Translation pls - Part (II)

In a similar vein to my post "Translation pls", I've discovered through a friend this blog post about Facebook and Tibetan at the Overlooking Tibet blog.

The writer considers the 'Facebook wall' to be personal space, which some people might take issue with, since it is still a public space where one broadcasts information to people on their friends list. However, the blog post alludes to wider expectations that American (and I'd say most English speakers for that matter) have that things be made available in English.

In any case, I could spend hours talking about this, but I'm off to attend a seminar at La Trobe Uni on Tibetic languages by the eminent Tibetologist Nicolas Tournadre, whose Manual of Standard Tibetan I own a copy of.

Très coincidental. Well maybe just a little bit.

Translation pls

This post is actually about code switching on one's Facebook wall and negotiating this particularly virtual space.
[EDIT: I've made a few changes to the original because it sounded a lot more aggressive than I intended it to be.]

Earlier this week, I'd posted this on an Australian friend's Facebook wall:

Quoi de neuf? What's this about living semi-permanently in XXXX?

This was in response to something I'd read about him moving back to XXXX. I used the French for 'What's new?' at the start because he's living in France and I knew that he had been learning French. I didn't want to write the whole post in French because I wasn't sure of his current level.

However, his reply was about 4 lines long, completely in French. It was actually a piece of bad news, but I assume he felt comfortable enough to put it on his wall, even if most of his friends don't speak French. His switching from English to French made me feel like he was privileging me with the response / information. Of course I didn't know how much his other friends already knew and thought that maybe he'd already mentioned something before and didn't want to repeat himself in English.

So following his lead, I continued the conversation in French with a comment expressing my condolences.

Within the hour, another friend had commented:

Translation pls?

A few hours later, there was another:

English, please. ;-)

Now, if comments like these appeared on my own wall I would be really annoyed for two main reasons. One, I perceive the wall on my Facebook profile as belonging to me - I mean, it's 'my' wall. I own it. (And Mark Zuckerberg owns me, but that's a different story.)  Sure, it's designed for public viewing, but I still perceive it as a space in which someone should be allowed to express thoughts / vent frustrations / share news in whatever language they choose and without having to explain themselves. It's fine for people to post on other people's walls, but they still have to be mindful that they are in someone else's 'personal space'.

For instance, I once posted a link to an article about the 2009 Xinjiang riots involving Hans and Uyghurs. A 'friend' on my Facebook (who I don't know very well and who also happens to be one of the annoying commenters above) replied to my post with a comment that I thought was somewhat racist and potentially insulting to my Uyghur friends, so I deleted it. Offended, this 'friend' accused me of denying him his freedom of speech. I said, sure he could say anything he liked, but just not on my wall. I then proceeded to block him.

Two, if someone posts in a particular language, I assume it's because they have a particular target audience in mind (also assuming they're not being a show-off douche). When one of my friends who lived in Japan for a bit posts in Japanese, I know it's intended for his fellow Japanese-speaking friends - the shared linguistic code serves as an in-group marker demarcating a group of friends within his larger network of friends. Some people might consider it rude to everyone else on the friends list, but I liken it to when people post quotes from a TV show, knowing that the only people who will get the joke are fellow viewers of that show. It therefore strikes me as somewhat rude when other people demand a translation for posts in a language other than English, like it's their right to understand everything that's on the wall. Admittedly there are times when people, including myself, make posts that sound a little cryptic in order to fish for questions or comments, but the idea is, if someone posts is in a language that I don't speak, I just ignore it, because it probably wasn't meant for me anyway!

I don't know how my friend felt about those requests / demands for English translations, but I can't imagine he would have wanted to repeat what he'd just said. His lack of a response to their comments seems to confirm my own suspicions that he didn't want to repeat himself.

In any case, here's a simple solution to people who still think it's rude that people post in languages they don't understand:

Just learn the language.

Or just learn to use Google Translate.