 אחת, שתיים, שלוש, אחת צהריים טובים. Good afternoon. How's it going? Knock, knock. May I have everybody's attention, please, for one minute. I don't mind if you play with your phones or laptops or anything throughout this whole session. I really, really honestly don't mind. But if you're here in this room, could you please look up at the screen just for a few seconds. If you remember this little thing that most people don't know English, if this is the only thing you remember from this whole talk, I'll be happy. This is the most important thing you need to remember. So please raise your hand if English is the only language that you know. Not so many of you, nice. Okay, is there anybody who knows more than two languages, including English? More than two languages, including English. Cool, this is fun. Thank you. This is fun because people often ask me, how many languages do you speak? And I hate it because I speak three and another one not so well. So I'm not any better than most of you. So, a Wikipedia article. Who can tell me what's the problem with this Wikipedia article? What's the problem with this Wikipedia article? What's that? Heteronormative. Nice. This Wikipedia article is fake. That's not what Wikipedia says. I faked it. This is what Wikipedia actually says, the English Wikipedia this morning. So this is fake. However, can anybody think of, I'll give you like five seconds to, you know what, ten seconds to think of other problems that you see in this article. Okay, wedding bands, what else? A really complex sentence. Okay, what else? I love this comment. The languages are hidden behind the button there and lots of people don't know that they're hidden there. I love that comment. Anything else? Wedlock. There's a wonderful podcast called The History of English Language. It has like a whole episode about the word Wedlock. Okay, so let me give you a hand. Does anybody know this language by any chance? Do you know this? This is ODEA. It's a language of Eastern India. For anybody who knows ODEA, but not English, the article in English is useless. That's a problem. That's a problem that you don't even notice unless you know English, whether as a first or as a second language. If you know ODEA, then you're lucky. You have an article about marriage. This article is available last time I checked in something like 140 languages. This means that there are lots of languages in which this article is not available. So it's a thing to remember. When I was preparing the stock, I found that in the Bavarian language, marriage is a... Is there anybody here? Seriously, this is the Bavarian language spoken in Southern Germany. Okay, it may be not the best joke, but that's actually the word for marriage in Bavarian. Yeah, I agree that that's not true, but this is the actual word. In standard German, it's something like, yeah, yeah. Okay, so, knowing English is a kind of privilege. It's a thing that you don't even notice when you know English. You don't notice how many things do you have that people who don't know English don't have, and I should remind you that most people don't know English. So I'll give you some examples. It's a very scattered thing. There are many, many, many more things that you are lucky to have if you know English that I will not mention in the stock. I don't know all of them, and I'm not like I don't have the time here, but let's give you some simple ones. A keyboard, any computer or phone or any kind of device has an English keyboard always, without any exception. There is no other language in top 50 or so languages of the world, except Indonesian, for which this is true. Even for big languages of Western Europe, like French and German, they have some extra letters that you cannot type on standard English keyboard unless you have the proper software installed, and you cannot trust that any computer that you use will have the software installed. Not to mention languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet or Hebrew or Arabic or Japanese and so on. On a lot of modern computers and phones you can install, you can enable the typing support in your language, but it's not always available out of the box. If you speak English, you have it out of the box. The only language that has this out of the bigger languages of the world is Indonesian. Another example, fonts. Again, the basic Latin alphabet is available absolutely everywhere without any exception. This is not quite true for a lot of other languages. There are some simpler problems, there are some harder problems, so let me give you an example of a simpler problem. I took this picture this morning and if you notice, his name tag is broken terribly and theoretically, this shouldn't happen in 2018 because unicode technology which allows letters in any language to be written on any computer should be ubiquitous by now? Apparently it isn't. I've been seeing problems with name tags in conferences like in almost every conference. This is pretty terrible. Bartosz, did I write the Polish part correctly? Thank you. This is really one of the smallest problems with fonts that can happen with fonts. It can be even worse. It still happens quite often that you cannot read, not to mention write. You cannot read anything in your language at all in quite a lot of languages of the world. The ODEA language, which I showed earlier with the marriage, quite a lot of devices, millions of devices that are used around the world, they cannot display that language at all. They will just display meaningless squares. Now something slightly less obvious, morphology. English happens to have very, very, very simple morphology. Morphology is how words change. In English you have the plural which adds the s in the end of the word. You have the past tense which adds ed, you have the gerund which adds ing, and that's about it. Words change very, very rarely in English. