As many schoolboys and students know, unintended innuendo can be found in the most unexpected of places and can lend a certain mischievous serendipity to otherwise dull lessons and lectures. One major source of linguistic amusement is transatlantic confusion. This was recently driven home to me by the following passage from an Irwin Shaw story: “Across the street, on the public athletics field, four boys were shagging flies.”
My confused yet amused eyes tripped and staggered over the sentence, but made no sense of it, retraced their steps several times, then sat on the kerb of the full-stop, under the shade of the quotation mark, and scratched their chin in bemusement. Boys shagging flies? Not only is that physically impossible, but why on earth would a celebrated American writer, working in a more decorous pre-Monty Python and Little Britain age, stoop to such crudity? It had to be something else.
Some sleuthing around and further research – the OED, Google and a couple of American friends – cracked the mystery. Rather than implying that a group of young lads were attempting intercourse with insects, the sentence was actually about baseball and catching fly balls.
As George Bernard Shaw once, rather hyperbolically, claimed, Brits and Americans are “divided by a common language”. And examples abound of confusing word usages, especially when it comes to slang and popular colloquialisms, not to mention regionally within each country.
Given the growing transatlantic familiarity in the age of the internet and saturating mass media, especially the British familiarity with Americanisms, confusion is receding, but it can still occur. English slang that might confuse Americans includes: the exclamation “bugger”, “cowboy” (as in unscrupulous trader), “con” (as in con artist, not convict), “fag” (as in cigarette), to “fancy” (ie find someone attractive), to be “pissed” (as in drunk), etc. Given that we’ve grown up with American pop culture, most mainstream Americanisms are very familiar and even many obscure local expressions have made it across the Atlantic. But hearing references to “fanny bags” and someone showing a lot of “spunk” can’t but elicit a knowing smile from a Brit.
Given the length and breadth of that language ostensibly known as English, the geographical differences don’t end there. Although Australian English is, in many ways, quite similar to British English, with perhaps more borrowing from American, there are still significant differences. The first time an Australian friend told me that he felt “crook”, I wondered what crime he believed he had committed. What he meant was that he had been feeling ill or unwell.
Of course, meanings do not only change across space, but also across time, in a phenomenon known as semantic shift. Among the most popular and best-known recent examples are “gay”, ie happy and carefree, and “queer”, ie odd or unusual. In fact, such is the way of things, that a “gay man” once referred to a womanising bachelor and a “gay woman” was a prostitute. Moreover, though gay lib may have really taken off only in the 1960s but before that we had the “Gay 1890s”, without a gay pride parade in sight.
As for “queer”, which has been appropriated as a term of pride by gay people, long before Britain came out of the closet, it had “Queer Street”, where people in financial dire straits figuratively lived, and someone “feeling a little queer” was not touching up anyone, but was, instead, under the weather.
Going even further back, things get really weird! Weirdly enough, if you though the word “weird” was relatively new, think again. It was used half a dozen times by Shakespeare, at a time when it meant possessing supernatural powers. Its modern meaning was coined by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the early 19th century. In fact, umpteen apparently familiar words in Shakespeare have quite different meanings today. For example, when one of the witches in Hamlet says, “You all know security/ Is mortals’ chiefest enemy”, security here means complacency and not safety, which would be nonsensical.
Over time, many words go through elevations in their meaning, or they fall from grace, or they end up meaning the complete opposite of what they originally signified. For example, “knight” simply meant “boy or servant”, while “gentle” meant of high birth, hence “gentleman”. Girl meant any young person – “gay girl” meant girl, not lesbian, and “knave girl” meant boy – while “man” meant any person, regardless of gender.
Once upon a time, people who were “awful” (ie deserving of awe) and “silly” (blessed and happy) were admired, and people who were “brave” (ie cowardly) were looked down upon. And if you were “fond” of someone, you found them stupid and silly, and if you found someone “cute” that meant they were bow-legged. If all this is a bit confusing, don’t “worry”, especially since, in medieval England, the word meant to strangle or choke someone to death.
Semantic shift is occurring around us even as we speak and, in the future, words may take on radically different meanings to the ones they have now. Today, in jest, we may say someone is “bad”, meaning good, “wicked”, meaning cool, or “fit”, meaning attractive. But future generations may have no other meaning for these words and may conclude that “survival of the fittest” means that only the beautiful live on.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/22/english-language-america-australia
While talking on cell phone is known to affect an individual’s ability to drive, a new study has shown that driving also reduces one’s ability to comprehend and use language. The study led by researchers from University of Illinois has shown that driving impairs language skills.
