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The Importance of Translating the Foreign Language Press Into EnglishOur own daily lives are imaginary. The rest of the world more so. I read The New York Times, The Washington Post, and wire stories off of Yahoo News. These three sources circumscribe my vision of the world. They are the forms of my perception. How unfortunate that minds that construct these sources are so few, and so limited. As of May 2005 there were 52,920 reporters and correspondents in the United States. If the ratio of international reporters to total reporters is anything close to the ratio of international articles to total articles in today's New York Times (highly unlikely, given the unusually broad international coverage in the times -- the ratio is 25:204 = 12.3%), then there are about 6,500 international reporters and correspondents employed in the United States. If we double that to make sure we count all the non United Statesean English-speaking international reporters and correspondents, we see that our rather liberal estimate of total English language international news reporters is 13,000. This might seem like a lot. But consider that this is .0002% of world population, one hundreth of the percentage of United Stateseans who report on the United States (.02%). And consider that the total number of non United Statesean journalists is at least ten times as large as the number of English language international correspondents. A relatively small number of English language international journalists alone accounts for the entire amount of international information that reaches us, despite the vastly larger and richer pool of foreign language reporting available to us on the internet if only we could decipher it. Instead of having access to that information, we are confined to twenty five articles a day in The New York Times, one today on Russia, one today on China, written by people who grew up in English speaking countries, see things in English speaking ways, and likely could not pass a high school literature exam in the native language of the countries on which they report. They (along with other elements of our culture in a less immediate way) are largely responsible for the structure of our dreams about the rest of the world. We are tantalizingly close to being able to explode the limits of this network by translating the foreign language press into English. There are enough internet connected English language polyglots to translate the world's major newspapers into English on a daily volunteer basis. If we can develop a culture of translation for the public good, English speakers will have access to the world's news as generated by the world's reporters -- not the international press of a few nations. The result will be unprecedented access to information from around the world -- information so rich that it cannot be shaped by a single government, a single set of orthodox prejudices, a single institutional mind, or indeed, a single mother tongue. The world will still be imagined, but our dreams will be vastly richer. Authored by admin on 2006-03-25 22:43 -0500 ( categories: TranslationBlog )
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