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary it lists all the forms of all the words because it has room for them. There are so few of them. Words hardly ever change. In Russian, for example, you have six different cases, so every noun can have six different forms in singular and six more forms in plural. Russian is a relatively simple example and Finnish it's something like 15 and there are languages that are even far more complicated. What does this mean? This means that it's much harder for search engines to support languages other than English, a lot of them. There are other languages that also happen to be simple as English, but most languages are not. Most languages have very complicated morphology, complicated grammar, complicated declangent. Search engines can be made to support them. Is Tray here by any chance? No. So Tray is working on improving morphology support for different languages in Wikipedia's search engine but it requires particular work for each and every language and again as you possibly know there are thousands of languages in the world English happens to be lucky with very simple support for search engines. Spell checking. So this is a funny thing a few years ago I noticed that the spell checker in Firefox marks a certain word as incorrect and I was sure that that word is correct. So I reported the bug, that bug was rejected. They told me that the word is in the spelling dictionary but the one that is shipped with Firefox intentionally omits it. They cut off the dictionary after something like 80,000 words because then it would be too big. That's the problem that English has. The dictionary is too big. There are too many for Firefox at least, too many texts collected the spell checker is so great that they have to make it smaller. A lot of languages don't have a spelling dictionary at all like nothing. In English you're lucky you will see wrong words marked in red in a lot of languages you don't have this. In some languages they were important enough for commercial purposes that Microsoft or some other companies developed spelling dictionaries for them certainly for German and French and Russian and a bunch of others. For some languages they were very lucky to have volunteers who developed spelling dictionaries for my language for Hebrew. They were two brilliant students. They were actually mathematicians and not linguists but they developed a spelling dictionary for Hebrew. So thanks to them they are lovely open source people. For a lot of languages they don't have such amazing volunteers and they don't have any commercial support that would justify commercially developing a spelling dictionary. So feel lucky for that. Something that is similar to spelling dictionary more than 20 years ago I started using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Word already back then in 1997 I think. It already came not only with spell checking but also with style checking so it suggested correcting King to Monarch. English has this most languages don't have anything like that. So English is very advanced in English but there is big demand for this kind of style checking in a lot of languages don't have this. Another thing about gender English hardly has any gender except pronouns even on your name tags today you can write your pronouns because this is so important these days which makes a lot of sense but if you think about this you hardly ever need this in software you don't often say he or she in software. When you do need to say he or she in software people these days usually remember to use they instead but in a lot of other languages you do have to say this in English verbs are the same for men and women in a lot of languages they are not in Arabic and Hebrew and in Russian and Polish and a lot of other languages verbs are different so if somebody on twitter for example you say Jane retweeted this or Mike retweeted this in a lot of languages the word retweeted would be different but twitter doesn't allow this it's very popular on twitter these days to say what are your pronouns in your profile but this is not reflected in software you just have to somehow manually do this in English you don't care in a lot of other languages you have to trademarks can anybody read what this says a staff so I did a little reversal here and what happens very frequently in a lot of advertising instructions user manuals of things the text is written in some other language not English but the name of the product appears in English because marketing people insist on the trademark to write it as it is sometimes it is bad sometimes they insist on not only using the original name but not even declining it which sometimes can be very ugly if the language uses a different alphabet then you suddenly have something in the Latin alphabet in the middle of a different thing and I shall remind you that not all people know the Latin alphabet I don't know if it's most but a lot of people don't know the Latin alphabet as strange as it may sound in the case you wondered this is a Hebrew name of artificial sweetener but that's how it looks if you would use like if you write something in Hebrew and then an English name in the middle by the way some companies they are pretty okay like Coca-Cola they are