TRANSLATION INDUSTRY UPDATES February 2025

How the internet has altered how we express ourselves

The world has changed a lot in the last thirty or so years, and one of the technological developments that has had the biggest impact on our communication has been the widespread adoption of the internet. In this month’s translation industry updates, we’ll be looking at how the internet has changed how we communicate.

On the most basic level, online communication has changed our approach to punctuation. Rules around using capital letters at the start of sentences and punctuation marks at the end are often much looser now, while our written communication has arguably become more visual as emojis have been widely accepted as a means of substituting the lack of non-verbal cues inherent in written communication.

The way we write has in many cases become a lot more informal than would have been the case a generation or so ago, with written content increasingly mimicking speech. The international scope of online communication also means that we come into contact with a greater variety of ways of expressing ourselves: for example, reading content written in different international dialects of the same language. This can lead to a democratisation of language but also accelerate the process of a few major global languages dominating international communication.

The way we express ourselves online can often be more performative than in real life, particularly in arenas such as social media that are implicitly about selling ourselves, while communicating in online comment threads tends to encourage us to express our opinions in one-liners rather than leaving more in-depth responses.

Instant communication channels like WhatsApp and Slack tend to encourage brevity, while it’s often believed to be the case that our concentration spans are shorter when reading online than when reading on paper, meaning that when online we are less likely to have the patience to read in-depth analyses or deep descriptive information and therefore prioritise briefer and more simplistic accounts of events.

And while the online world can often help us to foster communities and learn more about things that interest us, the internet can also have a real echo-chamber effect in encouraging us to gravitate towards people that we perceive to be similar to us and share our attitudes, meaning that it’s less likely for us to have our beliefs challenged than might be the case in offline scenarios.

Online and any other written communication carries a higher degree of risk in the sense that the lack of non-verbal cues mean that it’s not normally possible to instantly gauge how a person has reacted to something, meaning that it’s easier for written messages to be misinterpreted and more difficult to see how particular comments have landed. It’s much harder to get the tone right, which means that many of us spend a lot of time re-reading online correspondence such as emails before sending.

And this is also understandable when we consider that there is arguably greater accountability when communicating online due to the trail that it leaves. While in theory it’s possible to distance ourselves from something that we said out loud that might have been received badly, this is generally not possible with online communication, particularly on public forums such as social media. With this being the case, this means that privacy and the extent to which we are willing to share our lives and our personal opinions online is also a key consideration for many people now.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our thoughts on the challenges and opportunities of online versus analogue communication, but we’ve barely scratched the surface on this vast topic. We’d love to hear your thoughts around how communication has changed in recent years, so please feel free to leave comments, and we will see you again for next month’s updates!