I finally got around to posting an article at iCommons.org that I had meant to publish a long time ago, about an apparent conflict (in my view) between the idea of “open” content (and particularly the “open culture” movement) and the essence of linguistic “difference” which underlies the act of translation. The article is partly intended as an introduction to a session called “Open Content, Open Translation” that I am involved in organizing for the Local Context, Global Commons track at the iSummit conference, which starts in a couple days.

The conflict that I see between much of open culture as a movement, and the global reality of linguistic/cultural/political/historic differences, is that in the former the challenge to “cultivating the commons” appears to be framed largely in terms of law and technology (leaving out the latter elements). This is dangerous for many reasons:

If, as Lessig puts it, humans engage through writing texts and remixing them, then societies engage through reading texts and translating them. At a global scale, culture is created, and has always been created, through the synergy of these processes and not through the exclusion of the former over the latter. To ignore translation in the transmission of culture – open or otherwise – is to subsume the world’s diversity in a unilingual monoculture of protocols, statistics, and consumption.

The examples that I cite in making the case for the difficulty of a genuine “open culture” are taken from the Japanese language:

Difficult as it may be for some to imagine, many of the base concepts typically taken for granted in the West, things like “society” and “individual”, “beauty” and even “existence”, as well as some of the most powerful political ideas, no less that of “freedom” itself, are actually recent imports into the Japanese language. Incorporated and transformed by generations of translators, it is no exaggeration to say that these words and the meanings they convey – so familiar in the language of “global communication” that they pass largely without comment – have guided Japan to becoming the place it is today.

The examples above are taken from “Modernization of Japanese Language” by Akira Yanabu, which I highly suggest for anybody interested in learning about the history of the Japanese language.