fine with writing Coca-Cola in Hebrew or whatever language they translated all the languages Microsoft are also pretty okay Mozilla Firefox for some reason they insist on writing Mozilla Firefox always in English I hate it even though I love Mozilla I hate this word this is kind of obvious but if you know English then you can speak to people who only know English but then you get this weird reversal for example people go to India people who speak English go to India and then in India they speak to people who know English because they cannot speak to people who don't know English this creates a wrong impression that everybody in India knows English and India is just one example it could be any other country because of that you don't get to speak to people who don't know English because you don't know English yourself if you are such a person if you are if your native language is something else and you know English when you speak to other people try to remember that some of the people who know your language they don't know English try to remember them try to represent them it's the best they can suggest once you do know English it's very hard to see this but try to a little more about software a lot of software begins in English very often it's not translated at all Instagram until recently was not translated to any language which is really crazy because Instagram is so popular but until recently it was not translated to any language only recently they started translating Twitter was online since I think 2006 also they only started translating in 2012 a lot of websites still don't translate anything at all so if you speak English you're lucky because you can use almost any website almost any new service almost any new app you cannot some more detailed example of that error messages, bugs stuff like that if software is translated you see the error message translated which may be useful for you if you know what to do but sometimes the error message by itself is not useful, is not helpful you still need support from a support person if that support person happens to know your language you're lucky but sometimes you have to Google it if there's an error message in your language maybe Google will find something maybe not in bigger languages you may be luckier in Russian you may be lucky in German you may be lucky in Japanese you may be lucky in Hebrew I'm not sure sometimes you will, sometimes you won't now this is fun this is the New York Times app from this morning New York Times by definition has all of its content I hope this is clear this is an English language newspaper but I took the screenshot on my phone my phone is set to use Hebrew as the user interface language and you can see here that there's some weird cutoff on the left that's how I see the New York Times app the New York Times app without any good reason tries to adapt itself to my phone and flip itself from right to left on something like that it's really weird that's how it is supposed to look when the phone is set to English you can also notice that the menu on the top, the top story is most popular it's flipped it's actually one of the most common bugs in the last couple of years with the support for right to left languages content that is supposed to be English but it's broken because I want to read this in English and other things in other languages the Pinterest app used to be broken like this it was almost completely unusable and you may remember our colleague Stephen Walling he's now a product manager in Pinterest I emailed him and they fixed it in Pinterest but a lot of apps are broken, New York Times like it's a very famous important app broken obviously I should mention this we are all Wikipedia people but yeah if you know English you'll get more Wikipedia articles but let's see about lots of other right to left problems, that's a real website our colleague Moriel made it it's a brilliant website, please take a look at it emoji is broken damnit I actually have a theory that emoji is occasionally broken not always seen not on old phones it kind of shows people in the west who use emoji how does it look when a font is not available for your language that was supposed to be a yoga emoji never mind if you want to use emoji it's not the most important example but emoji is fun if you want to use emoji if you want to type emoji on your phone there are many hundreds of different emojis you need to search for them by name and they are indexed by their English name if you want to search for them in your other language you cannot you have to search in English if you don't know English you screwed it's fixable because theoretically it's possible to translate names of emoji to different languages but it has not really been done yet I think that is pretty important for software binary logic a lot of things in software like right and wrong opposites in English it's very hard very easy to form words like this opposite words it's not as easy in other languages it may seem why wouldn't it be easy so in English it's easy in Hebrew for example it's very hard when I have to when I have to translate wikipedia new features of wikipedia software I always struggle with these I have to use different words I have to like rewrite the whole sentence to make it opposite and so on complicated is anybody familiar with this term just in case you are not familiar with this take a look it's a pretty famous one because English has this fun morphology where words themselves hardly ever change it's very easy to it's very easy to turn a word from a noun to an adjective to a