The article has been translated automatically. Translated in:
The great goals of post-pandemic humanity, from health to climate, from peace to social inclusion, transcend the interests of each, and are pursued only together with the interests of others: in fact, they are united by the need to arrive at a form of global understanding.
It can probably be argued that this is not particularly new. But the contemporary condition makes understanding, not to say cooperation, fundamentally necessary. For structural reasons. Research and education are integral parts of this contemporary dynamic.
What is it all about? In the age of knowledge, value is focused on the intangible: research, design, image, organization, the meaning of products. Digital infrastructure is essential for knowledge management, which precisely summarizes economic value. In turn, value is defined when the demander recognizes it in the offeror’s proposal: thus it occurs in the dimension of communication. Unlike price, value is not only monetary, it is also cultural.
Hence, the dimension of essential exchange is transformed: it is not so much about the quantitative setting of prices and exchanged quantities of material goods, which takes place in the marketplace, but rather about the dialogue between humans who express and recognize the value of the knowledge embedded in products and services. In short, the knowledge economy works if those who offer and those who demand communicate and understand the value of the knowledge embedded in products and services. In a global context, these communications are international and cross-cultural and therefore must cross-linguistic and cultural boundaries-which means that the services of the translation and localization industry are strategic. If this is true, the topic of mutual understanding between people and populations should move up the list of priorities for companies and buyers.
So what are the risks and opportunities that can be recognized in a scenario like this?
Busy in the daily business of developing their companies, entrepreneurs, managers of public and private enterprises, servants of the state and leaders of educational institutions may be tempted to postpone engagement in international communication activities. But innovation in the world of translation and localization may convince them to focus on the topic. If the transmission of a text from one language to another is becoming easier for major languages thanks to machine translation, the added value of taking into account different cultural contexts is all to be explored and becomes the task of important business activities. Not only marketing, at the downstream end of production, but also planning and design, at the upstream end: because products and services in themselves communicate. All platform activities, for example, are actually the product and communication of the firm combined. And the structure
of platforms often adds to the form of institutions that provide a valuable service to society. Right from the design stage, the service must think about being accessible to generate mutual understanding among those collaborating in the development of social value forms.
There was a time when industrial economics might have been thought to be concerned first with the processes by which goods were produced and then with doing the advertising necessary to make them known in order to sell them. Today, communication-that is, the sharing of knowledge necessary to express and recognize value- is an integral part of the design of the product and the entire company that produces it. And the same goes for educational institutions, research centers, civic associations and so on.
Some might argue that international understanding is only effectively achieved through the development of a lingua franca, or a global tool of expression. But whatever language is chosen to bridge cultures, it actually imposes on communication the cultural structures of the country in which that language originated.
Multilingualism enhances the depth of cultures that have developed their own languages over time: by adapting to another culture’s modes of expression, people cannot draw on their own culture but must limit themselves to their knowledge of another’s culture.
Cultural diversity is a form of wealth. As long as it does not become divisive.
