Chinas technologischer Aufstieg in den 1990er Jahren

Um die heutige Stellung von China im Bereich Robotik zu verstehen muss man zurückgehen in die 1990er Jahre weil dort das Fundament gelegt wurde. Künstliche Intelilgenz und Robotik wird zu 95% in der Fachsprache Englisch publiziert. Alle wichtigen Konferenzen und Fachzeitschriften verwenden diese Sprache. Obwohl China eines der größten Länder der Erde ist, spielt die chinesische Sprache international und besonders in der Forschung keine Rolle.

Als Folge der Dominanz des Englischen hat sich China an die Welt angepasst aber nicht umgekehrt. In allen chinesischen Top universitäten stehen in den Bibliotheken die selben Bücher über Robotik und Künstliche Intelligenz wie auch im M.I.T oder in Cambridge. Also das berühmte Russel/Norvig buch "AIMA" und die Zeitschriften der ACM. Obwohl die englische Sprache sich fundamental von Mandarain unterscheidet haben alle Forscher in China sich diese Zweitsprache angeeignet. Dadurch erlangte China über Nacht Zugriff auf die vorhandene wissenschaftliche Literatur im Original. Anstatt von null anzufangen und zu philosophieren wie man Maschinen das denken beibringt, haben chinesische Forscher einfach die Original Proceedings der Dartmouth Conference von 1956 gelesen, dann die Reports über den Shakey Roboter von 1972 bis hin zum bekannten Buch von Sebastian Thrun über "Probabilistic robotics". 

Selbst heute wo China über eigene Robotik Unternehmen verfügt und eigene Forschung auf diesem Gebiet betreibt, gibt es nur sehr wenig unbedeutende chinsischsprachige Robotik-Zeitschriften. Selbst innerhalb Chinas werden diese nicht beachtet. Man orientiert sich unverändert an den großen internationalen Publikationen die passiv gelesen werden aber auch aktiv mit eigenen Beiträgen auf Englisch bereichert werden. Dadurch ist China zu einem wichtigen Akteur in der Forschung geworden und sorgte dafür dass die englische Sprache weiter an Bedeutung gewann.

Anders als während des Kalten Krieges wo es neben der US Spitzenforschung in der UDSSR eine russischesprachige Wissenschaftswelt gab, gibt es derzeit nur eine einzige globale Wissenssschaftscommunity die sich in Englisch austauscht. Mag sein dass ökonomisch gesehen, China und die USA Konkurrenten sind, auf der Ebene der Spitzenforschung arbeiten beide eng zusammen. In den Fachzeitschriften werden die selben Themen besprochen, es wird in der selben Sprache geredet und es gibt die selben Ziele, nähmlich den technischen Fortschritt voranzutreiben.

Learning french vocabulary with the Zettelkasten method

 

First thing to do is to organize the content by subjects. That means words are not simply structured from A to Z but there is a hierarchy available.

In contrast to the Leitner system there is no need to put the cards into bins. Instead the user is using a simple two pane folding editor which is organizing the content in a 1d array. The user has to type in the vocabulary manual and then use the pageup pagedown key to navigate in the information. This allows to memorize the information fast.

Suppose the user likes to know how to greet someone. Then he has to navigate to “2 Introductions” and there is a section for “Salutation”. The correct word is bonjour or salut to say hello.

Hindi as a world language

A map of the Wikimedia foundation shows the readership of the famous encyclopedia for each country in the world, https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/animations/wivivi/wivivi.html The Hindi language has a wide distribution all over the world. It is used by India to retrieve information, but the language is also spoken in the US, China. The overall population which speaks hindi is 560 million according to the info box, but in reality it's much more. It's only a conservative estimation and the number is growing. Hindi has a good chance to become the worlds famous language. In india alone, over 50 million pageviews each month are generated by Hindi speaking users. That means, they are using the WIkipedia in their mother toque to retrieve and write information about their own country and the world in general. The overall population in India is 1300 million which means, that in the future the amount of pageviews in the Hindi language will grow.

Is English needed in the computer industry?

There is a common misconception available which claims, that English is a world language and is spoken by million of people. Especially in the tech-industry the situation has changed since a while. Most international programmers doesn't speak English anymore but they are preferring their local language which is Japanese. The famous stackoverflow website https://ja.stackoverflow.com/ for asking questions about the latest Apple programming languages like Swift isn't written in English, but it's recommended to write in normal Japanese characters.