“The previous findings made no sense to those of us who have studied language,” said Gary Dell, a psycholinguist in the department of psychology at Illinois and corresponding author on the study.
“You might think that talking is an easy thing to do and that comprehending language is easy. But it’s not.
“Speech production and speech comprehension are attention-demanding activities, and so they ought to compete with other tasks that require your attention – like driving,” Dell added.
The new study was conducted in a driving simulator at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.
The participants worked in pairs – one as a driver and the other as a conversation partner who was either in the simulator with the driver or talking with the driver via a hands-free cell phone from a remote location.
The findings revealed that a participant’s ability to remember and retell a story declined significantly if he or she was also driving during the exercise.
The older subjects performed more poorly on these tasks to begin with, and their ability to retain and retell the stories worsened as much as that of their younger peers.
In contrast to their performance while sitting still, Dell said, “the drivers remembered 20 percent less of what was told to them when they were driving.”
Declines in the accuracy of retelling the stories were most pronounced while drivers navigated through intersections or encountered more demanding traffic conditions.
“This study shows that various aspects of language go to hell when you’re driving,” said psychology professor Art Kramer, who collaborated on the study.
Promoting Vietnamese Literature
Posted on: 20/01/2010
An international conference on promoting Vietnamese literature finished last Sunday in Ha Noi. More than 150 writers and translators from 31 countries attended the event.
Overseas Vietnamese Tran Thien Dao from France and Zhu Yang Xiu from China discussed how best to promote Vietnamese literature internationally.
Good translation is vital to promoting Vietnamese literature abroad. What does it entail?
Tran Thien Dao: Literature translation encompasses research, theory, criticism, etc. I would like to discuss fiction writing. Although translation on one level involves converting words from one language to another, the work is very creative.
Zhu Yang Xiu: Translation is both science and art. The translator does not rewrite but reads and translates original content. There was a Chinese writer who said: “If the original is whisky, the translation is brandy at the very least. It cannot be water.”
What do you think about the Vietnamese literature that has been translated into other languages, particularly Chinese?
Zhu Yang Xiu: Not much Vietnamese literature has been translated into Chinese. Promoting Vietnamese literature in China must take in two periods – before China’s culture revolution (1966-1976), which includes Vietnamese literature such as The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du and poetry by Ho Xuan Huong – and after the revolution. Work that has been translated into Chinese after that period mainly focuses on the theme of war, such as Dat Nuoc Dung Len (Country that’s Rising) by Nguyen Ngoc or Ong Co Van (The Adviser).
Tran Thien Dao: I think that translations must be accurate, fine and pure. Works that have been translated into French are accurate but not fine and pure.
What do you think of the standard of the translated works?
Tran Thien Dao: Of those translating Vietnamese literature into French, about 95 per cent has been done by translators who are overseas Vietnamese.
Translated works should be aimed at French readers not just Vietnamese researchers and Viet Nam lovers.
Zhu Yang Xiu: Not many Chinese translators are interested in Vietnamese literature. A translator must have a passion for the country’s literature and the country itself. It is important to find a publisher too. For example, before I translated The Adviser, I translated Chi Pheo, one of most famous stories by Nam Cao in 1941, but I could not find a publisher willing to take it on. They all said the story took place a long time ago and was no longer relevant.
How do you think Vietnamese literature should be promoted abroad?
Zhu Yang Xiu: Translations must connect different cultures. The work needs to be subsidised by the government. Viet Nam needs to set up a fund to support translations of Vietnamese literature into other languages.
Besides, a national award should be set up for the best translated works. The best works should be published and promoted globally.
Tran Thien Dao: Translators face many difficulties such as finding the necessary funds to complete the task.
Should the Viet Nam Writers Association set up a translation centre?
Tran Thien Dao: How will it operate?
Zhu Yang Xiu: I think it would be good to have such a centre. At the moment, translators have to find literature for themselves to translate. They have to invest their own resources. I’d translate Vietnamese literature if publisher commissioned me.
Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/lifestyle/201001/National-award-should-be-set-up-for-the-best-translated-works-890033/
Louisiana is a cultural melting pot. Because of the state’s unique DNA a combination of the history, politics and geographical location everything about “The Boot” is a little bit different, right down to the way Louisiana natives speak. But current speech pathology tests don’t take into account dialects of individual Louisiana parishes, and as a result, children with speech and language impairments might not be getting the help they need.
