Languages enable you to enter a different culture, communicate with a different group of people, and to understand them both. In this day and age, where the internet has given ordinary citizens the power to connect and communicate instantly with people all over the world, the power of knowing different languages has become even more visible.
If you know English and Spanish, for example, not only will you be able to understand the people that speak these two languages and their cultures, but you’re also able to quickly share and get information in these languages. This gives you a greater audience to be reached by your content as well as it gives you a greater number of sources from which to obtain information from different perspectives.
Therefore, being a multilinguist, or a speaker of more than two languages is really advantageous not only for businesses and affairs, but for issues that concern us as human beings.
Due to quick, open, and free communication that we can have with the rest of the world through the internet, we can create, share and spread content to different countries in a matter of seconds. Everyone can write articles, publish photos and videos, and with these, share and create sources for news. Therefore, making every citizen having the chance to become a journalist. And with the knowledge of multiple languages, a journalist of the world.
This has been really important in current events, and citizen journalists have been able to change history. For example, we can see the case of the current crisis in Venezuela. Venezuela has been undergoing more than two months of protests against the current government. Multiple deaths, violence, and violations of their human rights have been documented and filmed by protesters or passer-bys that have been able to publish them in the internet. Since the country’s media is censored, there is no way to know about what is happening out of the internet and social media sources within it. There was even a controversial case where the government said in official media that a protester died because he accidentally made a bomb he was carrying explode upon himself. But people on the spot filmed what happened, and he wasn’t seen with a bomb. Only a gunshot was heard and he was found unconscious on the ground and carried away by other protesters. The police were the ones seen with weapons, not the protesters. If it wasn’t because of citizen journalists, this injustice would’ve never been known.
And this crisis wouldn’t have had such an impact in the international community, which is trying to find a peaceful solution and support the people demanding a change right now, if it were not because of bilinguals. What citizen journalists have shared online has reached more people, countries and politicians, because they have shared the content in English and other languages besides just Spanish, which is the official language of Venezuela. If it weren’t because of the spread of information in multiple languages, less of the crisis would have been known and discussed by other countries.
Therefore, we can see that being multilingual is not something that might help businesses expand themselves on foreign markets or something that will help foreign relations develop, but also it is key for citizen journalism and the spread of information and news around the world. This way even ordinary citizens that know more than one language can be the catalysts of a big change and help people with their multilinguist voice.
Writer Maria Eugenia Padron is Spanish and French Language and Translation Intern at Modlingua, India's No1. certified translation and Language service providers based in New Delhi
Video Links on Citizen Journalism http://www.modlingua.com/videos.html
