diversity

On reading a poem about Melbourne, Unesco City of Literature

Posted by

0

Two days ago, my partner sent me the link to a poem by Koraly Dimitriadis, Greek-Australian writer and performer, called ‘Open Letter to Melbourne Unesco City of Literature‘. The poem throws flame at Melbourne literary institutions – festivals, magazines – denouncing their whiteness in direct, explicit ways – and expresses the rage of the poet for having to stay outside the door.

Oddly, this piece resonated very strongly with me. I wouldn’t have expected it to. I’ve been trained in French formalism, the raw emotional style jars with my classical taste, and I find its direct name-throwing discourteous. Yet I was very moved.

I’ve been invited to many of the forums and events Koraly denounces, disproving their exclusive anglo-ness, or non-queer friendliness. I never felt I was in as a ‘token foreigner’, and witnessed real commitment to diversity from the organisers, many of them women. Maybe I’m just nice and naïve – or maybe there was, indeed, genuine desire for more diversity.

Yet in all these instances, I also felt a great solitude, as one of the very few migrants, foreigners, non-native English speakers, among panelists and audience. I never quite know what these figures mean, but I read that in Greater Melbourne, 25 to 30% of people speak a language other than English at home. This is certainly not the soundscape I encountered at any literary forum in Melbourne. But then, literary forums are not home. Except if English is your native tongue, it will certainly feel closer.

I do notice a gap between a discourse putting forward cultural and linguistic diversity – aspirations to be some international city of literature, even – or in other circles, a part of Asia – and the domination of anglo-american authors and references in our literary life. It’s embarrassing, at a literary event, when you never heard of such American author, and the person you’re talking with has never heard of such Italian collective you love, or some Shanghai-based blogger. But it’s happened to me so much now, that I sometimes avoid talking about literature altogether – or when I feel provocative, I just say: ‘I don’t really read English-language books much’. It’s a great conversation killer.

Still, it’s a tough game: it’s hard enough to lead a reasonable conversation within one’s own tradition – trying to bridge aesthetic and ethical gaps may be beyond what audience or readership can accept. I’m not sure rage is the most appropriate way to deal with this, but I believe we should be very aware of issues Koraly raises. If I wasn’t invited, maybe I would feel that same rage. And as a semi-white writer myself – for better or worse, I felt good after reading this piece.

Space sharing, time sharing: future of work, or existing models?

Posted by

0

Our current (but changing) mindset is to think of work in the following way. Full-time work, dedicated work space, and regular daytime week hours are correlated. Work occurs Monday to Friday, 9-to-5, in a particular dedicated space and for a particular organisation. Anything  outside these spatial and temporal boundaries is either non-work or not-really-work.

We seem to be moving towards a model where work is more often part-time, with flexible hours, for multiple organisations, and occurring at different locations. However, this is by no means a new phenomenon. Let’s look at these very common professions – to quote a few:

  • Doctors and nurses may work more during the day, but 24 hour and week-end presence is required from some at least.
  • Teachers spend about one third of the time in front of a class, and two thirds preparing classes or correcting papers – which occurs in all sorts of settings, including offices, cafes, public transport or bed.
  • Cleaners typically work when others are not around, and pretty much everywhere.
  • Hospitality workers are flexible – a typical ‘daytime’ restaurant will open from 10h30am to 11pm – but start at 6 or 7am if they serve breakfast. 
  • Drivers – whether of trains, buses, trams, taxis, planes or trucks – work 5am to 12pm, and sometimes round the clock. A number of people in the transport industry will be around to support them.

When we think of new models for work – whether it’s part-time allocation, flexible work hours, or work outside the office – let’s not forget that these very common professions have been doing exactly that for years. These are by no means marginal phenomena, and maybe there’s something we can learn from them.

Please, feel free to share reflections here!

Second-tier languages on the web.

Posted by

3

I just finished reading the ‘Net Lang‘ UNESCO report on ‘the multilingual cyberspace’. I didn’t find the report overall earth shattering, but did note a few points of interest, which I’d like to share here.

