Transcriber: Alin Andrei Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Imagine you're on a journey.
You are on a journey in a really remote place.
You're surrounded by a stunning landscape
and an endless horizon.
It's quiet and beautiful.
Yet, you've got no time to enjoy the surroundings
because your car broke down.
And you've hardly any water,
and almost no food left.
So what you really need in this situation
is local knowledge about where and how
to find something to eat and drink.
Of course, when you travel to remote parts of the world today
you carry a satellite mobile device with you.
So you could google it.
But the chances are actually high
that you won't find the most suitable information,
that is local knowledge from people
who have lived in this part of the world
for a very long time.
Local knowledge is stored in more than 6.000 languages,
and companies like Google are really going to great length
to allow you to search in many languages.
But when we consider that the languages
which search giants like Google support
account for less than 5% of the world's languages,
we can see why it is likely that we won't find
the most suitable information
when we are stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
So language is a really powerful force.
It's the key to knowledge and that's the key to survival.
Language is a complex code system
that humans have developed over centuries.
Initially, language formed a sphere of cooperation
that our ancestors used to share ideas,
that our ancestors used to form and organize in large groups.
For example, to hunt down giant animals.
Nowadays, we use language to share ideas with each other and to collaborate,
just like we are doing here, today.
We use language to survive in our modern societies,
and to tackle the issues and problems that we face.
With language, we have managed to use
existing ideas, in totally new ways.
We can see this through the economy, for example,
where new inventions and improvements are created
by building an idea on top of another idea.
We can see this in similar ways in
science, technology, culture, sport
and many other domains.
Now language is really important for us
because it enables us to share ideas
and to build on each other's knowledge.
Something that is really crucial for our survival.
Now the same is true for people who live in the very remote parts of this world.
Those people who we would like to call upon when our car breaks down.
They carry a treasure trove of knowledge with them that could be vital for us.
Just like some of our knowledge could be vital to them.
We've all seen images of a farmer in a remote part of the world
carrying a mobile device with him.
And we often assume that he or she has access to a web of knowledge just like we have.
But this really is a romantic image.
Because it's not the technology alone that allows you access to knowledge.
It's the language that does.
Now as long as we have borders like
the farmer's language not being supported by the technology,
him not understanding our language
just like we don't understand his language,
we won't be able to share ideas with each other,
and to build on each other's knowledge,
again, something that could be very crucial for our survival.
But now imagine that we could connect
the treasure trove of knowledge that both he and we hold.
We could tap into his knowledge
just like he could tap into our knowledge.
To do so, we need to connect the languages,
we need to form language pairs,
because that will allow us to bundle our and his knowledge.
And when we not only connect the farmer's language and our language,
but all of the world's 6,000 languages,
we will create 36 million language pairs.
And that will allow us to yet again build on each oter's knowledge,
but this time at a scale unprecedented in human history.
In fact, it will make the knowledge that we can access today
look like an ant compared to a giant dinosaur.
Now the technology to form language pairs on such a scale
is not perfect, but it's already there.
Think about Wikipedia, for example,
which enables us to use knowledge by other people,
simply by linking an entry in one language
to the same, or similar entry in another language.
By doing so, Wikipedia provides us with more than 80,000 language pairs.
Or consider large scale machine translation like Google Translate,
which allows us to translate between any of the languages that it supports.
Google Translate currently offers more than 4,000 language pairs.
Besides these two examples we have lots of great initiatives
that evolve all around the world.
But what we need more is collaboration
to not only improve the quality of existing language pairs,
but to form many more language pairs,
because each language contains and stores invaluable knowledge.
So when we consider the treasure troves of knowledge
that lie beyond what we can access with today's social technology,
we can stop using the romantic image
that we and other people have knowledge
at our fingertips to guarantee our survival.
And instead we should concentrate
on turning this dream into reality.
Thank you.
(Applause)