ICANN Language Issues: Looking Down the Road

[Ayden Férdeline]

Thanks, Sam-

A very small correction, I believe that comment should be attributed to James Gannon, and not Michael Karanicolas.

Best wishes, Ayden

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, December 28, 2018 6:48 PM, Sam Lanfranco <lanfran at YORKU.CA> wrote:

> Michael Karanicolas has written: "I still believe that based on the ICANN meeting reports that language services are largely unused by the community and represent a huge overhead that we maintain purely to make ourselves look inclusive rather than providing a set of services that are actually used by the community".
>
> ICAHN is not alone with this dilemma, and I also feel that the expenditures mainly result in nice optics, while miss-allocating increasingly scarce ICANN resources. In other work that I do there are a variety of approaches to deal with multiple languages and equitable access by all. Here is an effort out of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to deal with the language issue at the text level. While this applies to the language of health science, there are possible lessons here with regard to ICANN's overall text strategy in a multilingual world. Admittedly we are much less down this road when it comes to simultaneous translation, but savings on any linguistic front free resources for the more difficult multilingual issues.
>
> Sam Lanfranco
>
> [image.png]
>
> Multilingual Science
>
> There are 6500 languages in the world, but only one language of science, English.
>
> The Library of Alexandria and Scientists in Developing countries aim to change this.
>
> "Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". (WHO)
>
> "الصحة هي حالة من الصحة البدنية والعقلية والاجتماعية الكاملة وليس مجرد غياب المرض أو العجز"(Arabic)
>
> Here is the WHO definition of Health in English and Arabic.  In the next 5 years, all journals can become multilingual.
>
> The Library of Alexandria is ushering in a new era of multilingual science.  Reducing the burden of translation, indeed promotes openness and scholarship.
>
> “We build too many walls and not enough bridges” (I. Newton)
>
> One of the major walls of science is one of different languages.
>
> We are writing to you with a simple idea. In 2006 Vint Cerf (the father of the Internet) told us about google translate, and we were excited to build a language translator into our Supercourse, and the Library of Alexandria.  However, much of it produced was Gibberish.  We tried again five years ago, and google translate captured the “gist” of the materials, however, it was still a bit messy.  In the past few months we have seen a major improvement in translation capabilities with a new approach called Google Neural Machine Translation which produced marked improvement in accuracy, and we feel is now acceptable to build multilingual science world wide.
>
> Multilingual Translation of Science
>
> We propose to establish a beta version of a translation button to be made available to all journals for free.  We would capture metrics of usage, and concerns of translation. We would like to have you join. We are planning a 6-month beta version; after which we will decide whether to continue. We will help you add the button to your journal and site.
>
> Please contact Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D. (Emeritus professor University of Pittsburgh)
>
> ronaldlaporte at gmail.com
>
> Ismail Serageldin, Ph.D.
>
> Professor Emeritus, Library of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt
>
>> ---- Original Message ----
>> From: Michael Karanicolas <mkaranicolas at GMAIL.COM>
>> To: NCSG-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
>> Sent: Fri, Dec 28, 2018, 12:01 PM
>> Subject: Re: Thoughts on the Proposed ICANN Org Budget for FY20
>>
>> Interesting conversation. Thanks very much Ayden for going through the budget doc to kick this off - which is important work.
>>
>> "I still believe that based on the ICANN meeting reports that language services are largely unused by the community and represent a huge overhead that we maintain purely to make ourselves look inclusive rather than providing a set of services that are actually used by the community. I haven’t looked at recent figures, but back during ICANN Dublin I believe that the majority of the interpretation channels were used by less than 10 people at huge expense to the org, we need to really look at wether language services are actually delivering any ROI or are we merely spending to look good in this area."
>>
>> As an English speaker, I'm always a bit hesitant about jumping into this issue, as I know I have the privilege/advantage of having my native language as the default. It's quite possible that ICANN's main concern here is the optics, but that's not something to be entirely discounted either. As an organization that strives to be international and inclusive, I think they like having a UN-esque model of translation. Still - I wonder if there isn't a better way of doing things, like potentially arranging an opt-in system, where users could pre-request language services for a meeting, and they'd only be provided if a certain number of people registered for a given language. That could also help them be better targeted as well - and have interpreters in the sessions where they're most needed, as opposed to just in the main rooms by default. May be something that's worth raising.
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