Rationale

BRICS in a multipolar world:

The need of international understanding

BRICS countries represent a multicentric alternative to the actual unipolar world scene. The very nature of such a multipolar association requires the establishment of effective ways of mutual understanding, in order to establish common objectives.

Alternative proposals for international communication:

Hegemonic language

The present world scene is dominated by a group of developed countries under the leadership of the United States, with English as a hegemonic language for international communication. All the other languages are accordingly relegated to regional or bilateral meetings.

Non-hegemonic language

An alternative to the use of the hegemonic language could be the overall use of a common language for international communications. In order to avoid hegemonisms, this language should not be associated with any particular country, as is the case of esperanto and other artificial languages. A problem remains in this case: Anyone who is speaking the international language cannot use at the same time his/her own language.

Translators

International organisations are currently resorting to identify several languages which cover the communication needs of the participating people, offering instantaneous translation among them. For example, the Pan-African Parliament offers translation in/from English, French, Arabic and Portuguese, while United Nations is struggling since 2009 to offer translation to English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. The cost of these translation structures increases sharply with the number of involved languages. The European Union is a paradigmatic case, where translation into 24 official languages represents € 1 billion, around 1% of the EU budget.

Translation devices

The use of translation devices is a way to keep using our languages while communicating with speakers from different languages. A widespread use of his soultion, however, would represent unacceptable costs for less-developed countries like some of the BRICS or BRICS+ participants.

Parallel sign language

Sign languages are the common way of communication for deaf people around the world. Speeches in any spoken language can be translated to a sign language (even to the International Sign Language), but it is not possible for one single person to do this. The reason is that sign languages have their own grammatical structure, which is not compatible with the grammatical structure of the spoken language.

Parallel enhanced communication with isolated signs

It is possibler, however, for one single person to make some isolated signs with the hands at the same time that he/she speaks. These signs can represent the main ideas of the speech, and they would provide some additional information to any other person from the audience.

In international audiences where a common set of signs is known by everybody, this strategy could provide an additional way of understanding, thus allowing the use of any spoken language without restriction. There has been at least one successful historical example of this: The use of the Plains Indian Signs by the North American Indigenous Nations before the arrival of the European colonists.

Yogote: advantages

It is possible to encode the hand gestures in written signs. The YoGoTe set of written characteres allows the reader to make the Gestuno gestures, which are a set of international signs developed by the World Deaf Federation.

International signs in written characteres

The YoGoTe proposal is based on the written representation for the hand gestures, applied to the Gestuno international gestures. The resulting signograms are easy to write and also easy tounderstand in order to do the gesture. This also enables to produce sign dictionaries as well as to add international signs to texts written in any language.

Educational experiences

During the last 20 years a lot of expèriencies have been made in schools from different countries and in everyeducational level, from Primary education to University.

Language learning

Teaching materials for the learning of foreign languages can be produced usin YoGoTe signs. They open the possibility to establish a network of teaching/learning groups of people between any pair of languages.

Free online available

All the YoGoTe materials and resources (dictionaries, activities, language lessons, etc) are accessible online at zero cost without restrictions, corresponding to the grass-roots nature of this proposal.