Worse yet, some children may be considered speech- or language-impaired when in actuality, they happen to speak what’s known as a non-traditional form of the English language. With support in the form of $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, Janna Oetting and her colleagues at LSU are setting out across Louisiana to help solve this problem.
Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders Oetting, together with LSU colleagues Michael Hegarty of the Department of English and Janet McDonald of the Department of Psychology, plans to conduct field studies in several rural Louisiana parishes, including Assumption, Iberville, St. James and West Baton Rouge, beginning in January 2010.
“We’ll be working with kindergartners because the basic structure of human grammar is established by age four, and we want to start the process at the start of a child’s elementary school experience,” said Oetting. “About 30 percent of Louisiana fourth-grade students are not reading at age appropriate levels, so if we can do something to impact that statistic, we definitely are ready to step up to the plate.”
Oetting’s group, which includes graduate students from LSU’s Department of Communication Science and Disorders, Linguistics and Psychology, looks at how the mind handles language and how children acquire it, specifically regarding abstract grammar rules, such as verb phrasing. The group will focus on children with “Specific Language Impairment,” or SLI, which refers to children who have no contributing health factors but who nevertheless lag in the mastery of language, measured against linguistic timetables.
“Nationally, only 29 percent of children with Specific Language Impairment are identified and receive any support or assistance; we believe the rate is even lower in Louisiana because of issues related to the understudy of our dialects,” said Oetting. “This is troubling because we also know that close to 60 percent of kindergarteners with Specific Language Impairment will present with a reading impairment in fourth grade. Standard English speakers are identified much younger and much more often. In areas of Louisiana and elsewhere where nontraditional dialects are spoken, the fear is that we’re missing lots of children.”
The goal of this grant is to develop tools essential for language development that are specifically tailored to several Louisiana dialects, language subsets that include African American English, Southern White English, Creole, Cajun and any combination thereof.
“Dialects can be a taboo topic, which is part of the reason that there’s a lack of diagnosis and treatment,” said Oetting. “What we’re looking at is the concept of impairment within the context of different dialects of English. We all speak differently. We don’t want tests that falsely identify children as impaired just because they speak differently than the baseline language on which the test was modeled, but we also don’t want children who need services not identified because their language weaknesses were incorrectly identified as a dialect difference.”
According to Oetting, speech language pathologists who work with standard English speakers have hundreds of tools at their fingertips for evaluation, support and education. But clinicians who serve non-traditional dialect speakers have far fewer to guide their decision making processes.
Using videotaped stories and interactive computer games made in their research lab, the team’s first goal is to better document the variety of dialects that are spoken by Louisiana children. Then, the group will proceed, identifying clinical markers of children with SLI within each of these dialects. The end goal is to develop tools that can be used in Louisiana classrooms to assist speech language pathologists in methods of assessment and treatment and educators in methods of language testing and teaching.
“People around the country and the world think of Louisiana as a rich and valuable place to study languages,” said Oetting. “It’s similar to the way that people view us as a rich and valuable place to study our natural resources, such as petroleum. But people are the real resources and drivers of Louisiana, and we’re doing everything we can to support and assist the children of this state as they progress through school and into adulthood.”
Read more: http://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.aspx?name=73007116
Government of Canada Invests to Ensure Translation Services for the Winter Games
Posted on: 18/01/2010
The Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, the Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister of Public Works and Government Services, and John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), today announced the signing of an agreement for translation and interpretation services before and during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
The agreement was signed by the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Translation Bureau, and VANOC to meet Canada’s official-language requirements during the Games. Funding of up to $5.3 million dollars will ensure that the Government of Canada’s Translation Bureau (managed by Public Works and Government Services Canada) provides, in collaboration with VANOC, superior-quality translation services before and during the Games to meet the needs of athletes, media representatives, dignitaries, and Canadians.
“These are Canada’s Games, and our Government has been clear that they will reflect the rich diversity of our country,” said Minister Moore. “Today’s announcement will ensure that our country’s two official languages are fully incorporated in the organizing and hosting of the Games, and that these will be the most bilingual Games to date.”
“There has never been any doubt that the French language will be front and centre at the Vancouver Olympic Games. I am particularly proud that my department has been able to provide expert translation and interpretation services for the entire length of the Games,” said Minister Paradis. “The Games present an ideal opportunity to showcase and enhance the visibility of our two official languages, both here at home and internationally.”
