I’ve personally struggled and have seen people struggle with language all my life. I was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Canada, so that meant being fluent in English and not so fluent in my first language of Cantonese / Chinese. I struggle to communicate properly with my parents in their native language and they sometimes have difficulty communicating in English. I travel a lot to non-English speaking countries and the number of times I’ve had to pull out Google Translate to get through basic tasks like ordering food from a menu and using a washing machine (as recent as yesterday) is uncountable. Similarly, I’ve been learning the Russian language for the past several years, and have had struggles with communicating with people who don’t speak English in that community.

My wife and mother-in-law are Ukrainian, and despite them being fluent in English and their native language, they have their own personal language struggles. With the war in Ukraine, their first language of Russian is being cancelled due to social and geopolitical pressure, and all the Russian language that I’ve learned is quickly becoming irrelevant.

I believe that non-English speakers should learn at least a bit of English as it’s a generally accepted international language and it’ll help them navigate through life, but it’s also unreasonable to expect people to not be able to use basic tools or be shunned from the greater society just because of this language barrier.

Encountering these situations in life myself just reaffirms that we need to build apps in a more accessible, thoughtful way, for the good of humanity. 

 Thank you for sharing your story. It’s inspiring to hear that. I’m bilingual too, English/Spanish, and I have also noticed the struggles with technology that does not come in people’s native language, even when they have some knowledge of that other language.

I know you have done a lot of work on translation. Do you think that aside from translating or thinking of English as a universal language, we may have another universal language: technological symbols? Is it possible that these symbols are much easier to learn and could make products more accessible even if translations are unavailable? 

People may not know the word play, but they recognize the “play” button, or download, send, camera, even emojis. (with some cultural nuances) 

 Nothing beats having translations available, but it doesn’t hurt to use symbols. Like you said, symbols are culturally nuanced, so some may not be universally understood.