Why the Future of the BBC Is Inevitably Multilingual

Journalists write the same story in forty languages in a room somewhere in the BBC’s offices, possibly in one of the more subdued hallways of the World Service building or Broadcasting House on Portland Place. Forty different editorial operations, each creating content for an audience that speaks, thinks, and debates in a language other than English, rather than forty translations of a single piece. Since the World Service started its foreign-language broadcasting in 1938 with an Arabic service targeted at the Middle East, the BBC has been doing this in a variety of ways. The organization has never been sure if it should be proud of this or a little confused by it. Observing from the outside, the rest of the world finds it remarkable.

Compared to most of his predecessors, Tony Hall, the former director general who oversaw the BBC until 2020, had a clearer understanding of the strategic importance of the multilingual operation. In 2015, he made the case for an annual increase of £85 million in the World Service budget to George Osborne using language that chancellors find most persuasive: soft power, global reach, and UK national interest. Without hesitation and to the fullest extent, Osborne replied “yes.” Since the Second World War, it was the biggest single financial infusion into the World Service. In Africa and India, new services have been introduced. Underrepresented language audiences started to expand. The BBC’s weekly global audience grew closer to the half-billion mark Hall had set for himself.

There was always more to that investment than just journalism. It was an admission that English is insufficient, made with an institutional honesty that the BBC seldom exhibits in public. The organization’s claim to global relevance is based on its readiness to engage audiences in their language rather than the status of its mother tongue. It may seem impressive that there are 2.3 billion English speakers, but only one in five of them are native speakers. Instead of using it because it belongs to them, the other four are doing so because it is helpful. Additionally, when the BBC creates content in Urdu, Amharic, or Burmese, it reaches people for whom the English version—no matter how well-written—carries a certain kind of distance that native-language journalism just doesn’t.

The practical aspects of that endeavor are now being altered by the AI component. The BBC has been testing systems that translate English-language broadcasts and articles into Turkish, Hindi, and Russian, among other languages, using speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies. This isn’t machine translation in the crude sense that the term sometimes suggests. Journalists who were familiar with the particular cultural register of the languages they worked in already staffed the BBC’s multilingual newsroom. The AI tools handle volume and speed so that human journalists can concentrate on the judgment calls that algorithms still make incorrectly. They are meant to supplement, not to replace, that work.

The BBC’s linguistic environment has been changing in ways that no broadcaster fully anticipated. British diplomats are now being taught Hinglish, a combination of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and English that has emerged as the primary language of urban India’s digital generation. It is also being incorporated into mobile applications. Online, Spanglish, Konglish, and what linguists refer to as Euro English are all growing and blending together to create something truly novel. According to Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University in Washington, no one has the authority to dictate to speakers what language should be used online. Regardless of linguistic standardization, Facebook has political and social standing if users can persuade it to support a variety of languages.

Slowly and with the institutional caution of a century-old organization, the BBC is realizing that this principle also applies to broadcasting. It is not just a resource question to decide which languages to serve, at what level of investment, and with what editorial ambition. It’s an editorial statement about which stories, in the BBC’s opinion, are worthy of being told. The ongoing discussion about the renewal of the charter will need to directly address this tension. There is pressure to reduce, consolidate, and safeguard the English core due to the BBC’s domestic political circumstances, which include a government review, a licence fee under pressure, and audiences dispersed across streaming platforms. The logic of multilingualism pulls in the exact opposite direction. Which argument will prevail is still up in the air. However, given the audience data, the investment in AI, and the World Service’s consistent growth, it seems as though the people in charge of the journalism already know the solution.