{this is not a post} I had to begin this “new” site with an insight about writing, because the main purpose of it is exactly about that: write. My native language is portuguese. Like any other language an extraordinary abstract conceptualization of a means to communicate between each other. I know that my english is crap. Nevertheless I will write many of my “un posts” because I feel I am faster on synthesis when I write in english.
But the real reason of this “un post” is an insight about a changing paradigm on different languages, hegemony, translation necessities, and common sense on the relevance (simultaneous, real-time, or “software” resolved).
Traditionally, the implementation of automation of processes has been characterized by homogenization, i.e. by a “cancellation”, a struggle of diversity. However not all the automation. Automatic translation by systems like Google potentially inverts this aspect, because allowing the translation (real-time or “copy-paste”), of languages foreign to the user, this could mean the possibility of an un-necessity to learn, read and understand other languages than the mother tongue. It could mean that native idioms could be preserved. As such, being the automata the system that resolves the problem of translation this could mean that automatization is a contribute to heterogeneity (and not homogeneity).
Interestingly it also could mean that hierarchy of and between idioms —a kind of indirect power seen by many of us as cultural hegemony—has no more relevance. Some languages, like English, have been been imposed as an universal communicational system, but that implementation has no more significance and necessity in any context.
At an “cosmic” level—i.e. with respect to all the humans—this could mean an interesting condition, because richness of diversity could be guaranteed and sustainable. However at an “atomic” level—i.e. with respect to each particular human—this could mean a less interesting aspect. Linguistic laterality is like lateral literacy, or, better, lateral thinking. It mean brains with amplified language systems, capable of wider understanding of specificities of certain groups of humans, of how certain languages are based on synthesis and others on analysis or how subjectivity and objectiveness is encoded and decoded in different utterances.
However, in fact, what is happening—and eventually this is invisible to most of us—is that the translation competence is being transferred to the machine*. That means one more step towards the full empowerment of the machine.
*as the driving competence.
Horácio {Tomé Marques}