Use a fracking translator

Those who belong to an Anglophone culture cannot imagine the frustration felt by the rest of the world when trying to communicate beyond the narrow circle defined by those who speak our language.

The result is a layering of many things. There is, for instance, the difficulty in speaking a language different from your own, both in terms of the time required to mentally translate a concept ¹ and in terms of keeping every peculiarity in mind. But there’s also the frustration of not being able to express a thought with the same nuances that our minds feel.

I speak English. I can express myself and understand, but this is not my language. If I wrote what I think in English, surely my potential audience would be broader, but it would also be narrower. To paraphrase what someone from my past once said, you don’t know how intelligent I am in my own language. We aren’t truly ourselves in a borrowed language.

The situation becomes even more absurd when we consider the technological level of the devices we spend 90% of our time with. Whether you use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, you have the ability to automatically translate a page’s text. So why do we keep writing in English?

The reason we non-native English speakers continue to write in a language that isn’t ours is that we know humans are lazy. I could say that we know you won’t use a translator, but that would be a lie because even we don’t use it. Perhaps we don’t do it because we feel the result would be something unreadable, but in reality, today’s worst translation software would do a better job than someone like me trying to run a marathon in shoes that don’t fit.

And even if something went wrong, even if at some point the AI you fed my text to started hallucinating absurd meanings, isn’t it better to discover something misinterpreted than to read something dumbed down?