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For centuries in the sciences, it was essential to know more than one language in order to be able to keep up with developments worldwide. As recently as our pa
by ISL 7y ago
For centuries in the sciences, it was essential to know more than one language in order to be able to keep up with developments worldwide. As recently as our parents' generation, it was a graduation requirement for doctorates.
That English has become the lingua franca [1] of the world is a recent development. If we would like people to read our documentation, it is reasonable to expect that we should do our best to learn how to read theirs, too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
- gumby 7y agoUniversities have only recently (past few decades) started dropping the foreign language requirement for the PhD.
- novok 7y agoLatin used to be the language of science & religion in europe too, it's not unprecedented that an industry standardizes on one language in a region.
- michaelmrose 7y agoThere are 6000 languages. Even the top 5 would take a decade of your life. It would make more sense to have a miniscule fraction of people make machine translation better.