“Although offices have changed in some ways during the past decade, they may need to be entirely rethought and transformed for a post-Covid-19 world.” “Few offices have been intentionally designed to support specific organisational priorities,” points out McKinsey. With this in mind, the imperative for office owners is to make their space work harder at delivering the productivity that people – and their organisations – want to achieve. One common finding, for example, is that ‘focus work’ can be better served working from home, while ‘collaborative work’ is often better done at the office. Being more productive at home is only the case for some kinds of work.
However, the true picture is more nuanced than that. And many benefits flow from online access, especially for marginalized people, as it gives them the ability to communicate and learn.With many landlords wondering what they can do to make the office as appealing as possible in the new world of hybrid working, could ‘productivity as a service’ be the trend for 2021?Īs corporates consider a return to the office after the pandemic – for some of the time at least – it’s the ‘P word’ that’s on everybody’s lips: productivity.įor some, working from home has reinforced the perception that they can be more productive when they are in their own space – with the challenge for employers and for office owners being to persuade them otherwise. This technology is the breakthrough necessary to end the language barriers facing Kurdish-speaking people, as well as every other human barred from the Internet because the modern world has decided not to go to the effort of translating their native language. Minor languages would receive a special boost under this scheme, because computers do not care how many people speak a language. The ability to use artificial intelligence for translation instead of multilingual people would speed up work considerably, and allow, finally, for the translation of large swaths of the Internet into every language imaginable.
The creation of effective natural language processing software would be a massive boon to efforts to break down language barriers. Natural language processing is the use of smarter artificial intelligence to mimic this complex process, promising to vastly improve computer translation ability. It is far above the level of current computers, with much more nuance and variability. Humans process language in a very holistic way, mixing together perceptions of intonation, feeling, and memories to organically arrive at meaning. More advanced programs can look at short phrases rather than words, which slightly improves the relevance of the translation, but this is still a far cry from humans' impressive skill with language. Currently, translation software works by comparing inputted language against vast dictionaries that rigorously check tense, form, spelling, and meaning, then give their best guess as to a direct translation.
A more detailed look at this technology can be found in this article on the subject, but essentially, natural language processing is an attempt to make computers read language like humans do. In the longer term, a more efficient, complete solution is to invest in artificial intelligence research to develop natural language processing software.
This is a difficult project, requiring significant commitment of time, money, and manpower, but is the only effective short-term solution to the systemic barriers facing Kurdish people online. These companies should also hire several people who speak both Kurdish and either English or Arabic, to begin the work of translating major platforms and making basic online services available in Kurdish. In the short term, it is important to send Kurdish-speaking liaisons and translators to Kurdish communities, to build a better dictionary and, using that, more adept translation programs.
To remedy the language barrier that Kurdish-speaking people face in trying to access the Internet, which for many is practically a necessity, especially among disadvantaged groups, we propose a series of paths forward for major Internet companies, which are best equipped to deal with the problem.