Big Data for Small Languages

In his Tedx Talk, Phillip Parker talks about what he believes to be technology’s latest revolutionary frontier: Big Data. One of the barriers to true education in developing countries that I hadn’t previously considered is that of language. We always talk about language barriers in the context of us not understanding the third world, but what if we flipped the tables and looked at things from their perspective? As difficult as it is for us to communicate with them in their language, it is arguably even harder for them to understand us in ours. Add to that, given the abundance of knowledge and data that we have in the English language, it’s important to consider the amount of information that is available but inaccessible to these underserved parts of the world.

In the words of Parker, this is the problem: “There’s a world of information out there… and maybe the person who can most benefit from this information is on the other side of the world. They don’t read academic journals, they don’t speak English, and they are in a world that has been undeserved because of their small languages.”

This couldn’t be truer! It is a market failure that the demand for this information from third world countries is unmet, simply because, economically, it is not a profitable venture for institutions with this information to translate academic journals, articles, etc. into these small languages for these small populations. These populations, therefore, are not supplied with the information that could be highly beneficial to them – be it simple things like weather forecast information that could help with agricultural endeavors, or school textbooks to educate and motivate current and potential students.

On our side of the world, we have the technology to make this information accessible to them, to translate these different texts into small languages. Parker talks about EVE—a collection of programs, which is an economically viable entity—which takes formulaic English and makes translations on autopilot. The keyword here is “economically viable”; our technology makes it affordable to really spread knowledge and data to largely rural non-English-speaking populations.

If this is one of the barriers to true and necessary information transfer, and taken more broadly, a barrier to equality and social justice, we need to start considering this language problem as one that we can solve, not by imposing our own English language on these small-language-speakers, but by directly providing information in their own small languages.