Is Monolingualism a Problem in Silicon Valley?
“Americans” aren’t traditionally known for speaking several languages or knowing world geography.
Zingword’s own Julija Savić wrote a compact tweet about Twitter’s most recent test, and the tweet went fairly viral in a matter of hours:
The skinny of the situation is this: Twitter is testing a new feature on Brazilian users that would make them see automatic translations of all Tweets on their homepage that are not in the language in their settings. Were Twitter to implement that globally (and without an opt-out), it would essentially end multilingual Twitter as we know it.
Evidently, some users report that you can opt-out of the feature, which is certainly better, but the Twitter crowd is still up-in-arms about it.
People are blaming monolingual culture
Zingword is near and dear to translators, so we’re tight with the multilingual folks of the world. Among the many different complaints and issues that multilingual people have about this new feature, one of the most frequent ones is a broad accusation that these decisions are being made by monolingual people who don’t understand multilingual people:
Some people argue it’s Americans, “tech” in general, or their product teams:
Though we’re making inferences about Silicon Valley and American companies in general, most of our examples come from Twitter, though Facebook and YouTube have already gone through so much of this (and much to the chagrin of worldwide users).
Is America really monolingual?
But is America really monolingual? People are talking about it (at least in the replies to our tweet).
Let’s take a look at the numbers from the 2000 Census, for Colorado, quoted in the Denver Post. They seem about right:
When you do the math, it shakes down to this: About 2 percent of the native Caucasian population in Colorado speaks more than one language fluently.
Among blacks, the bilingual rate is 7.4 percent. The rest, 92.6 percent, speak only English.
[ . . . ]
For Asian-Americans, the bilingual rate is 71.7 percent and 28.3 percent speak only English. Obviously, their rate is higher because many have arrived in recent decades from Asia.
And among Latinos the bilingual rate is 55.8 percent, while 44.1 percent can speak only English.
2% of white people speak a second language. This strikes me as about right, and is probably a lot more than what you’d find in South Dakota, where I grew up. Though, one does wonder if they made these white people pass a proficiency test — my high school Spanish teacher spent 6 months in Mexico back in the 70s and I don’t think he spoke Spanish at all.
Note too that not not all blacks, Latinos, or Asian-Americans speak second languages, either.
The takeaway here is that the cultural gulf is just massive: coastal American cities are vibrant and diverse, but in terms of languages spoken, these places will not rival average European cities or villages anytime soon.
Undoubtedly, Twitter’s leadership and product teams have a higher proportion of people who speak a second language than the US population, but they still have work to do with when it comes to diversity, and I doubt that Twitter’s product teams are as multilingual as, say, people in Sweden or Germany.
Does the American tech industry have a problem with monolingual culture, then?
There is nothing wrong, per se, with being largely monolingual. It’s enriching to speak more than one language, it’s fun to have different languages and cultures around you, and studies seem to show that it’s good for people’s brains. But living in a largely monolingual culture isn’t a problem in and of itself — Unless you are a Silicon Valley tech company like Facebook, Twitter, or Google, and you are making choices that affect users globally, many of whom are bilingual or multilingual.
How are these companies, whose headquarters are cloistered on the coasts, supposed to build language-specific features that delight users whose linguistic background is so much more nuanced (read: advanced)? Are these product teams capable of imagining features that would blow the average European’s (for example) socks off?
So far, not really. We don’t profess to know the inner-workings of Twitter, but one can imagine a localization team somewhere in Twitter asking the product team why they weren’t consulted, etc., etc., and new processes are popping up, new positions being created, and so forth, to hedge against worldviews that may be predominant.
Twitter’s considerations of automatic translations show there may be a problem
On the face of it, it seems like Twitter has perhaps misunderstood their users. On Twitter, you follow people whose tweets you want to see. If those tweets are in another language than the one you have in your settings, that’s probably because you want to see those tweets in that language. The fact is, a huge chunk of the world is bilingual or multilingual, and they have their own reasons for following this or that account.
Some tweeters have pointed out that there are some good use-cases for such a feature, if it were deployed differently:
- Automatic translation settings per Twitter account followed (my preference)
- Automatic translation settings per language
- Translate searches to find content in specific foreign languages
- Opt-in to such features, instead of opt-out, or easy toggle switches that are not hidden behind menus.
Any of these would make more sense. It would be interesting to be able to research and follow real-time developments in foreign countries, like revolutions, wars, conflicts, famines, or K-pop, without having to click to translate every tweet.
Unfortunately, what Twitter is doing is too simple and has collateral damage for all the bilingual or multilingual users.
I would argue that it also betrays a lack of creative product thinking at Twitter. Here are some cool, related ideas that would really make people’s day:
- The ability to surf Twitter (not necessarily your feed, but hashtags, searches, general surfing, moments, etc.) specifically in the foreign language of your choice, using automatic translation, so you could search in your native language to find Twitter users tweeting about subjects in foreign languages you really like, or just to practice your non-native languages. It would be a blast to go into “Finnish mode” so long as that doesn’t mess with my English/Spanish stuff (I’m bilingual English/Spanish).
- The ability to search for people and accounts who mostly tweet in foreign languages, so you could follow people near and dear to your foreign interests. Are you obsessed with methods for making authentic French croissants? Here are 50 real French Twitter users who can’t stop tweeting about croissants (or cheese, or wine, or champagne, OMG we love French stereotypes).
- Just more categorization for these language things, and just in general. Twitter lists seem so ancient. To give people legit language features, you’d have to add some additional language tools to Twitter to offer Twitter users more control. This seems like a tough pull for a company who hasn’t even managed to get bookmarks going, but more than that, do they have a team that really gets these issues enough to build something really cool?
I think some of these ideas are probably hitting the intellectual erogenous zone for the people who are curious about other cultures or what is happening in other countries at specific historical moments regardless of the amount of languages they speak.
If Silicon Valley had a more worldly disposition when it comes to languages, would they identify the right language features and discard the wrong ones before they start throwing darts to see what sticks?
I think that may be the case, but unfortunately, we’ll never know.
