culture of translation agency
TRANSCRIPT
Understanding the internet culture; A chronicle of non-English-native speaker.
How this culture effects Translation Agency's Work
It’s a warm and entertaining culture on internet, and sometimes we feel more cared and relate to whatever appeals to us at that moment. It is easy to forget that the internet is an international and multi-lingual phenomenon. I am curious as to whether the same patterns exist in other languages.I would like to talk about Memes. The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, the Selfish Gene, as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads.Memes are ideas, behaviours, or style that spreads from person to people within a culture. It acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.
An internet meme is an activity, concept, catchphrase or piece of media which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via
the internet. Such as posting a photo of people lying down (planking) in public places and uploading a short video of people dancing to a famous dance. An internet meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. It make take the form of an image, hyperlink, video, picture, website or hashtag. It may be just a word or phrase, including an intentional misspelling. This is considered as an English-language internet culture. Has it originated in other languages?
Meme could spread extremely fast. It may take one day to spread across a large portion of the internet and last for months or even years, followed by all kinds of parodies, due to the huge user base and large number of social websites. These small movements tend to spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, or news sources.
English is the universal language on the internet, but it has no official status and it will never have. And from hind sight, English can lose its position as a widely used universal language in two-fold possibilities ways, such as, probably beyond belief, a new empire emerges and all things we know in our various cultural sects are denounced, forcing us to align our language and culture with new
empire. And secondly, more realistically, the reach of the internet and machine translation applications, Google is working hard to establish a database with major languages in various countries. I like to believe that their effort is not based on the popularity of the language in the world, but of that small or large nation.The significance of the internet has grown rapidly in all fields of human life, including not only research and education but also marketing and trade as well as entertainment.The majority of the internet culture is in English. But the internet has an incredible reach, to corner pockets of the world, that includes a large number of nations and cultures living a completely different format of life from anybody’s.For a native English speaker to imagine their native tongue was, French, Mongolian, Swedish, Polish, Japanese or Mandarin, an interesting topic on the matter was shared and discussed upon. Check out this interesting mind opening Reddit thread on how a multicultured community of redditors gave their insights on the question: “What is internet culture like in your first language?”The most upvoted answers focused on laughter, which was depicted in characters, letters and numbers.In Thai, the number 5 is pronounced “ha”, so instead of saying “LOL” or “haha”, people just write “55555”. So if you see that anywhere on internet, it’s not some crazy number cult, just Thai people laughing.In Chinese, 5 is “wu”, and so it’s sometimes used exactly opposite to you – 55555 would be “wuwuwuwuwu”, meaning “boohoohoohoohoo”, crying.Similarly, 8 is pronounced “ba” so people use “88” to say “bye bye”
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