Description

Imagine you are in charge of a large international media corporation. Your employees live in different countries, hail from a diversity of backgrounds, and have a variety of points of view. You recently decided that you would like to improve communication and discussion within the company. In particular, you would like to invest in some software addons to your email system to enhance the exchange of ideas among employees. This softwarebased strategy involves a few steps. Your first step in improving communication is to purchase translation software. This software takes sentences from an email and transforms those sentences into sentences with equivalent meanings in a different language. Moreover, recent impressive innovations in translation technology - developed by Davidson, Inc. - enable the software to provide translations of sentences in languages for which there is no prefabricated translation manual. This feature - radical translation - uses information about the context in which the email was written, as well as the sentences in other emails and their context of writing, to determine the meanings of the sentences. By determining the meaning of foreign sentences, translation software enables those speaking different languages to understand one another. It thus removes one roadblock to deliberation and communication within the company: that an employee might not be able to decipher the propositional content of another employee's sentences.