6 ms·

Making cabinets and speaking the language of a culture that is necessary to succeed are not the same thing at all. Yes they are both skills but the similarity e

Making cabinets and speaking the language of a culture that is necessary to succeed are not the same thing at all. Yes they are both skills but the similarity ends there. Do you think a Japanese person who doesn’t speak English could build a successful company in the US without the help of someone who speaks English? It would be impossible.

debatem1 7y ago
I'm not sure why you believe the similarity ends there. The Japanese person would likely do the same thing I do if I need a cabinet made-- hire someone with that skill to do the job. Eventually that might stop making economic sense and they might decide to cut out the middleman, but again-- I'm not sure why I should be irritated either way.
- simias 7y ago
  It's probably not what's going to happen though, instead that person is going to work preferentially with people who speak their language because even if hiring a translator to work full-time was an option (and it generally wouldn't be because hiring a good translator full time would be ridiculously expensive for most companies) it would be a major pain in the ass to have to translate everything all the time. A few years ago I worked with a Taiwanese company and we had to use translators because some of their engineers didn't speak English (and I don't speak Chinese). The person translating was also an engineer which helped massively as she understood what we were talking about and could sometimes anticipate our questions and "fluidify" the discussion but it was still a huge annoyance, it made every interaction more painful than it needed to be, you often wondered if they really understood what you meant etc... I can't really imagine myself working full time in such an arrangement. I now live in Portugal and there's a massive American and French community in Lisbon. Many of them don't bother learning Portuguese and just interact with everybody in English. As such Portuguese people looking to work in Lisbon pretty much have to speak English. Actually you can now find restaurants where the waiter speaks English but not Portuguese (or at least not fluently). You can encounter similar situations all around the world where there's a huge foreign community. That can be fairly irritating for locals who end up feeling that they're the ones living in a foreign country...
  - debatem1 7y ago
    I mean, let's imagine for a moment that it's reasonable to treat everyone who doesn't speak your language as the vanguard of a situation such as you describe. Is Lisbon a dystopia we should fear becoming? Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US. Shouldn't that be reason to think "maybe the thing I fear won't happen"?
    - magduf 7y ago
      >Is Lisbon a dystopia we should fear becoming? For Portuguese people, perhaps it is. Who really wants to feel like a foreigner in their own country (esp. when that country is as small as Portugal)? I know I'd be really irritated if I tried going to local restaurants around me and all the servers there only spoke Spanish. How would you feel about that? >Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US. Yes, but that's because most of them either learned the dominant local language (English), or were not present in sufficient numbers to cause a situation like above. Sure, some formed little enclaves here and there, but that's a little different from what the OP described. And their kids grew up speaking English and fit into the new society. Finally, America is a really huge country, much larger than Portugal, and has historically accepted immigrants from many different places, so English (already being in place as the dominant language) was naturally the language everyone would learn so they could survive here. Given how huge English is now as a worldwide "lingua franca", I don't think you can compare America's history with what other non-English-speaking countries are experiencing today.
      - debatem1 7y ago
        The first part seems circular to me: you feel like we should fear becoming Lisbon because if you were in their shoes you would fear this outcome. Well, sure. But at a glance Lisbon seems to be doing pretty well for itself-- certainly better than lots of places in the US. Besides your sense that such cultural changes are bad, what makes them bad? Why, objectively, should they be feared? And the second part feels is framed as disagreeing with my point, but actually seems to support it: we've dealt with this issue before, the fear was the same, and the feared thing didn't happen. Shouldn't that mean we should dial down the fear this time around?

debatem1 7y ago

I'm not sure why you believe the similarity ends there. The Japanese person would likely do the same thing I do if I need a cabinet made-- hire someone with that skill to do the job. Eventually that might stop making economic sense and they might decide to cut out the middleman, but again-- I'm not sure why I should be irritated either way.

simias 7y ago
It's probably not what's going to happen though, instead that person is going to work preferentially with people who speak their language because even if hiring a translator to work full-time was an option (and it generally wouldn't be because hiring a good translator full time would be ridiculously expensive for most companies) it would be a major pain in the ass to have to translate everything all the time. A few years ago I worked with a Taiwanese company and we had to use translators because some of their engineers didn't speak English (and I don't speak Chinese). The person translating was also an engineer which helped massively as she understood what we were talking about and could sometimes anticipate our questions and "fluidify" the discussion but it was still a huge annoyance, it made every interaction more painful than it needed to be, you often wondered if they really understood what you meant etc... I can't really imagine myself working full time in such an arrangement. I now live in Portugal and there's a massive American and French community in Lisbon. Many of them don't bother learning Portuguese and just interact with everybody in English. As such Portuguese people looking to work in Lisbon pretty much have to speak English. Actually you can now find restaurants where the waiter speaks English but not Portuguese (or at least not fluently). You can encounter similar situations all around the world where there's a huge foreign community. That can be fairly irritating for locals who end up feeling that they're the ones living in a foreign country...
- debatem1 7y ago
  I mean, let's imagine for a moment that it's reasonable to treat everyone who doesn't speak your language as the vanguard of a situation such as you describe. Is Lisbon a dystopia we should fear becoming? Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US. Shouldn't that be reason to think "maybe the thing I fear won't happen"?
  - magduf 7y ago
    >Is Lisbon a dystopia we should fear becoming? For Portuguese people, perhaps it is. Who really wants to feel like a foreigner in their own country (esp. when that country is as small as Portugal)? I know I'd be really irritated if I tried going to local restaurants around me and all the servers there only spoke Spanish. How would you feel about that? >Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US. Yes, but that's because most of them either learned the dominant local language (English), or were not present in sufficient numbers to cause a situation like above. Sure, some formed little enclaves here and there, but that's a little different from what the OP described. And their kids grew up speaking English and fit into the new society. Finally, America is a really huge country, much larger than Portugal, and has historically accepted immigrants from many different places, so English (already being in place as the dominant language) was naturally the language everyone would learn so they could survive here. Given how huge English is now as a worldwide "lingua franca", I don't think you can compare America's history with what other non-English-speaking countries are experiencing today.
    - debatem1 7y ago
      The first part seems circular to me: you feel like we should fear becoming Lisbon because if you were in their shoes you would fear this outcome. Well, sure. But at a glance Lisbon seems to be doing pretty well for itself-- certainly better than lots of places in the US. Besides your sense that such cultural changes are bad, what makes them bad? Why, objectively, should they be feared? And the second part feels is framed as disagreeing with my point, but actually seems to support it: we've dealt with this issue before, the fear was the same, and the feared thing didn't happen. Shouldn't that mean we should dial down the fear this time around?