The other day, I had gotten into a dialogue about the use of quotation marks for emphasis, something that is considered grammatically incorrect, but something we see more and more on the Internet every day.
My acquaintance, and perhaps debate sparring partner suggested, not only is it bad grammar, but it is also non-translatable into other languages, for instance how would one "interpret such into Spanish" as the quotation marks would be completely out of place then, see his point, and it is a decent one indeed, so let's discuss the potential challenges and solutions of translating intensity and emotion into some more robust character based languages - Japanese and Chinese.
Several years ago, I had come up with a scheme which could be used in intercepting electronic communications whether voice or on the Internet in multiple languages and dialects, and artificial intelligent program which would label every single word in sequence by intensity level.
In doing this it would be easy to root out terrorists, drug cartel communication, and foreign spies in our country.
My basic theme was to put several numbers as a subscript after every word, and several as postscripts to help determine various factors to judge the probability or likelihood that that communication needed to be archived, or reviewed by a live person in the intelligence community.
Now then, my discussion with the individual wishing to have all of his articles translated into Spanish and Chinese was concerned that I wished to change the archaic grammar rules having to deal with quotation marks, to allow those marks to also be used for emphasis, intensity, or emotion.
Perhaps you've seen this done before on blogs or in online writing? It's becoming more and more common, no, it isn't proper grammar, but it is being done.
Now then, how can such things be translated into other languages? How about Chinese or Japanese for instance? Well, maybe there could be a sliding scale for intensity using colors.
After all, it's easy to change the color of the font in the online venue through digital technologies.
This wouldn't work very well with the written word that was physically written down on a paper with a pen or pencil, but it does lend itself well to the Internet.
What if everyone had an artificial intelligent software package behind their word processing program? Then it would be rather easy to shape the intensity, emotion, or emphasis of the various words being used.
A great deal of intensity might be red, low intensity might be light blue, whereas everything else would be in the regular standard black font.
This could be done just as people use italics, bold, or underlining.
Do you see that point as well? Indeed I hope you will please consider all these concepts because in the future our writing and grammar, and all of the styling which is fit to print will have to evolve.