“The 2010 Winter Games provide an extraordinary opportunity to display our unique Canadian identity to the world,” said Mr. Furlong. “As part of our commitment to hosting the Games, we have devoted a great deal of time and resources to ensure that these Games reflect our country’s diversity, including its linguistic duality. The Government of Canada has been an exceptional partner and their collaboration will help us deliver on these promises.”
This funding is part of $7.7 million that was announced on September 15 and will be directed toward aspects of the Games that help reflect Canada’s official-language policies and our country’s rich Francophone heritage. The Government of Canada has committed $1.5 million to ensure the placement of permanent bilingual signage at sporting and event venues and $900,000 for the inclusion of the French language and Francophone culture in the nightly victory medal ceremonies that will be hosted by Canada’s provinces and territories.
With its key Games partners, the Government of Canada, as a signatory of the Multi-Party Agreement, is showing its determination to promote Canada’s official languages and respect the obligations flowing from the Official Languages Act and related policies.
This Government’s leadership is demonstrated by concrete and productive measures that will help make the Games a success in both official languages.
Councils spent nearly £20 million of taxpayers’ money last year on translating documents into foreign languages including Mongolian, Tagalog and Pahari, according to new figures.
Documents were translated into more than 75 languages by councils.
The heaviest spender was the City of Edinburgh council, which last year paid out £110,000 for translations into languages including Mongolian.
Two of the highest spenders in England were Northamptonshire County Council which spent £73,000 on translation fees in 2008/09 and Leeds City Council paid £141,000 over the last two years.
Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said councils should encourage migrants to learn English instead of spending public money on translations.
He said: “Even the Government have now accepted that the practice of translating endless documents into obscure languages is a waste of money, so these councils have no excuse to still be doing this. Not only is this wasteful, it is counterproductive in terms of social cohesion.”
Among the more unusual items translated were a “pigeon feeding document” translated into Urdu for Manchester City Council, and “Weight Busters”, which was translated into Panjabi, Gujerati and Urdu by Warwickshire County Council at a cost of £207.
Hertfordshire County Council also spent more than £10,000 translating at least 100 school reports into languages including Sylheti Bengali, Tagalog and Tamil, while Liverpool City Council paid £98.92 to translate a payslip into Flemish.
Documents were also rewritten in Kpelle, a Liberian dialect, and Pahari, a language spoken in northern India and Nepal.
The figures came to light after 84 per cent of British councils responded to a freedom of information request by Lingo24, a translation agency, which said the figures revealed a “phenomenal and unnecessary wastage” of taxpayers’ money.
The Local Government Association (LGA) said the amount spent by councils on translation had been reduced from £25m in 2006.
A spokesman for the LGA said: “Translation has its place to ensure people can access vital services, find jobs and get their children into school. However, translation should not be a substitute for learning English and all public bodies need to adopt a common-sense approach.”
Dante Non-Stop
Posted on: 18/01/2010
The people at Bryn Athyn College went straight to hell yesterday. It was just before 1:30 on a beautiful afternoon at the leafy Montgomery County campus, and by sometime early this morning, they planned to be well out.
They would be – if they could swing it – awash in the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. Paradise.
Traveling in a single day from the depth of Point A to the pinnacle of Point B, allowing for a layover in purgatory, was an undertaking apparently never before attempted in the United States.
But the assembled readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy (or, if you insist on the original Italian, La Divina Commedia) were dead-set on reciting every one of the 14,000-plus verses that his iconic, dreamlike, high-concept poem comprises in three volumes: “Inferno,” then “Purgatorio,” and finally “Paradiso.”
That sort of marathon narration of a milestone work in Western literature is not even the tradition in Italy, where Florentines are known to recite one of the books – canto, or chapter, by canto – in readings that move from street corner to street corner, and may include both passersby and local celebrities.
“There were times I asked myself if I were crazy,” said Duncan Pitcairn, a student of the Italian language who came up with the idea and then acted on it. “It’s not something I would have taken on if people had not encouraged me.” Said his wife, Martha: “He reports that smirking is a form of support from his family.”
Yesterday, she was with him to help out at Bryn Athyn College’s Mitchell Performing Arts Center. There, 10 readers – mostly affiliated with Bryn Athyn, a municipality whose 1,350 residents are, like the Pitcairns, nearly all followers of a denomination called the New Church – were raring to recite.
The sponsor of the event was the America Italy Society of Philadelphia, the Center City organization that runs a wide variety of programs related to Italian culture. These include the language classes that Pitcairn, 54, a descendant of the same-named industrialist family responsible for Pittsburgh Plate Glass and significant in the nation’s rail and energy development, has been taking for seven years.
