Language is soft power

Language is soft power

语言就是软实力。

Язык — это мягкая сила

Making my way downtown, walking fast, faces pass and I’m h- suddenly struck with a series of random scenes:

• A teenage boy telling his friend “wesh frérot, téma ça, tu vas kiffer” (Yo bruv, check this out, you’ll proper rate it) and pointing to something on his smartphone

• A man trying to ace an interview for an temporary position over speakerphone

• A group of girls with a loud portable speaker cringing and laughing at the fact that their free version of Spotify killed their spontaneous vibe with ads about barbecue gear.

  
  
  

  Three different stances where language was instrumentalised through boisterous invitations, persuasion, negotiation and by sharing cathartic irony.
  
  Let’s see how these interactions were framed:
  
  1) The young man’s speech act was fueled with local slang in a friendly and persuasive invitation, implying tribal undertones and convincedness about his friend’s taste.
  
  2) The interviewee, following protocols and formulas that are typically found in job interviews, made an effort to sound collected and persuasive. Each word was measured.
  
  3) The girls played a spontaneous game of coordinated response to a cringe-inducing event. Their facial expressions and quick analysis of each others’ face were the main driver of the interaction. They operated on “pre-affective attunement”, that quick moment where you scan someone’s face to anticipate how they will react so your emotions surface accordingly.
  
  
  

  Whenever we go outside and overlook random conversations, we ignore the fact that we are witnessing cognitive agents weaving interactions through many layers and dealing with implications at different scales.
  
  Language, that instinctive, yet carefully codified system in which our thoughts are structured, is deployed around us through intentional utterances all the time.
  
  It is, in fact, soft power.
  
  Our world is shaped according to the construction, coordination, hierarchy and competition of these utterances.
  
  Therefore, adopting strategies for our message to be received as we wish becomes a necessity.
  
  
  Having worked on cultural intelligence lately, I couldn’t help but notice that it’s a concept that encourages strategy to deal with the unknown.
  
  What is the unknown? Good question.
  
  In this case, it is the dimension in which you haven’t built a sequence of patterns that allows you to act and speak instinctively because you can’t predict the layout of cultural and linguistic elements.
  
  You don’t have enough data and you are not sufficiently trained.
  
  Just like Large Language Models (LLMs), the more data and the better we are trained, the better the output in next token prediction.
  
  However, acquiring the data you need to know a different cultural arena requires a meta-strategy beyond the ones discussed in the Artraduc’s previous work.
  
  In the Cultural Intelligence Compass, I mentioned how you settle in different cultural arenas by strategically deconstructing the cultural patterns that are familiar in your source culture and reconstructing them in your target culture.
  
  I also mention strategic imitation, not to overthrow your initial identity, but to integrate both worldviews in order to increase agency.
  
  In this sense, you are simply an agent integrating himself/herself in a new arena. Hungry for code assimilation.
  
  
  

A new arena allows you to play again under new rules. If you apply strategic observation and mimetic action as discussed in the CIP, you can turn ordinary life into a meaningful ecosystem where language and external symbols give you the opportunity to weave new channels of internal and external communication.

Let’s see how it is presented in the different channels:

Internal communication:

• You get to know yourself better

• You communicate better with your internal system (feelings, emotions, point of view, knowledge, desires…)

• You get to learn about how you learn (metacognition)

• You get to bridge linguistic systems in a personal arrangement

• You subconsciously train your body and behaviour to respond differently to social interactions
  
  

External communication:

• You improve your understanding of social interactions

• You communicate better with external systems (groups of people, companies…)

• You get to learn about how you can leverage new information in different ways

• You understand what is useful within your set of cultural worldviews to respond effectively

• You create new neural pathways by exposing yourself to new information

As you might suspect, every set of internal and external communication channels is inherently personal since it stems from individual experience.

However, what lies at the core of these channels remains a fascinating mystery.

Elan Barenholtz, interviewed by Curt Jaimungal, distinguishes the linguistic system from the sensory-perceptual system in humans, claiming that we have a qualitative sensation that machines don’t inherently possess. Then, he proposes the existence of a latent space where translation between linguistic and perceptual embeddings might occur…

I pondered on this for a few days and even made a video about it. I mentioned how translators and interpreters are often making deals with that latent space from different perspectives and for different purposes.

Deverbalisation, a concept proposed by Seleskovitch and Lederer during the 1970s, could be seen as analog to the lego metaphor, but in this case, we deal explicitly with language structures, disassembling the ones in our source language and putting them back together in our target language.

If you try it, you’ll immediately realise that it’s a humbling task. Not only because it is mentally taxing but because the way your brain deals with the transformation of information within the latent space requires you to go through an untraced path between your own embeddings (sensory-perceptual and linguistic) in different languages.

Now, if we look at what’s been said above about cultural arenas, internal and external representations and linguistic and sensory-perceptual systems, we can assume that we can leverage patterns to create functional maps.

“The map is not the territory”, as Alfred Korzybski said. As liberating as that idea about language and cognition is, I would say that, for the purpose of leveraging patterns in favour of tweaking your own system of systems, your goal is to create maps.

However, you need to create them for strategic purposes, and if those purposes are connected somehow, even better.

Understanding, referring to and seeing reality through the lens of patterns can be applied to your relationship with language(s) but also with general information and knowledge. If you don’t have a meaningful relationship with patterns, you will have to deal with the external and most superficial layer of the world, away from the tenets of soft power within your own cognitive system.

Patterns are spearheads.


Every multilingual agent, AKA any person speaking/working/thinking and creating in different languages, should leverage patterns to create maps with strategic purposes.

I am currently working on tools and materials to help you with that. They will be available in the Artraduc’s website.

Because there’s no new Renaissance without expanding the way we think.

Because languages have always been an excuse for diversity in cognitive and creative processes.

Because living in a connected world is about mastering cultural patterns through different systems of communication.

A connected, multicultural world is an endless treasure of patterns and worldviews you can integrate to your own Lego set.

Nowadays, if you are someone with a mission and deeply invested in making your work known beyond your linguistic and cultural borders, you have two options: you become a multilingual agent or you outsource your allophone communication with a trusted partner who understands about patterns and language as soft power. That is, if you really want to conquer new readers abroad.

By the way, I am currently working on amplifying the soft power of a French author/creator/researcher in Spanish. He has a brilliant mind and his work deserves to be known by people with similar ideas and interests.

Language as soft power isn’t only about the individual experience, as you can see. It is also about strategic collaboration for integration, collaboration and expansion. The author I am working with benefits from a cognitive agent fully aware of the subtleties of Hispanic readers and I get to work on new maps for my latent space.

Whether you are interested in a different type of relationship with language learning to cross-pollinate your metacognition (learning about how you learn) or a strategic soft power collaboration through translation from English or French into Spanish and a subsequent expansion of your topics through my socials, the Artraduc’s got you covered.

I have to clarify, though. My goals with translation are very specific and this service is provided at a slow pace. To understand my philosophy about translation, check out my video on the topic.

There are other things I would like to say about language as soft power, but I guess I will talk about it on Youtube.

If you made it this far, thank you very much for reading and see you next time.

Hasta pronto,

Javier Arteaga