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.
