Multilingualism, Mission: Impossible (XVI)

Yesterday, I have read a post http://languagerichblog.eu/author/languagerichblog/

The title is: Minority Languages Fight for Survival in the Digital Age. I don’t agree with the point of view. Because once you know what happened in hospital of multilingualism, you may expect a universal language.

Some minority language interpreter need to be booked few month ago. As in Australia every interpreter is paid by government, their time is very precious, so if one of the triple doctor, patient and interpreter go to toilet, all of them would be flustered; don’t know what happened, either miss time or some unknown information. Even if all of them are presented at the same time, but the doctor is caring someone else, shall doctor stop or keep caring? Shall the interpreter waiting, and if so who will pay the waiting time? Australia is a country free for interpreter, but when a non-English speaker go to hospital it could be such a big trouble, what if a country, the interpreter is not free how the poor can live?

For this reason, doctor don’t have tea time, it is no good for the health of doctor. Even if the interpreter is free, when the non-English speak go to hospital, he had to introduce himself to the hospital and confirm his booked interpreter, so he had to know some simple English too. Here again we have to count if booking an interpreter takes three months’ time, how many times one can see doctor, during lifetime? And what sort quality of life the non-English speaker would be?

Likewise, the same thing happened in a country speaks other than English, if an English speaker went there and suddenly fall ill, he will suffer the same inconvenience too.

But why the multilingualism is so popular in the world? I think the reason is that whenever government or media talking about language issue, most speakers are bilingual, their job is translator or interpreter. If they support monolinguals, they may lost job.  Another reason is that in Europe, there are so many languages, so whenever vote, everybody don’t want lose their own language. So without mutual compromise, the language issue could never be solved, even if everybody know what is right and what is wrong. The funny thing is that everybody understand without good communication, the current commodity society may lose money from every sides, but no one want think about that once people of the globe speak one language, it means a lot of money, energy and time were saved for everyone. For a faster communication the computer has done a lot of job, but now more and more problems are concentrate on language. It looks like the environmental issue that before everybody have done something for it, it will get worse to worse.