While I may have been in tears at the Anne Frank House, I was an ignorant one at Rijksmuseum. Maybe it’s my everyday life to blame, or maybe it’s a state of mind, but sometimes I forget that not everybody speaks English. And even fewer people speak Korean. So, when I was asked what language I needed for the audio tour, I had an embarrassing moment of hesitation while trying to answer.
But, here is my point. According to the Ethnologue: Languages of the World, there are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world. While it is impossible for a museum to translate everything in every language, technology enables them to communicate with an even greater number of people. So, somebody like myself can go to a museum (all alone) in Amsterdam and still be able to listen and learn. Lucky for us, English is one of the main languages that museums use.
At the Rijksmuseum the audio tours were available in Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and Japanese. At the Anne Frank House, they had a listening and viewing room with about 30 phones that enabled the visitor to listen to audio commentary in several different languages through the receiver.
It’s a shame that I sometimes fail to realize how diverse the world can be. But it sure is refreshing when I am slapped in the face, and faced with the fact that luckily we do live in a world where not everybody speaks the same language.
“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” By Oscar Wilde
1 comment:
Thanks for writing this.
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