Hear the word “localization” and you might
think of a company rolling out a video game in several countries, or a film for
the Arab world being translated into the widely spoken Egyptian Arabic dialect.
Dialects often seem to go unnoticed as
being something of cultural value, except perhaps in academic circles. I have a
deep hunch that as the world becomes more globalized, it will be just as
important to localize into various English creoles as it will be to develop
products in Chinese, Russian, or any other of the world’s most common
languages.
There are countless examples of English
creoles being used in everyday life. For example, a 2010 National Geographic
article about Singapore mentions:
As you sit in a
Starbucks listening to teens saying things like “You blur like sotong, lah!”
(roughly, “You’re dumber than squid, man!”), Singlish seems a brilliantly
subversive attack on the very conformity the [Singaporean] government claims it
is trying to overcome (Jacobson).
As a globetrotting so-called Millennial,
it’s not hard for me to imagine that 10 or 20 years from now, I might be
writing an email to a business colleague in Singapore using this Asian-flavored
patois.
In his book, “Spanglish: The Making of a
New American Language,” author and professor Ilan Stavans includes a Spanglish
translation of Don Quixote (National Public Radio). (I’m sure many Spanish
professors would bristle at the idea, and poor Miguel Cervantes is probably
rolling over in his grave.)
Indigenous communities in the USA have localized
software into their mother tongues to help preserve cultural identity. For
example,
Office Online in
Cherokee was first released early last year [2014], and…was localized into
Cherokee in a collaboration between the Microsoft Local Language Program, the
Microsoft Office division and the Cherokee Nation’s Language Program (Office
Team).
Who’s to say that Gullah, “an English-based
creole language” (Opala) spoken in the Sea Islands and the coastal areas of
North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and northeast Florida couldn’t also be
localized?
Localization can be used for numerous
purposes – education, advertising, cultural preservation – the possibilities
for this technology are endless. What matters is how we choose to use it. As a society, will we come to recognize
different dialects of English as culturally valid, thereby expanding our sense
of what is “American” or “British” into “global?”
How we balance and create identity at the
local, regional, and international levels deeply affects our everyday lives,
from the boxes that we check in Census surveys to the music that DJs choose to
play on the radio. Language is one component of identity; creoles are no
exception, but rather an increasingly common aspect to consider as the
localization industry evolves.
Bibliography
Jacobson, Mark. “The Singapore
Solution.” National Geographic Magazine. Jan. 2010. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.
National Public Radio. “Spanglish, A
New American Language: Book Documents English Words with a Spanish Twist.” 23
Sep. 2003. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1438900
Office Team. “Office in Cherokee.”
Web blog post. Office Blogs. Microsoft.
23 Feb. 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. http://blogs.office.com/2015/02/23/office-cherokee/
Opala, Joseph. The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection. Yale University, n.d. Web. 14 April 2015. http://www.yale.edu/glc/gullah/06.htm
