translation 
programs will only then become more reliable. At this moment, 
French and Hungarian users, for example, seriously feel their 
language mutilated if they have to express themselves in ascci.

But let's not complain too much. Once I saw a small paper in a 
shopwindow in Amsterdam, saying 'English? No problem.' 
Rebuilding the Babel Tower together should be big fun and I 
am ready to spend a lot of time in the construction of a true 
multi-lingual Net. If you are also interested in this, I would like 
to do some practical proposals, for nettime and beyond...

* Not all of you might have noticed yet, but since November 
there is the nettime-nl list for 'dutch-only' texts. Soon the 
'German-only' nettime-d list will start as well. These parallel 
lists have been established because most us prefer to contribute 
in our own languages, specially in the heat of the debate. 
Sometimes there are local announcements or topics that need 
not to be translated into English. But we have also established 
these lists to put the translation issue on the agenda of nettime. 
The groups involved in the Dutch language list (with 150 
participants so far, all over the world!) intend to have some 
crucial contributions translated. We will of course stop all 
attempts to post new material in English on those lists and 
hope that more languages join the list family (nettime-jp? 
nettime-fr?). For more information, you can look at the 
rearranged zkp-homepage: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime.

* In the past we have sometimes been posting articles in 
German, French or Spanish. This is nice for the linguistic 
geniuses or data dandies amongst us (or ourselves). Some of us 
complained about those postings (guess from which countries), 
and for good reasons. It is indeed frustrating if you really want 
to read something. Perhaps some of us could report about the 
efforts to work with the translation programs. I have only 
heard that correcting those automatic translations is a hell of a 
job. Is the quality already satisfying enough?

* To overcome the situation that translation is everyone's own 
business, it would be great if we could socialise this problem 
and create a kind of 'virtual translation desk'. A place on the 
Net where authors, translators and editors could meet. This 
could even be a company with a strong component for mutual, 
non-profit projects. Many people think that this already exists, 
but this is not the case. Yes, professional translators are there. 
They work for big companies, like the simultaneous translators 
and only big and expensive conferences can effort them. And 
there are the professionals doing literary translations. But 
none of those are on the Net (why should they be?). For many-
to-many languages translations we need the model of the gift-
economy (and some help of future bots).

Anyone using this awful phrase 'global communications' 
without mentioning the multi-lingual aspect of it, seems 
implausible for me. Let's change this and put the translation on 
the agenda. Separated, bi-lingual systems, though, remind me 
of 'apartheid'. The linguistic Islands on the Net should not 
become closed and isolated universes. Our own cute 
bastardised Englishes has no future either. There will never be 
one planet, with one people, speaking one language. 'Das 
Ganze ist immer das Unwahre' and this specially counts for all 
dreams about English becoming the one and only world 
language for the New Dark Age. Still many netizens 
unconsciously do make suggestions in the direction of 'One 
language or no language.' (in parallel with the eco-blackmail 
speech 'One planet or no planet'). The pretension to go global 
can be a cheap escape not to be confronted anymore with the 
stagnation and boredom of the local (and specially national) 
levels. Working together on language solutions can be one way 
to avoid this trap.


***

Edited by McKenzie Wark

Editor's note: I was tempted to change 'flamboyant birds' in the 
first paragraph, by substituting in its place either 'exotic birds' 
or 'exotic fowl'. Flamboyant conotes showy and ornate -- its 
something one would say of a Las Vegas stage show. Exotic 
conotes rarity of occurance, as well as a less specific quality of 
unusual appearance. The justification for making the change 
would be that, as the editor, I am getting closer to the 'author's 
intention'. 

Its worth noting that 'bird' is also unusual in this context. Its 
used colloquially in Australia for a fowl meant for the table -- 
but I don't know if the expression is so used anywhere else. The 
OED is not enlightening on this subject. 'Fowl' is more correct, 
as the term fowl includes chicken, duck, geese, turkey and 
pheasant -- but not quail. But 'fowl' sounds no more natural. 
So while 'exotic fowl' seems to me to be both a correct 
expression and closest to the author's intention, it isn't 
something that looks quite natural -- hence I see no net gain in 
such a change.

I've left 'flamboyant birds' because, quite simply, there's 
nothing *gramatically* wrong with it. Its just an unusual 
usage. But this often happens in Euro-englishes: neglected 
areas of connotation for particular words get reactiviated, or 
extensions of connotation that don't yet quite exist in English-
english come into being. I think that is, historically, how 
English develops and changes -- just look at the remarkable 
richness thats crept into standard English-english through 
Irish-english. The example here may seem trivial -- all editing 
decisions are in the end trivial -- but I've expounded on it in 
order to show the kind of things that happen. 

The editorial solutions can head in one of two directions -- the 
instrumental or the formal. Geert's preference is instrumental 
-- the text is a means to an end. I'm inclined to a slightly more 
formal approach -- the surface of the text, as a distinct artefact 
in its own right, ought to be respected. 

I've made minor changes elsewhere in Geert's text. With one 
exception, sentences ending in prepositions have been recast. 
Possessive apostrophes have been added. Spelling is now more 
or less OED, except of couse the 'net-neologisms' that don't yet 
exist in any recognised dictionary. For example 'newbie'. Here 
one follows standard net-usage. If I was editing for printed 
publication, I'd be inclined to eliminate unnecessary net-speak 
-- but that's another issue.



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