4. Translators in a global community

The popular yet paradoxical idea of a diverse global community raises questions about language and translation. Would a global community with a global language lose its other languages? Would a global community without a global language be able to interact efficiently across thousands of linguistic frontiers? One strategy that might make global community compatible with linguistic diversity is panlingual transparency via aspectual phased translation. With it, translators translate aspects of a discourse at each phase of a multiphase process, rather than translating the discourse in its entirety in a single act. In an initial simple model, communication in a global community relies on translation partitioned into four phases; the translation in each is either linguistic or cultural, but not both. A source discourse is translated culturally (within the source language), then linguistically (from the source language to a global representation), then linguistically (from the global representation to the target languages), then culturally (within the target languages). Such partitioning could elevate productivity by facilitating divisions of labor between professional and lay translators and between human and machine translators, and by letting monolinguals act as translators.