The English language owes its centuries of global dominance to the fact that it is the principal spoken language, if not always the official one, of some of the world’s most powerful nations—namely the US and the UK. English is a major lingua franca for the world, a language people who don’t share a first language can reliable fall back on. But this is changing.
China’s status as an economic superpower presents a challenge to this dominance. To do business internationally, play the latest video games, or keep up with trends in popular music, English knowledge is still the surest bet. But language as we know it is on the move. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say there are more people in China with English as a second language than there are Americans who speak it as their first.
And while you are likely reading this blog in English, with a couple of mouse clicks you can easily “translate it” into German, Japanese and a number of other languages. Computer translation and voice-recognition technology allow a person to speak their own language and hear what their interlocutor is saying in real time.
Computer translation is in part why the days of English as the world’s principal spoken language are numbered. But translation technology is not completely reliable yet.
In California, scientists for Gridspace are developing translation and voice-recognition technology that’s so good that you can’t recognize whether you’re talking to a human or a computer. But there will always be a need for translators to keep an eye on what the computers are doing.
Computers can’t capture feeling, emphasis and clear meaning. To be certain your words are translated correctly, you still need a human translation team to ensure these important elements of communication are captured.
And the concept of “standard” English language is being challenged with vernacular languages.
In India alone, you can find “Hinglish” (Hindi-English), “Benglish” (Bengali-English) and “Tanglish” (Tamil-English).
The same thing is happening among Hispanic-American communities in the United States; English combines with variants of Spanish as spoken across Central and South America to create vernacular “Spanglish.” Language is more than a means of communication. It is also an expression of identity, telling us something about a person’s sense of who they are. “Spanglish” may not be a target language for a translation project, but for a translator or interpreter — human or computer — working in Spanish or English, it’s essential to understand it. And for the moment, in that realm, a human being still beats a computer every time.
TrueLanguage, an ISO-Certified business translation agency specializing in business translation, technical, document, legal, localization translation services and more are experts at ensuring accurate localized translations that accomplish their intended goal.
