What might it then mean to talk about "humanization" as a process, or of some relations becoming more "human" than others? For a start, it means finding a reason to cooperate with others rather than destroying them. That reason, entirely compatible with egoism and self-defense, is then invested with affective values. It might pass through what we have intuitively called the giving of a face, and with multiple kinds of interest in the other, since the more subtle our shared understandings (in the dynamic plural), the richer our overall cooperation. In this, the move from cooperation to humanization shifts from calculated costs to a more iconic way of dealing with complexity. We start to recognize, for instance, that the lives of end-users are not actually lived in locales, just as our lives are not entirely spent in knowledge-producing professions. Such recognitions of commonality need not be an ideological cover for exploitation.They can become the necessary basis for subsequent recognitions of difference, appreciation of diversity, and respect for modes of belonging from which the self is excluded.

Our interest in humanization should not be confused with general complaints about technology. We would broadly agree, with the Catalan anthropologist Eudald Carbonell (in Carbonell and Sala 2001), that the use of technology is a key element of what makes humans human. The more technology we use, the more human we become, transforming the world and our relations in ways that remain impossible for non-human beings. Electronic communication extends our senses, enabling us to cooperate ever more, and providing the increasing information we need for such relationships. The problems with our

technologies concern how we use them, how their social distribution is restricted, how the interfaces direct thought, but not what the technologies are in themselves. Indeed, in the terms of Carbonell, these restrictions on technology are what still keep us from being fully human.

Looking back at the various chapters in this book, humanization would certainly concord with values like the diversity of cultures (which we have argued can be protected by communication technologies) and the power of tongues as weaving the threads of complex belonging. It might even be compatible with the joyous mixes of languages we have found in imperfect localization, with which we learn to live and work. Its opposites, however, the prime impediments to humanization, would seem to work in a field that we have so far only mentioned in passing: that of the type of language we use in our technical discourses. Those discourses are of key importance, not only because they are the most localized and translated, but also because they are progressively dominating the way we think about localization and translation themselves.

But we still have to discover what humanization might mean in terms of language.

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