verb and vice versa and then it gets to a very curious situation where a word used in the computer user interface what is it actually is it a noun, is it a verb does it communicate some kind of abstract idea that goes even beyond usual grammar in English it's very easy like is a very very famous ubiquitous button in Facebook what is it is it something iconic which went beyond the usual constraints of grammar what happens when you need to translate this how do you translate this to Hebrew for four years the translation to Hebrew was a hafti which means I liked it it's also a pretty common word in colloquial language it was a very good translation the problem is when Facebook added a year or two ago the new buttons for different emotions one of them was love which was the same word and then you had to then people had to find a new translation to make them different so they actually changed the like to like now it just says like in Hebrew in Hebrew letters but like I give a lot of examples from Hebrew because that's the language I know I use most often but it could happen in a lot of other languages and then you know when you can speak about this there's a verb to like you can speak about this as a noun somebody's post became very popular and got 2,000 likes or 20,000 likes how do you turn that in Hebrew taking that translation and turning it into a noun would be very hard in English it happens to be very easy English is lucky so what can you do any questions still here I had a question about the last example 2000 likes and how would you translate that as a concept into another language I'm wondering if the fact that we can say in English I can say in English 2000 likes is because English as a language has that flexibility or because I'm crappy at English you are not crappy at English meaning like the slang in English just kind of throws out convention and doesn't really care it's not even slang it's pretty usual acceptable, acceptable English there's nothing wrong about it yes English just has this luck English happens to be a language where this is possible without sounding weird trying this there may be some other languages in which it is also possible in a lot of languages it is not possible in a lot of languages it would just sound like literally unspeakable people will just not understand this it will sound like an ungrammatical sentence anything else before I go a little bit further? yep I should have known I just wanted if other people were wondering why Indonesian why is Indonesian lucky why can you type Indonesian on any device possible and the answer of course for those who don't know is Indonesian simply doesn't use any characters not found in the standard Latin layout it's not that anyone was considerate of the Indonesian language it happens to be possible to type it on an English keyboard so any English keyboard is ipso facto an Indonesian keyboard just in case someone thought oh the Indonesian's got it made no no no it's just that the Indonesian alphabet it just uses the same basic 26 letter alphabet is English without any critical marks or extra letters or anything so you can use it but it's just I went over the list of the most the biggest languages of the world and Indonesian is the only one I could find there which is like that so the emojis here are completely different so what you can do if you know any language other than English switch your computers and phones to that language please do like right now if you speak a language other than English they call your phone go to settings change the language of your phone do that language why? because dog food that was supposed to be an emoji for dog food dog food in case you don't know is a technique in some industries where the employees eat their own dog food and employees are trying the product themselves it's much better if you actually see it yourself you actually see all those bugs all those weird bad translations because if you don't see it only people who don't know English will see it but if you know English and you know another language and you see this bug then you can report this bug to the developers and they will fix it like I reported that bug to Pinterest and like I do with a lot of other bugs in Mozilla and Google and a lot of other things please do this it may make you uncomfortable it's worth it you may have to suffer through weird bugs you may have to switch to different languages to check is it broken because it's really totally broken or is it broken because the translation to my language is broken and so on this will make you uncomfortable it makes me uncomfortable but try it, please try it, it's fun switch to another language and then switch back that will be especially fun now the next slide is a little plug for what our team has been doing in the last couple of years you may know on Wikipedia that there is a list of languages in which any article is available in the sidebar did everybody notice this making sure on the sidebar there is a list of languages so until recently this list of languages was just a list of languages a few months ago we started changing the design of that the design of that list has now changed you will see in a few seconds how does it look now it's not yet changed in English English Wikipedia is now the only Wikipedia in which this is not the new design it will be soon but please log in to the English Wikipedia on your laptop and enable this in the preferences and what you will see instead of the very very long list of languages you will see something like this so it makes it more convenient to