Issues
What are the solution opportunities that new info sharing technologies like wikis etc... can offer to barriers to cross cultural collaboration?
Not just language, but art and other expressions of culture are important cross-cultural elements.
What are the issues introduced by computer-mediated/online communications vs. face-to-face?
Education and two-way exchange should be guiding principles.
How to avoid cultural imperialism? Dominance of English a problem or a solution? Europe is increasing using English as a common language for discourse and it is not necessarily seen as the language of the British Isles, which some Europeans don't even consider to be strictly "part of Europe."
Other ways and media for culture-informing forms of communication and accessibility to information sharing should be embraced, e.g. possibility of first person sharing of experiences, presenting of their own communities' stories, and impact of access to video cameras and editing software.
What is obvious to one culture may not be obvious to another. In sharing, people may omit things that they deem obvious to their community, but which may not be obvious at all to an outsider. This results in cross-cultural communication blind spots. Open interactive platforms like wikis can help to facilitate re-framing which can help to expose these blind spots.
On translation and alternatives to translation
Instead of conducting translation from "original language" documents, it may be possible to eliciting answers to pre-defined questions to be answered independently in each language, or documents on a topic elicited in each language to be built from scratch. This can provide a basis for comparison - e.g. comparing English to Spanish version of Wikipedia. Depending on the topic, either version may be the more authoritative one. However, comparability problems may occur due to asymmetrical relevance of topics/questions, or different interpretation of questions (points of view).
Some open source projects have good translated documentation. Redhat and Inkscape, for example. Are these carried out by employees or volunteers? Is there open-source community based translation a solution?
Some suggested principles:
1. Don't sweat translation: don't worry about trying to translate everything, except for technical guides such as wiki how-tos. Exact translations (esp robot ones, and word-for-word) can actually block or deform cross-cultural exchanges. Even in a common tongue there can be severe cultural differences, e.g. Americans (for whom irony scarcely exists) just don't get Brits' humour and hate their snarky put-downs (think Simon in Am Idol), les québécois détestent les français condéscendants, Icelandic Bjork rages at centuries of Danish domination incarnate in von Trier (//www.filmlinc.com/fcm/JF06/vontrier.htm:last para). It's the 'barrier of a common language' to quote J B Shaw.
2. Autonomy: allow each culture (probably many under each language) complete freedom and originality in saying what it thinks is important -- you may guide (but not dictate) discussion by posing one clear question to everybody. Some may not think this is the important question and should be free to prose others.
3. Learning to explain or understand another culture is a spiral process: your lived experience (vécu, enjeux) may take several rounds to explain, with the explainers realizing at each round that something crucial remains unsaid. My story was of the Cape Breton villagers who took a whole week to talk to a videocamera, then said after viewing the uncut tape, 'You outsiders left out all the important things'. It takes that first round just to see what is left out of frame, taken for granted, habitus, pris pour acquis.
4. Patience: inter-cultural communication takes emotional connection, followed by a long period of continuité. The audience must listen to the silence and the non-verbal: pictures, sounds, songs, framing, the unsaid, the unsayable, the shy. And explainers must be patient too -- the audience's questions may seem unbelievably ignorant, irrelevant, impertinent or useful.
Next steps:
We will find out who else is talking about / looking at these issues. NelsonKo will coordinate.
Nelson will find a way for this discussion to continue online - wiki or scope
David Millarmailto:fdmillar@videotron.ca will check with Simon Fraser U Scope http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/
Meanwhile I have uploaded to attachments a short list of interesting 'intercultural media' sites, and an Excel file of websites that are attempting youth global outreach & action. DM