I Speak Not Good English

I can’t imagine moving to another country and having to work a menial job just because my language skills aren’t very good. I know a guy from Ukraine whose degree is in biomedical engineering and he’s currently working the graveyard shift cleaning a mall because that’s the only kind of work he could get because he couldn’t speak English. It’s also interesting how – and confess to having done this – people will have skewed perceptions of people’s intelligence and skills because of language limitations. When I was in Germany, I could always tell when people thought I was just stupid because I wasn’t able to communicate well.
The Babelfish idea (see “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) is brilliant, though disappointingly fictional. Noting, of course, that along with the fantastic experience of being able to understand everyone’s language through instant translation, we would then also be able to understand all their really horrible poetry.