“I really wanted to hear The Divine Comedy as a story,” he said. For hundreds of years that was the only way, because most people were illiterate. It was recited.”
On a train ride back to Philadelphia from New York, where Pitcairn heard the Italian actor Roberto Benigni read several Divine Comedy cantos last spring, the idea came to him. He took it to his Italian teacher, Franca Riccardi (“I thought it was wonderful,” she said), and “the Bryn Athyn theater happened to be empty because it’s the middle of a winter day.”
Well, it’s empty until 8 this morning, when people begin setting up for a Sunday service. But Pitcairn and the crew hoped to be finished with all hundred chapters around midnight, not altogether out of reach. The first hour of reading ended at the beginning of the 10th canto.
Pitcairn was not one of the official readers, although Riccardi was – and she read her cantos in Italian, while Pitcairn worked a PowerPoint presentation that threw surtitles on a screen behind her. When other readers took to the podium for English recitations, he projected an image from the appropriate canto.
The images and the fairly new translation – a prose version more accessible than typical translations into poetry – came from Princeton University’s Dante Project, headed by Robert and Jean Hollander.
The day began at 1 p.m. with notes on the work from Victoria Kirkham, a professor of romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Dante Alighieri – a poet who also wrote in Latin, a deeply religious dreamer, and a politician ousted from his beloved Florence by the opposition – was forced to roam the palaces of northern Italy for the last two decades of his life, when he wrote the work. He finished just before dying in 1321.
It’s both powerfully rich in imagery and dense with literary and religious illusions, this story of a poet (named Dante) who is accompanied into hell by the poet Virgil. (Yes, a now-famed sign at one of the gates says “Abandon hope, all who enter here.”) They see, depth by depth, the most astonishing, even gross, things. The two then work their way to purgatory, where Virgil leaves his young charge in the company of Beatrice, an angel in whose eyes Dante finds his way through paradise.
“Midway in the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood,” recited Eric Carswell, the minister who began with Dante’s first lines. About 45 people were in the audience, which expanded and contracted as the afternoon moved forward and the story moved downward, to the center of the earth, before Dante’s ascent. Other readers, who rotated canto by canto, included a Temple University doctoral candidate in technical writing, a theater teacher, and a college student.
Another was Christopher Clark, the new president of Bryn Athyn College, who said he knew The Divine Comedy “only like most college-educated civilians” – having only a general idea of it. Chara Daum, a Latin translator and one of the readers whose final recitation would be the very last, was asked whether she had special plans for it. “I plan to be upright,” she said.
A $20-a-person dinner was prepared for 7 p.m., but the event was free. And during the day, onlookers were asked to offer a respite to readers by volunteering for a canto. That was what Dario Galanti, 17, the son of Giorgio Galanti, head of cultural affairs at the Italian consulate here, did at Canto 16 in “Inferno.” The younger Galanti rehearsed to himself in the theater lobby, then took the stage and rolled the canto, about three netherworld spirits, gracefully from his tongue in its beautifully trilled original Italian.
“He knows very well his Dante,” said his dad.
Except for readers, Pitcairn expected no one would stay throughout. “I’ve been saying to people, ‘Come for five or 10 minutes and get a taste of the afterlife.’ We’ll hopefully get to the end, where we meet God in heaven, before it’s too late.”
Source: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/81907147.html
Internet Changes to Language
Posted on: 18/01/2010
Since the first web browser appeared on computer screens in 1994, the Internet has radically changed global communication. With instant access to messaging and email, the ability to circulate commentary and opinion has revolutionized the way people communicate. This has had an affect on language and writing, but people still debate the scope of these changes, and whether or not they’re for the better.
Eleanor Johnson is a professor in the English and Comparative literature department at Columbia University who attributes a growing misuse of language to the explosion of electronic communication.
“I think that text messaging has made students believe that it’s far more acceptable than it actually is to just make screamingly atrocious spelling and grammatical errors,” she said.
Johnson says that her students, over the past several years, have increasingly used a more informal English vocabulary in formal assignments. University-level research papers, she says, are now being peppered with casual phrases like “you know” and words like “guy” informal usages that were absent almost a decade ago. She attributes the change to instant and casual communication. She’s also seen an increase in incorrect word use, with students reaching for a word that sounds correct, whose proper meaning is just a bit off from what they intend to say.
