At UNESCO's glamorous Cold War spy-thriller headquarters in Paris, Koïchiro Matsuura, the Japanese diplomat running the organization, is pushing to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions.

Yep, he's trying to keep English from muting out every other language, and that's certainly nothing new. But unlike others, Matsuura comes off like an airline executive talking about routes, planes, hubs, spokes and flow. That's because culture flows.

There are two basic route models in the aviation business. Airlines either fly point to point or hub and spoke. Point-to-point flights move from one city to another, while hub-and-spoke transit goes through connections via the airline's base city. Now, let's contemplate that in relation to cultural flows. With books, films and the internet, which kind of world do we live in, point to point or hub and spoke? If culture were an airline model, in other words, would Poles be able to fly to Tokyo without having to transfer at LAX?

One of the articles to emerge from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference was, "Cultural Diversity? A Pipe Dream." In it, Rüdiger Wischenbart noted some shocking facts about the current realities behind book translation.

Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It's sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we'd be talking about the kind of world where you can't fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.

Non-Anglo cultures are also listening less and less to each other, more and more to us. "In 2005," Wischenbart reported, "a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals.... Yet, this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well-intentioned process will ever mend this imbalance.... Centrifugal forces are working against globalization, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between."

The "pipe dream" that Wischenbart describes is UNESCO's point-to-point vision of global cultural flow from any point to any other. The world we live in today, though, is still a hub-and-spoke world.

If it's clear in the book world, it's even clearer in the film world. The U.S. studios' share of the box office in Europe grew from 30 percent in 1950 to more than 80 percent by 1990, with 70 percent of that dominated by just six companies – Disney, Viacom, Sony, Fox, AOL Time Warner and Universal. European movies, in contrast, can't achieve more than 5 percent of U.S. market share. American studios remake the most successful European movies for the U.S. market.

An interesting table shows the box-office share of domestic films in various countries around the world. Only in the United States and India do a significant number of people go to movies made in their own countries. (Granted, last year Japanese moviegoers pulled off a surprise coup – Japanese films achieved a majority box office share, 53.2 percent, for the first time in two decades.)

What about the internet? Well, English is unsurprisingly the dominant language, with 29.5 percent of all users communicating in it. Chinese is next, with about half the number of English users (159 million Chinese to 329 million English users). But Chinese is coming up fast, with more than twice the growth rate of English online. If it overtakes, does that make English a point-to-point language, or does Chinese just become the new hub, with all the spokes (at least the Asian ones) leading toward it?

Earlier this month, UNESCO's International Programme for the Development of Communication approved a grant of $15,000 for the reinforcement of a community multimedia center serving the marginalized weavers of Madhya Pradesh, India. You'd have to be a grinch to begrudge this kind of corrective gesture, no matter how small.

But perhaps economic vitality – consider the examples of Bollywood, Japan's film industry and the booming Chinese internet – is ultimately what will usher in a point-to-point world. Oh, and machine translation that really works. Maybe UNESCO could give $15,000 – or even more! – to the marginalized and struggling translation weavers at Google.

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Momus, aka Nick Currie, is a Scots musician and writer who lives in Berlin. His blog is Click opera.

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