If You Only Speak English…
I wonder how much information is unavailable to me, because I don’t speak Chinese.
Billions of people are talking over there, but I can’t understand a word…
Spanish, French, Hindi, Turkish… What are they all talking about?
Generally, I assume that most important information will be English first, or translated into English.
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The Bible
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Wikipedia Pages
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Harry Potter
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Xi Jing Pin’s ‘5 Year Plan For China’
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World News
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Your Friends Speak Your Own Language
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Google Translate for the rest…
And generally, I assume that people are talking about the same things anyway, (career, family, government, health, etc.) just in a different language.
But these are assumptions. I have no idea what they’re talking about.
How Much Information Isn’t Translated?
Most likely, you have never watched a Chinese video on the Internet, understood a Spanish song, or read a French research paper.
That’s a lot of information you’ve never had access to.
As an example, look at the YouTube video results when searching ‘Xi Jinping five year plan’ in English and Chinese. The videos are not the same. In fact, the bigger conversation is happening in Chinese (more views per video) and YouTube isn’t even legal in China.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
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Many ‘successful’ people speak only 1 language.
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Do you really care about China’s 5 Year Plan, or what the Bolivian president says?
Honestly, I don’t, until I think… “What if I only spoke Italian, or Hebrew, or Turkish?”
Then I’d know I was in a bubble and I’d try to learn English as fast as I can, so that I’m not stuck talking with the .8% of people who speak Italian and reading only the Italian Internet.
20% of the world population speaks English and only 5% grew up with it. It’s still a bubble, just a bigger bubble encompassing 1/5th of the world’s population.
Those 6 billion people who don’t speak or write or make videos in English… are any of them worth listening to, conversing with, or learning from?
Consider also, that when you search for information in English, you will only find information in English. You will not find a Chinese website to copy/paste into Google Translate. You are not searching the Internet. You are searching the English Internet.
“I don’t care about the other 80%” does not seem like the right answer to me.
I wonder, “What are all those people talking about?”