see in how many languages is any article available so if you see an article that is available in 200 languages it's great you can know that well a lot of people can read about this thing if you see an article that is not available in any languages at all you should just it just repeatedly reminds you okay I am lucky that I can read this article and people who don't know English cannot read this article so you are very welcome to try this and you are very welcome to try this and I'll be happy to hear what you think about this new way showing the languages tell all your friends about what I'm telling you here switch your phone to your language and tell your friends to switch your phone to your language and tell your friends to translate Wikipedia articles those of you who live in San Francisco San Francisco is a pretty multilingual city I really hope that when you walk around San Francisco you do notice a lot of signs and warnings and advertisements and Chinese and Tagalog and Spanish and Vietnamese and a lot of other languages surely you have friends who know other languages speak to them tell them that there is Wikipedia in their language tell them that they can make the Wikipedia in their language larger and richer and they can translate articles also if you have friends who work in big tech companies like Yahoo, Google or Microsoft whatever tell them to switch their phones to their languages I have a very curious experience repeatedly people tell me like I tell them you know Russian or Hebrew or Polish or whatever why do you use your phone in English I especially do this when I report bugs in Google products for example or in Twitter and I wonder there are lots of people who know Hebrew and work at Google why do I report these bugs why don't they see themselves and they tell me I use it in English because it's more comfortable what a terrible excuse but even more terrible excuse most of our clients speak English they test for them but there are other people at Google who know only English they surely test it only in English you can test it in other languages it's a very strange conversation that I have occasionally with people but you are welcome to try this as well it's not that hard surely many of you have friends who work at tech companies and this is my cat and this cat has an important message for you most people don't know English please remember this and I intentionally left time to talk to you and to discuss and to hear your opinions and questions and additions and examples thank you I have a fun little example I currently live in Cairo predominantly everyone speaks Arabic they don't really speak English unless they're a little more educated and in English language but what I find funny is even in areas that are impoverished the signs are all written in Arabic but they are English words I had the impression that I was going to go to an Arab country and learn Arabic through science, through TV shows but I'm literally reading like mother care in Arabic letters so it's just dominated an arena that I just had no idea about it's just a comment also just a comment I've been traveling to Bangladesh in November and I met the Wikimedians there and of course I was aware that most of the people I would meet would be from the upper middle class because they're the ones that have time to contribute they're the ones but then when I was there I met some they had very different levels of English that was what you were talking about we meet the people that speak English and I was meeting some of them who didn't speak English that well and I realized when we have the international conferences when we have the Wikimania we meet also from those communities not only those that come from educated families but even inside of them they're the best educated and we never see part of the communities because those are the people that will not probably be able to get visa to leave the country there are some there that don't speak English but I think it's very important that we try to reach those those are the people who can't participate on matter and they will not be able to participate in the international conferences so finding a way to get in contact with those people that don't know English and contribute to Wikipedia and small languages I think that's a very important thing to think about them yeah there's a radical thing that I say about this every now and then for the Wikimedia board there are elections every now and then one of the requirements to become a candidate is to know English so I can totally understand how it will be practically hard to communicate with other board members if you don't know English but somehow somewhere it must be acknowledged don't allow people to run if they don't know English then most people are not represented on the board that's a problem that needs to be at least acknowledged and people tell me no no it's impractical it's radical you cannot even mention this but they keep mentioning this thank you I think reality is radical so it's appropriate to say radical things I wanted to add something that I think you haven't emphasized enough in your talk the vast majority of people on the planet do not speak English I don't know if you caught that from the talk they do not I travel a lot I meet with people in many countries and I can confirm this lots and lots of people don't speak English and maybe some of you are imagining well you know maybe like a subsistence farmer in India doesn't speak a word of English but you know what probably not reading wikipedia either because he's too busy