Since my move to Ireland, I’ve been constantly impressed by Europe’s multilinguality exemplified by many of my colleagues, even outside the language department, who are conversant in three languages. They can comfortably function in any of them and easily give examples in all of them during their lectures to make the content more relevant to students from different parts of Europe.

In Asia, it would be a rare exception even for Asian Language Department lecturers to be able to freely switch between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, for example, despite the overlap of some Han characters in their writing systems. In contrast to multilingual Europe (that does seem to mean European Union languages), multilingual Asia is something that is simply not being pursued through its major languages. This is largely because the way to globalization in Asia is aligned more explicitly with mastering English. For example, Nissan’s Chief Operations Officer, Carlos Ghosn, often dubbed as a champion of globalization in Japan, has made English an official language within Nissan. A similar move to stress the importance of English may be seen in Malaysia, following its Bahasa Malay efforts, while Singapore seems to be making a concerted effort to improve on “Singlish,” which is seen by Singaporian translators with a strong aversion. Indeed, the globalization language strategy seems different depending on locality – after all, location still matters.