October 21, 2011 - Comments Off on What are you saying?

What are you saying?

The week began with a lively conference call between the tech teams in New York and London about multi-lingual website development strategies. A call that would end up infusing the whole week with language themes.

Later in the week, while working, we had an ongoing conversation about which language should a baby be exposed to, and even taught, beyond English. Someone suggested Chinese, which was then quickly broken down into Mandarin and Cantonese, with the observation that New York is apparently full of pre-schools that are run exclusively in Mandarin.

I suggested English, Mandarin and Spanish. The first, the almost de facto language of business, the second, spoken by the largest amount of people on Earth (and possibly the forthcoming language of business as well) and the third, spoken in the largest amount of countries.

I shared a recent article from the New York Times on how babies tell languages apart:

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language.






Then there is music, a kind of universal language, with it's ability to contain complex math and human emotion all at once. Exposing babies to music could help facilitate the learning of foreign languages, particularly musical languages. There is a classic Radiolab program on that theme that is a must-listen.

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The truth however, is the internet has lead everyone to create hybrids of languages that are specific to the audiences begin engaged. I speak to my family in Spanglish, using words in whichever language would best carry the message. I send SMS messages to my friends in an even more fine-tuned version of English that is also peppered with the ubiquitous acronyms of the web, a kind of global English, Globlish.

From The Economist:


But languages aren't only restricted to the realm of words. Today programming languages are as relevant as any spoken language and we should get comfortable with the idea of comprehending and translating from Javascriptglish, HTML5glish, Unixglish, ObjectiveCglish, looking at a bit of code and understanding it like we are in The Matrix.

Which brings us to translation.

Let's not forget about data. No matter which language we use to collect it, data is the principal language of the 21st Century. Vast amounts of data when presented visually transcend language to convey simple truths. All one has to do is visit Information is Beautiful to understand.

When we develop brands, websites and apps we are in essence creating a new language, a new collection of icons, glyphs and interconnected relationships to share a very specific message, each project a new world of communication.

So, what are you saying? Because the 80/20 rule applies here. People comprehend you 20% on what you say and 80% on how you say it.



Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism

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