surviving and stuff and even if that's true those are not the only people who don't speak English you see people who are educated who are successful and do not speak a word of English either because they don't need to and they get by without it with all the disadvantages that Amir mentioned or because they for whatever reason couldn't pick it up I saw a Turkish engineer in Ankara with a master's degree who could not respond with yes or no or tell me the time in English could not understand what I was saying at all and I have a lot of experience talking to people with low English skills this guy had none and he was an engineer with a master's degree somehow in Korea an affluent westernized country these days in Seoul in Korea I met academics at a research institute PhD at least who understood English they were able to follow my presentation and they're probably able to read articles in English but could not utter a phrase in English couldn't utter a single sentence in English so it's not just the poorest of the poor it's not just rural people in villages it really is the majority of the planet hello I'm sure many others will share anecdote I cannot go and change google or facebook but I want wikipedia to change and that's something we can do there are a lot of things that are broken in the wikimedia projects itself and a lot of bugs have been filed and sleeping for years and to be fair we are not adequately resourced to fix that a simple example is wikipedia.org you visit that from India it shows the top 10 Indian languages and no one can understand how to find the Marathi wikipedia or Hindi wikipedia in fact my colleague shared an experience horrible experience that they had to go through 14 steps to find Marathi wikipedia and you go to Marathi wikipedia you cannot if there is another case people know how to type in English even if they want to search a Marathi word they can't type in Marathi because the keyboard doesn't support the only way they can try to find an article is to type the corresponding English article so if I type an English equivalent I should be able to find at least the local equivalent it's not happening it's something that can be done with wiki data but it's not happening and any rollout that's coming from the wikipedia foundation is actually English first or sometimes only English only I think we should adopt a policy that it should work for all the languages from the beginning if it doesn't work it's actually broken yes applause both of these issues are known to me very well they require work I'm really really trying to put them on the roadmap to actually get fixed both of these things I know very well what you're talking about I'm kind of hopeful I'm kind of hopeful I'm hearing in the current annual planning for wikimedia that we're going to invest more in language so yay I hope that these two things are pretty high priority for me I want to get both of them fixed so yes thank you for speaking about this speak about this to more people yeah we only have five minutes left so there's one more question maybe a second one don't do me okay yeah just to say that language as many other things it's a battlefield during the Cold War people in Cuba were studying Russian not English there's a reason why we need to speak English now and English is kind of a symbol of status in many places you won't find people hiding that speak English but in many countries in America and when I say America I mean from Canada to the land fire you will find people hiding that they speak their native languages so because English gives you status and access to better jobs and these kind of things so I think fighting this is the most complex thing making you understand that yeah knowing English give you access to things but keeping your language or speaking other languages is also an important asset yeah just this yeah you need heroes not it's uncomfortable you need heroes to make themselves uncomfortable you'll see in glossaries to define the terms you want to translate that would help the heroes to make the job I just want to comment about something as well I spent I think about two years translating the media wiki interface into my language but when I do a global search on my user contribution that work is not acknowledged anyway so it's also saying that we don't value translation efforts by contributors and when you go to see other activities I mean this is the first thing we look at when we say for example select volunteers will come to wikimania or look at the activities that volunteers have and if we are not looking at activities such as translate wiki then we are not encouraging them to do those translations so that's also another structural problem that we are facing besides the fact besides the fact that the most of our languages in Africa are not even properly structured using the Latin alphabet and we have even that work to do to say for example how do I write the word which means I'm in a Latin alphabet it doesn't exist so there was a work around that was done which I don't personally think is the right way to do but I can't even have that discussion because we're still busy trying to get my language to be recognized enough for me to do a google search in my language yeah thank you for saying this at the moment all I can say is thank you it's not acknowledged I agree that it could be better acknowledged I will use the opportunity to say thank you to you and everybody else who is here who is investing time in translating yeah we need to fix this thank you for saying this thank you Amir thank you very much