The first thing I’d like to note is that nobody really seems to know what’s happening on the web, or be able to measure it. I posted charts from wikipedia in a previous post, and commented on the discrepancy between English language contents vs English speakers online. All authors agree that English content is disproportionately high. But the exact measure is unclear. In spite of various projects, there seems to be no clear figures about  language on the web. Given the abundance of contents, including huge quantities of dynamic contents (blogs, facebook pages, twitter…), it is, at present, impossible to give any clear calculations: lack of proportion does not help generate percentage points. This initial remark serves as a caveat for what follows.

The second point is something I already noted when reflecting on language policy within Australia: there is remarkably little talk of ‘second-tier’ languages, and how to strategically engage with them. In rough terms, the situation is as follows: there are about 6000 to 7000 languages spoken on the planet, but a small number of them dominate the offline world – and even more so the online world. Roughly speaking, on the internet, 1 language (English) accounts for about 50% of all contents, and about 60 to 70 account for over 90% of all contents. Many author defend ‘minority languages’ – those within the under-represented 10%. But no-one seems to really focus on the ‘second-tier’ dominant languages – Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, etc – which alternatively fall in with the rest of under-represented languages, or – more frequently – are bundled together with English among ‘privileged’ languages which do benefit from an established set of standards, and are recognised by multilingual browsers and translators.

These  ‘second-tier languages’ are precisely those I am most interested in. They represent about one third of all contents, and two thirds of all users. What will happen to that proportion in the close future? Are they going to challenge the dominance of English? Chinese, particularly, but also Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic… Is the web gearing towards an equal proportion of English and Chinese? Or is English going to remain the dominant form, a necessary koine for web communication?

While I prepare further reflections about machine-assisted language learning vs automatic translation, and scenarios for the future of digital multilingualism, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – and link to any material on that question!

First and second languages on the net

Posted by

15

What language is the net written in? A wikipedia page on the question proposes the following charts. These charts are based on estimates as of May 2011, themselves not fully representative of the full net content – but let’s have a look at them all the same.

This one represents the languages used for the contents of the web:

Screen Shot 2013-01-31 at 3.02.34 PM

This one represents the language spoken by web users

Screen Shot 2013-01-31 at 3.02.51 PM

Did you notice the discrepancy? English accounts for 57% of all contents – but only 27% of users. And in parallel, Chinese (I suppose this is Mandarin) accounts for 25% of users, but only 5% of contents.

Traditionally, English has been the web’s lingua franca. But non-English contents has grown at a rate much higher than English contents. And it looks like the future of the web will be multilingual. Also, let’s not forget – if 55% of the web is written in English, 45% isn’t, and that 45% represents a considerable amount of contents.

I think the early days of the internet brought with them some utopian vision of a unified world – where everyone would communicate with everyone in the ‘global village’. For non-native speakers of English – like myself – this meant an added burden of study: the doors to the global village were opened only to fluent English speakers. Others remained at the margin.

Now, it looks like more diverse communities are blossoming. But how do these ‘web-linguistic-subcultures’ communicate? Are they equivalent in shape to the ‘global’ English-speaking community, simply different in size? Or is there a qualitative difference between them? Are they radically fragmented, provincial, each individually relating to the core ‘English’ web, but not to each other?

In particular, what is the situation for ‘second-tier’ web languages – German, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, French? Debates about multilingualism often seem to jump directly to forgotten rare dialects, omitting to think – more cynically perhaps – about these second tier languages big enough to not be just lumped in an ‘other’ cloud, but not yet big enough to compete with dominant English. Partly, the Marco Polo Project was born of a felt need to create bridges between the Chinese and English webs – the first two languages by users, if not contents. But is there such a need?

And finally, what does it mean that – still – a significant part of internet users are communicating in their second language – while others use their first? Does that create an implicit hierarchy – some sort of post-colonial position of dominance to native English speakers, who can put aside the burden of learning a foreign language, and still access the world? Or does it create a risk for ‘English’, which sees itself more and more invaded by non-native speakers, to the risk of possible depletion – reducing to some watered down ‘globish’?

At the start of this Education and Digital Culture MOOC, these are the questions I’m asking myself – and which I’d like to reflect on further over the next few weeks. I’ve just downloaded a big report by ‘Net.Lang: “Towards the multilingual Cyberspace“, and will post further reflections here. Meanwhile, all comments are very welcome!

Career paths

Posted by

0

I never believed in career; now my belief is put to the test.

