Thursday, November 15, 2012

FYI France : multilingual cyberespace


R
e-visiting a book published last Spring -- http://www.fyifrance.com/Fyarch/fy120315.htm -- herewith recent news and debate about that interesting work, plus some others -- again via my translations of postings by Hervé Le Crosnier --

> Hello,

> Last Spring, C&F éditions published the book,

> Net.lang : réussir le cyberespace multilingue [Net.lang : succeeding in multilingual cyberspace]

> -- a product of the Maaya Network, the book was coordinated by Laurent Vannini and Hervé Le Crosnier --

> The book was supported by L'union Latine, l'UNESCO, la Francophonie, le CRDI (Canada) and l'ANLoc (Afrique du Sud). We assembled over thirty articles from language specialists, all over the world, evaluating the effect of the Internet upon the promotion and preservation of threatened languages.

> A reference work, Net.langue covers:

  • technique -- standards, naming, search engine multilingualism notably for Asian languages;

  • the situation of languages in the world and in cyberspace, an analysis;

  • preservation and revitalization of languages in danger or threatened with extinction, what we must understand first;

  • a humanistic approach to languages, and its implications, for example in sign language, or in the acquisition of maternal language.

> The book Net.lang will be presented, with the assistance of most of its authors, during the,

> Troisième symposium international sur le multilinguisme dans le cyberespace [Third International Symposium on Multilingualism in Cyberspace]

> -- which will be held from November 21 to 23 at,

    CNRS,
    Amphithéâtre Marie Curie
    3, rue Michel-Ange
    Paris

> Presentation and inscription form:

> This book was the subject of a debate which took place May 3 at the Maison de l'Interdisciplinarité, Institut des Sciences de la Communication of the CNRS. The first videos of that encounter now are available on the video link of C&F éditions on YouTube:

> The book is available as follows:

> Sincèrement,

> Hervé Le Crosnier

 

--oOo--

 

Note by JK:

Multilingual access remains one of the Nets' greatest challenges. Since the earliest days of ASCII -- before Microsoft ASCII and IBM ASCII and Extended ASCII, ISO 8859-1, countless other flavors... -- the digital world has had a hard time with accents aigus, composing things "comme ca" or "comme c,a" and only recently "comme ça" -- and even now, in 2012, someone somewhere will write to me complaining that the last did not render well on her particular interface.

And no one, anywhere, has begun to tackle the "grey literature" problem in this: still only available in English, and that incomprehensible to even a native speaker, are all the instruction manuals and shrinkwrap agreements -- adhesion contracts, those used to be called, and they were illegal then for public policy reasons still valid now -- and sales blurbs, and unhelpful Help pages and Userblogs and wikis, which beset so much of technology's worlds.

And now, joy, we have voice interfaces, all of them struggling mightily with even regional accents in a single language: so now it's not even enough that a user must speak the supposedly-primary argot, s/he must carefully avoid anything which smacks of Mississippi or Alabama, or Maine, or Cockney or Breton or la Dordogne, in addressing such systems. But the customer is king, designers will discover that their systems must change to suit the users, not the other way around.

It's not a perfect world. We were naive, in the beginnings -- until the updates really get updated, for all users everywhere & instantaneously, and until all commercial vendors get together and stay together on these things, and perhaps until innovation stands still -- these things will continue to change, underlying encodings alter, improvements cause anomalies, users complain that their accents aigus "look funny".

This may be a Good Thing. Harry Truman's, "Show me an efficient government and I'll show you a dictatorship", applies also to technology -- we need innovation, creativity, change -- commercial markets, like electoral campaigns, do not "abhor" uncertainty, they thrive upon it.

But if we are to retain our democracy, our variety, the flexibilities and fluidity which keep our lives exciting and productive, we must anticipate mistakes, anomalies, user complaints, incongruities -- and languages which "look funny" on-screen. No the Entire World is not going to speak English, or know how to -- Umberto Eco described some of the folly in that very wish in his The Search for a Perfect Language (1997), and there have been other eloquent warnings -- so we might as well get used to, and even enjoy, the variety.

 

--oOo--

 

Intrepid publisher C&F éditions again, then: notes on three of their other books of interest here, again translated by me --

  • Enjeux de mots [Wordplays]
    > Good news for the libraries which do not yet have this book, which we thought was out of print: doing our inventory we found 20 copies. Enjeux de Mots is an encyclopedia constructed around various Internet terms and written by over 25 authors located on 4 continents. It is multilingual, each article appears in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese. The texts are available online:

    > http://vecam.org/article603.html

    > -- so we have 20 printed works in 4 languages available again, primarily for libraries and their reference sections.

     

  • Dans le Labyrinthe : l'évaluation de l'information sur internet, par Alexandre Serres [In the Labyrinth: the evaluation of information on the Internet, by Alexandre Serres]

    > The labyrinth has not discouraged its readers, so we are proceeding to a second printing. The presentation of his book, by Alexandre Serres, may be viewed on YouTube:

    > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKaOo4sfTik

    > -- this video easily may be exported / downloaded for viewing on the blogs of schools or libraries.

     

  • Libres savoirs : les biens communs de la connaissance [Free Thoughts: the Common Goods of knowledge]

    > It is rare that a book becomes the signal for a revolution of new activity in the public sphere. This is what has happened, however, with the book Libres Savoirs, which is at the heart of the creation of the group savoirCom1, begun in September, which is launching a variety of initiatives in defense of the Knowledge Commons.

    > http://www.savoirscom1.info/

    > Because it explores the variety of efforts under way regarding the Knowledge Commons, from freeware to farmers' rights, Libres Savoirs remains a reference work indispensable for this rapidly-developing theory.

 

--oOo--

 

So, the Outside View : people in France, and elsewhere, presenting and discussing and debating ideas which, to us in the US and the anglophone world generally, may look very strange and very foreign.

Because they are... The question being, in our rapidly-globalizing world, whether the isolated island "cut off by fog" is them, or us?

Bonne lecture,

 

Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com

 

--oOo--

 

FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071-5916

FYI France (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic journal published since 1992 as a small-scale, personal experiment, in the creation of large-scale "information overload", by Jack Kessler. Any material written by me which appears in FYI France may be copied and used by anyone for any good purpose as long as, a) they give me credit and show my email address, and, b) it isn't intended to make them any money : if it is intended to make them money, they must obtain my permission in advance, and share some of the money which they receive with me. Use of material written by others requires their permission. FYI France archives may be found at:

Suggestions, reactions, criticisms, praise, and poison-pen letters all gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us .

Copyright 1992- , by Jack Kessler,
all rights reserved except as indicated above.

--hjlm--

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