The discovery that language can be a barrier (ÕÏ°­) to communication is quickly made by all

who travel, study, govern or sell. Whether the activity is tourism, research, government, policing or business, the lack of a common language can severely delay progress or can stop it altogether.

Although communication problems of this kind must happen thousands of times each day, very few become public knowledge. Publicity comes only when a failure to communicate has major results, such as strikes, lost orders, legal problems or deadly accidents--even, at times, war. One reported example of communication failure took place in 1970, when several Americans ate a species of poisonous mushroom. No remedy was known, and two of the people died within days. A radio report of the case was heard by a chemist who knew of a treatment that had been successfully used in 1959 and published in 1963. Why had the American doctors not heard of it seven years later? Possibly because the report of the treatment had been published only in journals written in European languages other than English.