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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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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I’m guessing this also applies to technical “languages” (e.g. medicine) and how many people in an org understand that vs delegating to “experts”?
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I would imagine that is not the case in Europe, where people grow up multilingually. See Merkel and Putin, who switch around.
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Funny/insane: I've been in meetings with people from various LatAm countries where we end up having the meeting in English, for clarity.
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