10. I think of you as a brother. Translation: You remind me of that inbred banjo-playing geek in ‘Deliverance.’
9. There’s a slight difference in our ages. Translation: I don’t want to do my dad.
8. I’m not attracted to you in ‘that’ way. Translation: You are the ugliest dork I’ve ever laid eyes on.
7. My life is too complicated right now. Translation: I don’t want you spending the whole night or else you may hear phone calls from all the other guys I’m seeing.
6. I’ve got a boyfriend. Translation: I prefer my male cat and a half gallon of Ben and Jerry’s.
5. I don’t date men where I work. Translation: I wouldn’t date you if you were in the same solar system, much less the same building.
4. It’s not you, it’s me. Translation: It’s you.
3. I’m concentrating on my career. Translation: Even something as boring and unfulfilling as my job is better than dating you.
2. I’m celibate. Translation: I’ve sworn off only the men like you.
1. Let’s be friends. Translation: I want you to stay around so I can tell you in excruciating detail about all the other men I meet and have sex with. It’s the male perspective thing.
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA — On a dance floor in a plaza of this many-hued Caribbean city, salsa was oozing from vast speakers. Latin feet were shuffling. Voices were singing along in impassioned Spanish.
And then came a song that electrified the mostly Colombian crowd as few songs had. It was “I Gotta Feeling,” by the Black Eyed Peas, which electrifies my generation wherever they live in the world. When historians of culture look back at this wave of globalization, the song’s lyrics may be of use.
They repeat the hope “that tonight’s gonna be a good night” over and over and over. There is little elaboration. And yet, as global anthems go, this is lyrically ambitious. The music that links the global young today is one of thumps and beeps, sounding to older music lovers like a room full of malfunctioning computers.
This is not the only way in which words seem to matter ever less to my generation, and not the only way in which this desertion may be the bitter price of a good thing: a world that talks to itself more easily than ever, by taking the art of talking less seriously.
We are all linguistic utilitarians now. At work and home, in person and on our devices, function rules and form pales. Capitalization, commas, full sentences, the writing of words without numbers in them, the avoidance of jargon and mixed metaphors — these norms are suffering, unable to persuade multitaskers of their worth.
Of course, anxiety about language is very old. When technologies turn, when new social groups rise, when politics change, critics predict the end of literacy. George Orwell, in a seminal essay in 1946, warned that pretentious diction and meaningless words and other bad habits were corroding politics. He criticized the belief “that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light.”
Orwell, writing during the Cold War, was especially worried about the ideological misuse of language. In our own day, the threat would seem to come instead from a new trinity of technology, globalization and business, which seem to exert a pragmatic pressure on language, to undermine the idea of language as an end in itself.
Technology is changing how we read, write and reason, as a growing number of critics suggest. Television has long been accused of making us stupid, but now the Internet, though overflowing with text, is also blamed. In an essay in The Atlantic last year, the technology writer Nicholas Carr argued that the power-skimming, link-hopping and window-toggling that define the Internet experience have eroded the old practice of reading unbroken stretches of prose, with grave implications for our writing.
E-mail, meanwhile, has become a linguistic wasteland — even among language lovers. Cellphone keypads make us promise to “call u back after the mtg.” Twitter coaxes us to misspell to meet the 140-character maximum. Blogs, though they seek to bring out the writer in us, are notable for how little stress they put on the actual writing. How many literary greats has the rise of the blogosphere produced?
Globalization, in bringing cultures together, exerts its own pragmatic pressure. With English the escalator of globalized success, the language’s center of gravity is tilting away from English-speaking lands. A stripped-down English of catchphrases and trite idioms, light on richness, is becoming the true global language.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16iht-currents.html
The article “Language barrier adds burdens to police and public” (Page A1, Sunday) is totally misguided. The problem is not that there are too few police officers who speak English. The problem is there are too few residents who speak English. If someone chooses to immigrate to this country, they should also be responsible for learning and using the predominant language — English. If I decided to live in France, I would expect to speak French to survive in that culture. If I decided to live in Mexico, I would expect to speak Spanish the majority of the time. I seriously doubt that outside of the primary tourist areas of the country you would find English-capable civil servants. Saying we need more Spanish-speaking police officers, city and county workers, ballots, notices, etc., only addresses the symptom. The problem would continue to exist, unabated.
