Language Barrier

This morning, I read Fukushima workers face “nightmarish world of high radiation, difficult terrain” which includes a depressing video filed by John Sparks with Channel 4 News.

There is, of course, the depressing story about corporate deceptions regarding the true state of the situation. And how the operation is being managed by 600 subcontractors that mostly don't seem to know what one another are doing. But I was struck by this statement regarding the language barrier:

Communication on-site is difficult. With about 30 foreign experts in charge of key bits of equipment, there's no common language. And the masks make it that much tougher. Sometimes the workers take them off to speak to each other.

"Few of us speak English or French, so the language barrier is higher than expected. We talk to them through translators, but we know we're being exposed to radiation while we do it."

This is exactly what Esperanto was intended to fix. Instead of empowering everyone to be able to seamlessly communicate with everyone else, we have ended up with English as an international language -- which works pretty well for big businesses and corporations to make money, but doesn't really solve the problems that people have on the ground. It's depressing that, 125 years after a workable solution was unveiled to the world, we still have a real language barrier that is killing people.