the timboucher experience

International Data Languages

Been really interested lately in the subject of international languages, for which the internet is pretty much the perfect proving ground.

During the spambot era of my online media production empire (I say that because it’s more than just writing), I discovered the importance of something which I began calling “reference points.”

What Is A Reference Point?

For our usage, a reference point on the internet is basically a chunk of content. It can be large or small, new or old, any shape or size, but it basically has to be a complete package. That is, you can say to someone, “here is such and such reference point,” and then you’d be able to send them the URL to a file, a folder, an entire website, a quotation, a video, a song, a photo, etc.

My spambot era of writing was an experiment in organizing reference points into sequential chains which communicated information above and beyond the sum of its parts. So, for example, I could post seventeen pictures, three videos from YouTube, some quotations from a few different media sources, and maybe a little bit of original written content, and then use WordPress (my blogging platform) to publish those things in a new package, a unique configuration with an unique identifier. A bunch of other reference points got re-arranged, taken out of their original context and bundled together as a completely new reference point.

TumbleLogs and Web Scrap Books

The logical outgrowth of this sort of web technology usage reached a head in services like Tumblr or ClipMarks, which offer users the ability to clip, bookmark, store and organize reference points found on the internet. You can find a link to my current Tumblr account right here. On it, you’ll see a vast collection of links, images, quotations and video research from which I generally create completely new and original content for my main domain, TimBoucher.com. My Tumblr account is kind of like my “blog behind the blog”, a garden of reference point seeds which I cultivate into full-grown posts.

Content Scraping

One quick note for SEO and other webcomm purposes: it’s important to always ADD + VALUE whenever you’re re-bundling other people’s reference points. Always include new or novel text or what-have-you into your reference point package. Otherwise, all you’re really doing is content-scraping, and unless the sites you’re pulling references from have a totally open and flexible Public Domain License, like mine does, you may run into legal or at least technical trouble somewhere along the way.

Online Translation Tools

Veering back to the subject of international languages though: bundles of reference points which can be freely transmitted back and forth between users on the internet seems to me to be the best means of communication between very culturally and linguistically diverse groups on the internet.

For example, a reader who understands only Chinese and a reader who only speaks English may have a difficult time communicating on the internet using pure blocks of well-formed text. Obviously, you always have the option of using an online translation tool, but if you’ve ever used one of them before, you’ve seen their drawbacks. Since they are powered by algorithms and mathematical definitions of what word translates to what other word in another language, you typically end up with very distorted and jumbled meaning packages.

For example, let’s translate that last paragraph from English into Chinese, and then take the Chinese output and translate it back into English.

Perhaps for example, understands Chinese and the reader who, only then the reader only speaks English has the difficulty time communication in Internet’s use qualified text pure block. You always have obviously use on-line translation tool’s choice, but, if you’ve has used in them in front, you’ve is seen their shortcoming. Why because they and anything mathematics definition supplies power word do translate by the algorithm in another language, your other dictionaries obtain finally distort and mean the package promiscuously.

See what I mean? The result is basically nonsense - quite similar to what you’ll see in spam emails at times. Words have a high degree of meaning degradation when translated into another linguistic framework.

A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words

You know that old saw though, the one about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well it’s true. A photograph of a man smiling, for example…

…Means the same thing to everybody who views it, correct?

Well, not quite. What happens if you pick a different man with a different smile? Like this guy:

Or this guy:

Each one of these photo reference points has a slightly different meaning, whether it’s the expression of the person in the photo, his ethnicity, his attire, his environment and props or any other culturally-significant contexts or unspoken backgrounds within which the image may be embedded.

However, the degradation of meaning is not quite so high with images as it is with text. That is, you can translate text back and forth across languages and have it become quite literally jumbled on a character-, word-, and sentence-specific level. But a person who views a picture is going to see the same literal picture whether that person speaks Russian, French or Japanese. The file itself won’t be changed or tampered with by translation tools or other types of text-based filters (like those used in censorship, for example).