For more opinions see: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6816482.html
Foreign Language Oscars
Posted on: 14/01/2010
The race for the Oscars will hot up in the weeks to come, and the one for the foreign language film evokes a keen interest in India. Though the country of a 1000-plus annual movie production has had an abysmally poor record on the Academy awards night year after year, the passion to push a film onto the big international screen remains abstracted from perennial failures.
This year’s Indian entry for a possible shortlist nomination is Paresh Mokashi’s Marathi work, Harishchandrachi Factory. Though this is one of the better Indian movies sent up, the Oscar battle is wide open. Too wide for anybody’s comfort
The foreign language section is one of the most unpredictable among the Academy honours. While awards such as the Golden Globes provide some clue to what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may decide, they are usually poor indicators when it comes to the foreign language cinema.
Also, the voting procedure is somewhat flawed with nine choices made by the jumbo Academy voting body (six) and a compact foreign language steering committee (up to three). Out of this, five nominees are picked. Often, these and even the winning film are at considerable odds with what critics and festival selectors see as clinchers.
Last year, Japan’s Departures took home the Oscar beating all-round favourites like France’s The Class and Israel’s Waltz with Bashir. The prize shocked many, but it merely proved that prediction was getting harder by the year.
This year, the picture appears even more blurred. A reason for this is that many countries have not nominated their frontrunners. A master storyteller and craftsman like Pedro Almodovar has been snubbed (once again) by his native Spain. His gripping Broken Embraces, a favourite for the Golden Globes, will not make it to the Oscar short list. Not in the foreign category, though it is eligible to be included in other sections – Best Picture as well – because it had an American release, a precondition for participation in the main Oscar categories. Spain’s hope at LA this season is The Dancer and the Thief, a heist drama from Fernando Trueba.
Chile has a similar story. Sebastian Silva’s The Maid won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and has got the Golden Globes nod, but was surprisingly not considered Oscar material by the country’s selectors. Instead, Chile has gone with Miguel Littin’s Dawson Isla 10, a 1973 political movie that follows the coup which brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power.
Oliver Assays’ Summer Hours has garnered many trophies and favourable write-ups from critics in New York, Boston and Los Angeles. But France chose Jacques Audiard’s prison drama, A Prophet for its Oscar war.
There are other such examples of a film dazzling international juries and some of the harshest reviewers, but failing to impress the country’s selectors. John Woo’s action epic Red Cliff (China), Chan-wook Park’s blood-thirsting vampire romance, Thirst(South Korea), Cary Fukunaga’s immigrant saga Sin Nombre (Honduras) and Anne Fontaine’s fashion biopic Coco Before Chanel. (France) are some.
In India, excellent works of masters – Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Aravindan, John Abraham and Adoor Gopalakrishnan – were never considered Oscar worthy. What were movies like Jeans and Eklavya: The Royal Guard. If they sank in the ocean of Oscar without so much as a ripple, India should not be disappointed. For, it deserved no better.
Source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/Foreign-language-Oscars-are-so-unpredictable/H1-Article1-497064.aspx
Do Hands Speak Louder Than Words?
Posted on: 14/01/2010
It’s an old bromide, but some folks probably couldn’t talk if you tied their hands behind their back. Gesticulating is sort of an international language in that most of us talk with our hands as much as our voices.
And it turns out that’s a good thing, according to new research from Colgate University, published in the current issue of Psychological Science. Psychologist Spencer D. Kelly of Colgate and colleagues at Radboud University in The Netherlands have found that gestures and the spoken word are so mutually interdependent that “gesture and speech are actually part and parcel of language — that is, they together constitute language.”
The research also shows that if the gesture matches the words (as in showing a chopping action while discussing chopping vegetables) the message is more quickly, and more accurately, understood than if the gesture doesn’t match the words (twisting instead of chopping, for example.)
A ‘Bushism’
OK, don’t we always match our words with our gestures? Not always, according to the researchers who cite a much-watched video clip — “number two on David Letterman’s Top 10 George W. Bush moments.” This Bushism, as it has become known, shows the president saying, “The left hand now knows what the right hand is doing.”
Unfortunately, the president raised the right hand when referring to the left hand, and the left hand when referring to the right hand. That “incongruent gesture,” according to this research, should make it more difficult for viewers to understand what the president was saying. However, proving that was beyond the scope of the research.
Seventy college students participated in two studies aimed at showing whether our gestures really matter. Each participant was shown a number of videos depicting specific actions, like chopping vegetables, accompanied by an audible description of the act. Sometimes, though, instead of showing chopping, the video showed twisting, or some other action that did not mimic the sound track, and the participants were asked to determine if the action matched the words.
