Gregory's Servera gigantic unsolved issues in social technologies is how to deal with many languages being canonical. a project that is developed by a community in one spoken language has a really huge hurdle to get community participation from those in another
 3 comments
@PaulDavisTheFirst yes definitely not the only place this issue exists but its a place I would expect to see more people reaching for a solution. with all the talk of 'scaling' technology there is so little in 'bridging the gap' @liaizon I think when a problem has existed for 10,000 years, there's a good chance it is not amenable to solutions that just happen to be at hand in our time. Not zero chance, though, so I suppose considering it still worthwhile. Certainly the progress in machine translation and also voice synthesis does suggest that there are perhaps some avenues to explore. |
@liaizon this is not limited to social technologies.
there's a reason we talk about "the anglophone <X>" or "the francophone <Y>". Countless cultural creations in one language that remain inaccessible and unknown in the others. Literature, film, & oddly even music & dance
It's also reason why the legend of the Tower of Babel is so powerful: we know & understand that humans speaking different languages are (to some degree) isolated from each other, & cannot collaborate and coordinate as well