Until the end of June, I had a great part-time job with the Victorian government. I worked in evaluation and strategy, a stimulating role, and a chance to learn about governance and management. Working for the government aligned with my commitment to the common good. And the conditions of the job – three days a week, with flexible working hours, and a very short commute home – gave me the necessary free time to set up Marco Polo Project in the first place.

This job has now ended. The government decided to cut down 10% of their staff. I was on a fixed-term contract – usual status for recent arrivals. And although I was part of a winning team for last year’s innovation challenge, got in an Asia-leadership program, and can speak Chinese, my contract was not renewed. It seems either the Baillieu government does not actually consider Asian engagement a priority, or there’s a flaw somewhere in their HR system.

In the short term, this leaves me with a problem to solve. I need income. I can’t work full-time and run the Marco Polo Project. And I don’t have much time to filter and apply for jobs.

I therefore started wondering, is there any support group, or official policy, for people like me, to help them find suitable jobs? Melbourne is a creative, innovative city. This is because it has large numbers of artists and social entrepreneurs – many of which work part-time at various jobs. Our activities, although they do not have a direct dollar value, contribute to the general well-being, are a serious argument for tourism, and contribute to talented executives, academics and professionals choosing to settle in Melbourne. We’re contributing significantly to the community, we’ve got skills and we’re happy to work. But we don’t have time to look, and we need flexibility. Would any firm develop an ‘easy job’ sponsorship – where instead of giving a novelist a grant, you give them a front-desk reception job, and access to the building’s rooms after hours? Or is there any business out there who would like to support dialogue and understanding with China, and help the goal by giving me some part-time position?

The voice of the writer

Posted by

0

One question has been bugging me a lot lately, around the Marco Polo Project. A core, central, excruciating business question. Why would anyone actually  come to our website? I’ve had  lots of tactical answers so far, and they were good enough: people will come if we advertise properly and if we build strong networks, and they will stay if our website looks good, if it’s quick and efficient. This was supported by all sorts of documents, of how China’s definitely super-hot, and there’s a shortage of Chinese teachers, and online learning is the new frontier.

But that doesn’t address the core, hard question: why would anyone spend time on the Marco Polo Project, rather than reading blogs about China written in English, translating articles for wikipedia, or doing a language exchange on qq?

The only good answer I can give to that is: people will come to us if they’re  looking for the voice of original Chinese writers.

It sounds like a paradox, because one potential flaw in our model is that we’ll be relying on the work of amateurs for our translations – with potential loss of accurracy, and problems of quality control. And yet, I believe that we are the only translation and media platform that, from its conception and structure, really focuses on Chinese writing – in other words, on text construction, choice of words and point of view, rather than news and information.

Accordingly, once our platform is up, our work should be to filter, tag and bring up the best writing from the Chinese web, and build a strong editorial team with taste and intuition.

I believe that ‘information’ is not all that people are after, that the way things are said actually matters. I believe it is worthwhile to listen to Chinese voices, and follow the way they build an argument, or what steps they take when telling a story. I believe that even an amateur translation will carry most of that across. AndI believe that making efforts to translate not only ‘contents’ but an individual voice is the best exercise to build on your language skills.

At least that’s the bet I’m making, and that there’s a public for it.

Multicultural story-sharing

Posted by

0

At an amazing post-festival drink party with the Emerging Writers Festival people, while discussing straightmenkissing.com and Melbourne storytelling projects, I had an idea that could feed into the Marco Polo Project. Why not create a platform where Chinese speakers (and maybe Japanese, Korean, and Spanish speakers too) could share their experience of Melbourne as a place where they lived as international students.

I spoke with a guy there who works at Melbourne Uni, and said ‘these international students, they come here, but they stay together, they don’t really meet the locals, they might as well stay home.” I said,” Not so: they do meet people they would never meet home. People from Beijing meet people from Shanghai, and Chongqing, and Tokyo. How would they meet them, at home? It’s like the Erasmus yer for Europeans, you meet other Europeans, often some from your home country; and it’s extremely formative – even if it’s not a proper encounter with the country you live in.

So, yes, why not provide a platform where these international students could tell the stories of their time in Melbourne – and, maybe, share it with locals (or we could translate them, and spy on them); like Americans tell of their time in Paris. Melbourne as a playground for cosmopolitasians – why not?