Apropos of nothing: people sharply underrate the utility of knowing a high-consequences language pair. You'd think bilingual people are common in the world, and they are. And you'd think that they're common in corridors of power, and they are. And yet...
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And everything that starts in language X will be sent to an expert for translation into Y before being fed back to a functionary. And this introduces a delay of approximately the same length as the organization's core analysis cycle, or more when those translators get swamped.
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Also, after you get into an organization which has translators available and you are exposed to the culture which suggests, mostly accurately, that a professional translator is going to obliterate your reading comprehension, you *stop looking at things you can yourself read.*
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Estimate for yourself, for some target consequential organization and language pair: * How many people do they have total who speak that well enough to order dinner? * To read a newspaper? * A journal article? This is a sobering exercise once you know the numbers at any org.
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And when you Venn diagram the language skill with any deep professional expertise on any subject, the pool of people who can read it and understand it gets very constrained very, very, very fast.
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End of conversation
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This is broadly true of the Canadian civil service even though bilingualism is common on paper
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meh, I think it's more about being able to trust (and hopefully fire if necessary) your experts A lot easier to clean house of useless local experts who messed up handling this situation. Than it is to fix or even leave the WHO
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