Hello, everybody, this is Michael Campbell with Glossika and I'm really excited
to sit down today with Ariel Koren.
She has a really unique and amazing background,
works at Google Translate, also works at Google For Education
has worked in many years with Latin America.
She speaks fluent Chinese, I was blown away by her her Arabic and Hebrew yesterday,
a true polyglot, a lover of languages, but more importantly,
a lover of people and spreading empowerment for people around the world.
Please, tell us more about your exciting life.
How long have you been at Google?
And what is your title there?
Sara: Yeah, so I've been at Google for four years, and I've spent part of that time doing
community impact work and community impact marketing at Google Translate
and currently, I'm on the Google for Education team,
which is the team that brings tech solutions to schools
and education institutions, and I'm the marketing lead
for one of the regional marketing teams at Google for education.
So you mentioned to me just now that your region is Latin America, right?
So you work a lot with Spanish and Portuguese, is that correct?
Yeah, I work with some awesome people all across the region who are doing really cool work,
and when we talk about language there, specifically, I get to work with a team that
does amazing work on language democracy issues, and around like making specifically education
technology resources more accessible, and in this case, Spanish and Portuguese.
So, cool. So how do you how you envision people and being able to empower them by using the
languages that they're learning and going out in the world?
Yeah, so this is actually what we've been
-one of the conversation that we just had at the Polyglot Conference.
We were talking about how a lot of people when they think about like the word
polyglot if they even know what it means.
They think like, nerd, cerebral, intellectual,
like someone who's kind of in their own little bubble-
Mike: I don't know, you look pretty cool to me.
Sara: I don't know, I try, what can I say?
But we're talking about like how people are kind of in this bubble
and that's the perception and what we want is like,
and I'm a marketing person, so like a rebrand.
We want to rebrand polyglot from being like this kind of
insular, or even sometimes, pretentious person,
to actually being a language activist
and we talked about language activist
we talked about someone who focuses a concentrated amount of energy and passion toward promoting
and celebrating and protecting language diversity and language democracy, right.
So that's what we've been talking about during this conference, its a lot of conversation that we're having
How can we become language activists? How can we become people who look at the ways
that language underpins injustices that language, lack of language, active lack of language democracy,-
Mike: What is an example of injustices that you see?
Sara: Oh, gosh, I mean, this could be a really long conversation,
Mike: But just to kind of bring it home to everybody,
you know, look, look at other specific examples you can give us.
Sara: I gave a lot of examples. Let's talk first about the internet,
just specifically, the Internet, right?
At Google we like to say the Internet and particularly our tools
are supposed to serve to make all of the world's information organized and universally accessible.
And the internet is supposed to be a tool that democratizes information and access to information.
But 50% of the internet's content isn't just 10 languages.
And English alone accounts for, excuse me
80% of the world's internet content is in 10 languages, 80%.
And English accounts for 50% of that.
So 50% of the world's internet content is in English,
which is a language that is only understood by 20% of the world's population.
Mike: So 50% of 80% is actually 90% of all information in English?
Sara: 50% of the world's internet content is in English.
10 languages account for 80% of the world's internet content,
Mike: Right so I had it backwards.
Sara: Exactly. So you have this language that 20% of the world's population can actually understand
not even necessarily speak it natively, but can understand it
and one of the things that we were just talking about in this in the presentation that I was giving is that
in the United States, which is the country that has the most,
the highest population of migrants in the entire world,
19% of the world's migrant population is based in the United States, okay?
In the United States, wouldn't our expectation
or at least our hope, at this point, not expectation, but our hope, be that a country that is so
at the receiving end of so much migration, that this country would be doing a lot of
capacity building around language, competency and around cultural competency?
Instead, the federal government gives zero dollars to initiatives to promote multilingualism amongst youth in
the United States and 85% of public high school students in the United States do not ever
step into a foreign language classroom until high school.
So how can we spread you know, good to society
and help people be more accepting of people in general, you know?
I mean, I don't think I'm the one to answer that question,
but in terms of -always spread good at the blanket level,
I could talk obviously to the language piece, which is what we're talking here.
One of the things that we're talking about in the presentation
is around this idea of language activism, and one of the key pillars of language activism
is when you're looking at an injustice or you're observing an injustice being in the
news being on the local level, the global level, are we interrogating the ways that
language underpins that justice-injustice or is used as a tool to further that injustice?
So like, one example is the fact that asylum seekers, both-
well let's talk like specifically in the United States
are required to fill out all of their paperwork just in English.
Mike: Asylum?
Sara: Asylum seekers.
Mike: Asylum seekers, okay.
Sara: and so they're required to fill out their paperwork in English,
all of the paperwork that asylum seekers have to fill out is only available in English.
This is happening in 2019.
It's a discrimination problem. It's about making-
it's about using language as a tool to make asylum which is already nearly impossible
to get in the United States, even more impossible to get, and it's something that's happening in 2019,
but that's been happening. I just talked about this in the presentation,
but it's been happening literally since the Holocaust. When asylum seekers who are fleeing the Holocaust,
were arriving to the United States, and the State Department which was under explicitly
and notoriously anti semitic leadership implemented a visa application form
that was eight feet long and available only in English,
so printed in tiny print, eight feet long, available only in English,
and like Holocaust historians look back at this
and there's a famous historian whose name is David Wyman,
who described this as paper walls that meant the difference between life and death.
So everyone right now is talking about the literal walls that are designed
to limit people's fundamental human rights to freedom and mobility.
But as language people and at this conference at the Polyglot Conference,
I think we should be talking also about like
word walls and language walls and paper walls, because language is used as a tool for oppression.
And as language activists, we have the power to "darle la vuelta" - to kind of spin that around
and use language as a tool for healing, for empowering, for service.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I don't know who said it, but
somebody said the word is mightier than the sword.
And so it can be used both for good and also for,
for quite a lot of evil as well.
Yeah. Well, it's been a pleasure having you here today and getting a chance to talk to you,
thank you very much, and
I would love to hear more about
all of the updates you have in the future.
Is there a place where people can
follow you on Twitter or other social media? Do you post?
Sara: Yeah, definitely. And also, let me just say that we have this crisis translation response network
that we haven't talked about, but if you're watching and you're someone who's
multilingual or has language skills
and you're passionate about using those language skills to make a difference,
go to respondcrisistranslation.org and sign up to be a volunteer translator
for people who are experiencing crisis and need translation in an emergency setting
or in an emergency situation, respond. respondcrisistranslation.org
that would be great, yeah.
Mike: Thank you very much.
Sara: Thanks, a lot.