The same is true for spanish speaking programmers. They have accumulated on their website https://es.stackoverflow.com/ around 100k questions with all sorts of programming related questions about Android, PHP and Javascript issues. The localized version of Stackoverflow have became successful because most computer engineers are not interested in learning English and finds it more comfortable in communicating in their mothertonque. This helps to lower the entry barrier. Sometimes, the function names in the newly written Swift programs are also written in Spanish characters which makes the sourcecode more readable and is recommeneded for international oriented projects. This helps foreign students to not only learn the the programming language itself but they will understand the Spanish alphabet much better.

In contrast, the former trend of using English as a lingua france in computer science has come to an end. The English speaking stackoverflow website struggles in finding new users and the quality of the questions has lowered since a while. The reason is that the English language is used as a colloquial language in which non-sense questions are formulated.

The recommended way in using the Spanish language inside existing C# is given in the following example:

public string Jugadas()
{
    string variacion = "";
    if (turno == 1)
    {
        variacion = "X";
        turno = 2;
    }

The function names and the variables as well are written in the spanish language. Jugadas means “interpreter” in English and variacion can be translated into “oscilator”. Unfortunately, the Java keywords are written in plain english. For example “public” could be translated into “público” which has over the u character a wonderful apostrophe which looks nice on a 4k resolution screen.

Why learning English is a waste of time

English is sometimes promoted as an easy to learn world language which gives people access to all the academic knowledge in world. All the books, most websites and even movies are created native for an English speaking audience so it makes sense to invest a bit of time in become fluent either in the UK or the US dialect. The problem with learning English is, that the vocabulary is hard to memorize. For example, if a native speaker of French likes to write a letter in English, he needs to lookup a word in the French to English dictionary. For example, he knows that he like to start the sentence with the normal “bonjour”, but what he doesn't know is how to translate this into English.

If somebody is not able to speak the language very well, he doesn't know how to translate a sentence into English. He can ask a bidirectional translater which explains, that bonjour is translated into “good morning” but can the word used in the same way like the french vocabulary? In most cases the answer is no and the French speaker will make his first serious grammar issue and the reader of the letter will recognize, that he is not familiar with the English very well. What he is producing, isn't a letter in fluent English, but his typed in words would read like a beginner translation from French to English.

The better idea is to avoid the foreign language from the beginning and write the entire letter in the native language which is easier to read and will show that the speaker has learned his own language on an expert level. Even if the other side isn't able to understand French he will notice, that the letter was written well and he can ask somebody who can translate it. In the modern age, the translator can be an automatic software.

Reason why English is better

Only a fraction of papers are published in English. Large parts of the EU, China, US and India are using their own local English in University content. For example, in Germany nearly all classes at the university are German-only classes, the same is true for other EU-countries. But why should everybody speak English, if he is great in his own language, and doesn't won't to do something else?

The answer is given in the book “Tucker, R. "Mathematical and scientific library of the late Charles Babbage." CF Hodgson and Son, London (1872).”, it is a very historic book, published 150 years before and contains all the books and journal papers, Charles Babbage was aware of it. Apart from the content itself, which is mostly about Astronomy, Mathematics and Optics, is one thing remarkable: The literature list contains many different languages. There are some books written in French, in German, English, Latin, and sometimes the language is Italian, It seems, that Babbage was familiar with all these dialect and his first profession was not computing but philology. Sure, all of these languages like German, French and so forth are very nice languages, and in theory it is possible to express everything with it. But, are these languages superior to English? No they don't. English is according to many experiments, the easiest language to learn for foreign speakers. A basic vocabulary consists of not more then 1000 words which is enough to travel through an english speaking and get in conversation with the locals. Sure, nobody in the world likes English very much, but from the purpose of using a language as tool it is the best.

The funny thing with English is, that the language is very tolerant with errors. That means, even a beginner makes lots of typing and grammar errors he will understand by a native speaker. In contrast, if somebody speaks French on an expert level, it is very hard to understand him. It is not necessary to give English a warm welcome, because there is no real alternative to it. But what is possible is to make clear who a world will look like which contains of 100 languages and more. The result is, that the people are not understanding each other. If someone is interested in hiding knowledge and encrypting information the only thing what he need is to write down his academic paper in a perfect form of the German language, and around 6 billion people worldwide are no longer able to get access to it.