Uneasy Rhetoric

According to this article, e-learning strategies in Ireland may ignore the Irish language. This decision is not political, but purely monetary:

When outlining the potential difficulty in rolling out e-learning in the Irish market O’Callaghan said that any requirement to localize e-learning courseware into Irish-Gaelic could be prohibitively expensive.

“Ireland will need to make some hard decisions in regard to Irish language e-learning,” [Barry O'Callaghan, chief executive of Riverdeep] said, pointing out that his responsibility, as the chief executive of a private company, was to make money for the shareholders.

This perspective is pervasive in the business world today. Actually, its pervasive in just about every world. Our overwhelming desire to reduce everything to monetary units threatens cultural values and institutions (someday I’ll write a longer screed on this). It oversimplifies the complexities of human life.

A successful e-learning company in Ireland might discover that there is an untapped goldmine in the Irish language market. In fact, minority language markets may be a way for smaller businesses to compete with the bigger businesses because they’ve all taken this idea that minority language localization would be “prohibitively expensive.”

On the other hand, maybe O’Callaghan is just looking for a government handout to do the Irish localization.

(via Online Learning Update)