Picture-Based Languages

Going back to the example of the Chinese language though, their system of writing utilizes what are called pictograms or ideograms. In other words, they utilize abstracted representations - drawings - of actual things (people, animals, objects, activities) to communicate meaning. English and other Romance languages are based instead on conveying meaning through phoneme-strings: each letter or group of letters represents a sound made with the mouth (although, our alphabet originated as something more like pictograms to begin with).

So a Chinese-language written sentence is already more like a string of reference points:

According to Babelfish, those three Chinese characters represent, respectively:

We can easily translate a string like that into picture-based reference points:

But we have to be careful which images we select to convey each meaning packet in our reference point chain. As illustrated above, any image, or any reference point used to create a new reference point chain comes laden with many layers of both implicit and explicit meaning, context and subtext, depending on who’s viewing it, and what their background is.

Narrative Threads As Codecs

Nevermind that we have not included any clear connection between the three images. Is the man on fire? Is the man in the house? Is the house on fire? Is the man a fireman in a firehouse?

We simply don’t know, because we don’t have enough information to understand what the connection is between the three reference point entities.

This is, more or less, the same problem that we ran into above with the English-Chinese-English translation via Babelfish. The program knows more or less what each individual word or phrase means, but it has not the sensitivity that a human reading in his or her native language has to decode how all these little islands of meaning thread together into a larger narrative.

Trade Languages

Many experiments have been done with artificially creating international languages, like Esperanto, but few of them have caught on. Other international picture languages have also been created for exactly the reasons we’re talking about in this article. But the problems with any of these created languages is that they have to be learned and that they are, at this point, far from being universally accepted. You might have one party in a communication being familiar with such-and-such language or symbol system and the other party having only knowledge of something totally different.

Aside from created languages, the other big thing you see in world history is the development of trade languages or pidgin languages. Usually, these languages are a combination of phrases and vocabulary and grammatical structures from multiple language sources. Like Spanglish, Creole, Swahili, etc. These languages arise organically as a matter of convenience between groups who live and work in close proximity to one another and whose daily business requires interaction with people outside of their language and cultural group.

The internet is a valuable resource for facilitating exchange between culturally and linguistically diverse groups. Whether you’re talking about financial transation services to exchange good and services - like eBay or PayPal - or things like blogs and forums, there are tons of different options for pidgin languages to naturally develop between people coming together from different backgrounds to communicate, to say something to one another and to attempt to understand one another.

Because of all these different options though, services, technologies, subcultures and demographics communicating with members inside and outside of their group, we’re likely to see a flowering of multitudinous options for international communication. That is, we’re seeing many different dialects of communication developing between diverse groups of people online, depending on what tools and techniques they are using to communicate with one another.

Semantic Solutions

As always, web technologists are hot on the trail of solving these problems. As my colleague recently pointed out, microformats are a way of marking up data within your web page so that it is broken down semantically into usable packets of data by both human and machine audiences.

But you as an internet user can experiment with these issues without ever resorting to anything as dorky or potentially dense as that. My recommendation would be to do what I’ve been doing for quite some time now: embed redundant reference points throughout whatever you’re writing or communicating online which convey meaning through many different overlapping modalities and media. That way, when people (or even machines) with extremely different backgrounds from you, such as an international audience, they will be able to understand more and different quality of information than they would derive if you were just communicating with text alone.

Experiment!

As always, get out there and experiment and please send me your results. This sort of emerging field is 100% collaborative and totally open. The biggest innovations in international communication will likely come from people on the ground who are actually doing this stuff in their day-to-day life, and who are pressed to solve very basic problems in communication in order to understand and be understood.

• [Digital Broadcast Shamanism] Intent Mark-Up Technique
• There are secret programs!
• Alternative Reference Point Visualization Techniques
• Saturday Nights On The Internet
• The Importance of Wexes