Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Random Notes: Multiculturalism in Korea, and Crowdsourced Translation

An interesting article about multiculturalism from one of the Underwoods - one of the foreign families with the longest histories in Korea.  Most interesting quotes: "Koreans are hospitable to guests to a fault"... but "If you stay too long, Koreans become uncomfortable with you" and "having one million temporary foreign residents does not make Korea a multicultural society"

"Homogeneity... is the cornerstone that has helped Korea survive adversity.  But there is a downside, too."  To find out what the downside is, read the article.

It reminded me of a very interesting: academic, but worth downloading the .PDF-article sent to me by Matt, from Popular Gusts, also about multiculturalism, and how Korea, while it has tolerated other cultures, has always done so on the assumption of Korean culture's superiority.   Is that real multiculturalism?  Who knows?  Is surrendering one's idea of cultural superiority a necessary or good thing?  I suppose it depends on which values a country as set as its priorities.  Discuss amongst yourselves.

Crowd-sourced translation is an awesome idea that I'd love to see take off: crowd-sourcing means throwing something out on the internet, and letting users do it, for example, the way Wikipedia was built. Here's an article about it, and here's a website that does it: Looah.  If you want to be a translator, and need practice, if you're bilingual, and think some English blog content should be in Korean, or some Korean online content should be in English, here's the place to submit, or translate.

I've been reading about rhetoric, logic, and the different kinds of appeals one makes during a debate.  This led me to a funny moment of brain-weird, where I was watching this video, and analysing these two kids' appeals to different kinds of authority, and attempts to establish superior ethos.

6 comments:

CeilingofStars said...

So the kids' arguments boiled down to:

-This is what I said, so it must be right.
-I said it first, so I must be right.
-I'm older than you, so I must be right.
-I can tell your mom and she'll take you home, so I must be right.

LOL. Did I miss any?

Roboseyo said...

That's about it... but what are the latin names of each of those appeals?

Unknown said...

"I'm older then you, so I must be right."

is Ad Verecundiam or appeal to authority.

"I said it first, so I must be right."

Don't really know on this one, could be a few different ones depending on how it was worded. Most likely similar to the above appeal to authority or possibly tradition.

"This is what I said, so it must be right."
Appeal to authority with the speaker assuming their the authority. Could also be Genetic Fallacy.

"I can tell your mom and she'll take you home, so I must be right."

That's just an attempt at bullying someone.

Hannah said...

I could barely understand a dang thing these kids were saying. Maybe I don't spend enough time around children...

Translation quotes said...

Meanwhile, here in Daegu, we had some rain last night, but all day today we had sun, blue skies, and puffy white clouds. And no, I am not kidding. Don't really know on this one, could be a few different ones depending on how it was worded. Most likely similar to the above appeal to authority or possibly tradition.

Roboseyo said...

"That's what I said, so it must be right" could also be begging the question.

"I can tell your mom and she can take you home" is Argumentum ad Baculum - appeal to force/threats or "appeal to the stick" - "I'm right because I'm stronger" or "I'm right because I can cause worse consequences than you can"

but I might be wrong.