Time is for international match-ups

On 01 Nov 2007 | By Thuan | Permalink

If your interest in cinema makes you scan movie cast lists, you may have noticed that some of the characters of recent blockbuster productions are played by European actors. Mads Mikkelsen played the bad guy in Casino Royale. It was his first appearance on the international scene. Before that, the Danish actor made most of his career in northern Europe, appeared in small and brilliant movies like After the wedding (check his IMDb profile). Not the same age, but the same fate, Gaspard Ulliel incarnated Hannibal Lecter in the last settlement of the Hannibal movie franchise... I remember spotting this talented French 20-something-year-old actor when he began in Le Pacte des Loups or Embrassez qui vous voudrez. And what about Monica Bellucci and Lambert Wilson? They were Persephone and Merovingian in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolution. Two other illustrations of what the movie industry is doing nowadays.

Does Hollywood lack of talented actors? It could be but I doubt that, because the current socio-economical situation is to multicultural match-ups. Movie producers are catching on with the "Think global, act local" rule. In order to reach more international audience, their movies need to show local faces, bring in some French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian or whatever alien blood. And it's not that bad — check out Brokeback mountain directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee.

In the Internet, this situation lies since its genesis as the word "Internet" stands for "inter-network" but also for "international network". Bloggers who want to expand their site into a profitable micro-publication know it too well. Seth Godin, who is praised as a marketing guru, tips people to "write in English... better, write in Chinese" in a long post entitled "How to get more traffic for your blog". Again, for the same reason: the world is shrinking but it turns out the small village is full of people speaking different languages.

To fill the gap, translation machines aren't enough because they're not evolving and coping with cultural evolutions faster enough. Of course, you could guess the alternative is Traduwiki. After all, Traduwiki's mission is to enable real people fill the gap between cultures by themselves. But the real thing is, Traduwiki is just a drop in the ocean of what could be done. We need more innovative services, something that will interconnect between networks and medias to give more speed and accuracy to our daily conversations. Something that can react as fast as we do, and change as we want. Something for example like a instant messaging service that is able to translate while we write. We're far from there, but we truly believe we need more of those services. The results would be people knowing each other better, and that's not too much of a cliché.