How has translation become a tool for shaping the destiny of languages in the age of digital globalization?
From 7 to 11 July 2025, Geneva hosted the WSIS+20 High-Level Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in collaboration with UNESCO, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Among its key sessions, the symposium “Leaders TalkX: From Local to Global: Preserving Culture and Language in the Digital Age” reaffirmed that linguistic and cultural diversity is no longer a cultural luxury or an isolated concern but has become an integral part of the struggle for survival in a globalized information society. In this context, the debate is renewed about the crucial role translation plays in the life—and even the fate—of languages: in their emergence, development, decline, and sometimes rebirth.
Throughout history, translation has never been a neutral process. It has always been an active force in the dynamism of languages between life and death. The most famous example of this is Latin, which dominated Europe for centuries before beginning to decline in the face of rising national languages. Its fall was not due to structural weaknesses or limited expressive capacity but rather to the vast translation movement that transferred its knowledge and thought into French, Italian, Spanish, and English. Paradoxically, translation here played a dual role: it contributed to disseminating Latin thought while simultaneously accelerating the abandonment of Latin itself as a living language of communication.
A similar scenario occurred with the Coptic language in Egypt. Following the introduction of Arabic after the Islamic conquest, a widespread translation movement began—first with religious texts and later with scientific and intellectual works—translating them from Coptic into Arabic. As this movement advanced, Coptic gradually receded from the spheres of daily communication and knowledge production until it became confined to church rituals. In this case, translation was not merely a cultural bridge but an effective instrument in displacing one language and enabling the rise of another, within a broader context of social and political transformation.
On the other hand, translation can serve as a means of revitalizing languages, as is currently happening with the Amazigh language in North Africa. After decades of marginalization and confinement to oral use in villages and mountainous areas, organized translation efforts—alongside education and media initiatives—have revived Amazigh in several countries, such as Morocco and Algeria. Intellectuals and translators have begun rendering literary works, historical texts, and media content into Amazigh, contributing to the modernization of its written structure and the reformulation of its vocabulary and terminology to meet contemporary needs. As a result, Amazigh has regained its legal status as an official and living language within the national linguistic fabric.
From this, it can be argued that the fear of languages disappearing is misplaced. Languages do not die because others overwhelm them, but because they isolate themselves from the world, refuse to engage with the knowledge of others, or fail to develop. The history of languages has shown that translation is not merely a means of communication between peoples but a creative force that shapes, revives, or erodes. A language into which knowledge is not translated—and which does not absorb what is translated into it—condemns itself to decline and extinction.
In the age of digital globalization, translation has become a tool for civilizational survival rather than a cultural luxury. Weak and marginalized languages are no longer threatened solely by the dominance of major languages, but also by the lack of translation into and from them. This was clearly emphasized by the WSIS+20 Summit, which stressed that the future of linguistic and cultural diversity now hinges on societies’ ability to harness translation technologies and linguistic artificial intelligence applications to support endangered languages and revive forgotten intellectual heritage.
The cycle of birth, death, and rebirth of languages, as recorded in human history, inevitably passes through translation. Therefore, defending any language is not about shielding it from external influences but about translating it for others—and translating other cultures’ knowledge into it. Only through this mechanism do languages survive, and only through this strategy do nations remain present in the memory of the world and the current of history.
Dr. Marwa El-Shinawy – Academic and writer
