In the “Übersetzerportal“, I found the following article.
Let me cite:
This was the first time Arabian experts, during a UN study, examined the political, economic and cultural situation of the 280 million persons living in the 22 member states of the Arabian League. Among other things, the final report says: “The situation is even worse when it comes to translating books from other countries. Currently, only 330 books are translated in the Arabian world each year; that is about a fifth of the number of books translated into Greek. Spain alone translates as many books every year as have been translated into Arabian in the last 1,000 years. Mind you, the Arabian Countries have the enormous practical advantage of having a shared language.
(From the “Arab Human Development Report 2002“– which was written with the support of the UN Development Program, UNDP).
This makes me thoughtful. Here is another citation from the article:
The per-capita income of Arabians is the second smallest of the world. Only the African countries south of the Sahara are worse off. Consequently, the fabled oil-riches of the Arabian world are just a myth. The gross domestic product of all Arabian countries, that is including the oil-exporting countries, was only 531.2 million US dollars in 1999 – which is less than that of Spain.
The researchers conclude that the primary reason for the Arabian societies being hindered in their development is their own deficits: lack of political freedom, suppression of women and an isolation from the exchange of ideas that drowns all creativity. The study was mostly done by Arabian intellectuals and experts, which means that you cannot write off their results as western arrogance.
I also read about the “books translated” in “brand eins” – and the more recent numbers were no different. Nothing has changed in this relation. Here is a comparison: the persons speaking Greek as their main language are probably considerably less than 20 million worldwide. As opposed to this, the number of persons speaking primarily Arabian has increased and is probably now more than 300 million. In a nutshell, that means: a Greek gets 75 times as many books translated into his language than an Arab. Surprisingly enough, the economic situation in the Arabic countries, too, did not really undergo significant change over the last 15 years.
In the last millennium, the availability of technology and media (the printing press –Buchpresse) was a formative factor for the development of various empires, kingdoms and domains (and of the thus developing public sector with the long-term consequence of democracy emerging). Today, this role has been taken over by the internet. However, it is not dominated by text, but by sound and image. Consequently, many more podcasts are listened to than text posts are read. And we have a mass consumption of videos. The tendency is on the incline.
Hence, the number of illiterates increases in the American/European cultural circle, as well. In the USA, they already demand as part of the “barrier free internet” that, for instance, civil office pages must be comprehensible and easy to use not only for handicapped persons, but also for “functional illiterates”. With good reason. While in Germany, according to the “Federal Association for Literacy and Basic Education”, only around 7.5 million persons (less than 10 % of the population) are considered illiterates (source), the number is higher than 15% in the USA. Here, too, the tendency is on the incline both in the USA and Germany.
As you see, the future will belong to the podcast, the video and the illiterate. It is quite possible that the competence to use written language in everyday life as it is a matter of course in our (contemporary) social environment might get lost, as, for instance the competence to calculate or add, subtract, multiply, divide, or extract a second root on paper has been lost or forgotten. Why don’t you just try? For instance when you want to do the winnings calculation after your game of cards without using the App on your iPad.
For the mostly Islamic Arabian world, podcasts should not be a problem for religious reasons. Strangely, though, the Islam also seems to have no problem with videos (see not only ISIS), despite the fact that videos are, after all, just a series of images. But then: basically, we are just talking files consisting of zeroes and ones, be it a document, a spreadsheet, an image, an audio or a video. But apparently, the videos can be tolerated by the religion? Does that mean videos might be the beginning of the end of Islam?
And it might just be that the internet creates a kind of illiteracy that makes the Arabian world again competitive, thus starting a new era for the Arabian World.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
“Functional illiteracy” is if you cannot use written language in everyday life in a way that is considered self-evident in your social context.
P.S.1
I took the picture from Wikipedia – the licence and the author are:
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