Trapped in the dominant language

A reader sent me an email this morning, asking about the reported cremation of the daughter of the Balinese H5N1 victim. This seemed odd in a largely Muslim country, the reader thought, and speculated that the family might be Hindu. In my reply, I agreed—but it also reminded me of how ignorant most of us are about cultures outside the English-speaking world.

It's easy to be parochial in a language that includes William Shakespeare and Paris Hilton. English offers something for everyone. We tend to pity authors in languages like Dutch and Czech because they're doomed to small audiences.

But when events outside the anglophone world begin to affect us, we're really at the mercy of a very small number of "translators"—those who know English and other languages and cultures as well.

In the case of avian flu, I've been especially frustrated by the lack of translators of Indonesian culture. The SARS outbreak in 2003 introduced me to the blogging world, and I learned a lot about the disease and its impact on China through blogs in China. Some were by westerners teaching English or doing business there, but many were by ordinary Chinese whose English was excellent. It was easy to keep track of the disease, and equally easy to understand the impact it was having on Chinese culture.

Two years after the first human case of H5N1 in Indonesia, I still know of no Indonesian bloggers who both write in English and follow H5N1 in their own country. An occasional westerner has popped up, blogged about H5N1 while backpacking, and vanished again. Official Indonesian government sources offer sporadic information at best.

The tireless folks at CurEvents Flu Clinic have become expert toggle-texters, using computer translation of media reports in Bahasa Indonesia and other languages. These can sometimes be informative, but a computer can't provide the context for a news report in another language: Is this an accurate report, or a sensationalist one? Do local journalists censor themselves on this subject? Is it likely that a 5-year-old Balinese child would be cremated or buried? And what religion does her family follow, anyway?

Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese are not obscure languages. Many Indonesians are working and studying outside the country in places like US medical schools. Scholars in Indonesian studies work in many universities around the world. We need to recruit some of these people—not just to provide readable English translations of news reports, but to supply perspective on those reports.

Until we get such translators and interpreters, we are going to remain trapped in the gilded cage of our own language.