"A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services"
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Global commerce, Sapir reminds us, is not just containers and contracts; it is the constant, expensive friction of meaning. His example of the multinational firm sounds almost mundane, which is precisely why it lands. By choosing the corporate world rather than poetry or diplomacy, Sapir smuggles a radical linguistic point into the language of budgets: translation is not an optional cultural nicety, it is structural overhead. Modernity doesn’t erase linguistic difference; it itemizes it.
The intent is quietly corrective. In Sapir’s era, industrial expansion and international bureaucracy were accelerating, while many elites still treated language as a transparent conduit for “real” ideas. He pushes back by framing translation as labor - ongoing, specialized, and costly - implying that meaning is not easily detachable from the particular system that carries it. If language were merely a set of labels, you wouldn’t need “enormous” resources to move messages across borders.
The subtext also cuts toward power. Firms can pay for translation; smaller actors often can’t. That asymmetry shapes who gets heard, who gets to negotiate, whose mistakes become “miscommunication” and whose become failure. Sapir’s sentence anticipates a world where globalization depends on invisible linguistic workers and infrastructures, and where the myth of frictionless international exchange survives only because someone is paid to fight the friction.
Contextually, it fits Sapir’s broader project in linguistics and anthropology: language as a formative social technology, not just a medium. The boardroom becomes his proof that linguistic diversity is not sentimental heritage but a hard constraint on how the world actually runs.
The intent is quietly corrective. In Sapir’s era, industrial expansion and international bureaucracy were accelerating, while many elites still treated language as a transparent conduit for “real” ideas. He pushes back by framing translation as labor - ongoing, specialized, and costly - implying that meaning is not easily detachable from the particular system that carries it. If language were merely a set of labels, you wouldn’t need “enormous” resources to move messages across borders.
The subtext also cuts toward power. Firms can pay for translation; smaller actors often can’t. That asymmetry shapes who gets heard, who gets to negotiate, whose mistakes become “miscommunication” and whose become failure. Sapir’s sentence anticipates a world where globalization depends on invisible linguistic workers and infrastructures, and where the myth of frictionless international exchange survives only because someone is paid to fight the friction.
Contextually, it fits Sapir’s broader project in linguistics and anthropology: language as a formative social technology, not just a medium. The boardroom becomes his proof that linguistic diversity is not sentimental heritage but a hard constraint on how the world actually runs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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