Talking With Your Hands
As might be expected, the students got the message more quickly if the gesture matched the sound. And if the gesture did not fully match the words, they were far more likely to miss that, thus making more errors than when the gesture matched the words.
“When gesture and speech convey the same information, they are easier to understand — they are faster and produce fewer errors — than when they convey different information, and this effect appears to be driven by mutual interactions,” the researchers write. “This integration is obligatory. People cannot help but consider one modality (gesture) when processing the other (speech.)”
“If you really want to make your point clear and readily understood, let your words and hands do the talking,” they conclude.
Although the researchers say their work suggests that the spoken word is a little more potent than our gestures, we can all think of exceptions.
Thumbs Up
An injured football player being carried off the field cannot speak as loudly with his voice as he can with two raised thumbs, a universal symbol for everything from “I’m OK” to “We shall overcome.”
The former president notwithstanding, our gestures probably do reflect our words nearly all the time, as the research suggests, because the two “modalities” are so interconnected.
But sometimes, even when the two don’t match, the meaning is inescapable.
Quite a few years ago, the Dallas Cowboys were getting trounced during “Monday Night Football,” and the game was so lopsided that the cameramen were searching the crowd for some fitting symbol of defeat. One camera slowly zoomed in on a lone Cowboy fan, way up in the cheap seats, seemingly faithful to the end.
But as the camera closed in, the fan slowly raised one finger in the universal sign of disdain.
Dead silence in the broadcast booth until Don Meredith, the former Cowboy ace and a commentator on the broadcast, drawled, “That’s right, folks. Dallas will always be No. 1 in the eyes of her fans.”
No words necessary. There’s no doubt about what the fan was really saying, Dandy Don notwithstanding.
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/hand-gestures-hands-speak-louder-words/story?id=9493716
Braille Continues To Evolve
Posted on: 13/01/2010
If asked to name a 12-year-old—any 12-year-old, boy or girl – who created something that is such an important part of people’s lives that it is used every day all over the world, many people would probably shrug their shoulders and give a blank look. Those savvy in the world of social networking might say the two teens who created Myyearbook.com. Others would surely say Mozart, possibly Chopin.
But, although a contemporary of Chopin, this blind young lad’s creation had nothing to do with music, but everything to do with learning and reading when he developed a system of making letters, numbers and words using six raised dots in different patterns. By the time Louis Braille was 15, he published the first ever Braille book in 1929, then went on to add symbols for math and music in 1937, which undoubtedly made those blind students wishing to play Chopin happy.
Braille, who was blinded by accident when three, developed the system because of the way blind students were taught in 1821 Paris: teachers talked and the students listened. He wanted a better way to learn. Although it took until 1868, 16 years after his death, for his system to be accepted, it spread worldwide and is the standard used globally today, with those raised dots recognized by both the blind and sighted.
“New Jersey has approximately 295,000 blind and visually impaired residents,” said Adam Szczepaniak, director of the New Jersey State Library’s Talking Book and Braille Center, which has the state’s largest Braille collection with over 13,500 titles, of which almost 10,000 were circulated last year. “Naturally, Braille books are bigger. The translation of the Three Musketeers takes six large volumes, fortunately they are very light.
“Braille skills are integral for the blind and visually impaired to have full, independent, successful lives,” he continued. “It’s such a necessity and yet it is little recognized for its importance. Seventy percent of blind people without Braille skills are unemployed, while 85 percent of the Braille-literate population holds jobs.
“That’s why we also provide Web-Braille to our customers,” he added. “Our mission at TBBC isn’t just to provide free accessible reading materials, but to provide information, including information on and access to the latest technology. Web-Braille is part of the National Library Service for the Blind and Handicapped’s Web site which allows a member to either read a Braille book online with their software or download the book to their computer or Braille output device.”
Output at TBBC is via either audio software or a refreshable Braille display terminal. The Braille terminal receives content displayed on the computer screen and displays it, line-by-line, in Braille on the terminal. The mechanism uses the piezo effect of some crystals, where they expand when a voltage is applied to them. The crystal is connected to a lever which raises the dot. Each Braille dot (eight per character) is controlled by a crystal.
Another software program in use at TBBC is the Duxbury Braille Translator, which converts text on the computer instantly to Braille in a variety of languages. This translation may then be printed out on the Braille printing machine.
And in case you think that Braille is out of step with today’s communication, consider this: “contracted” Braille predates today’s text message abbreviations by many years.
Services at the NJ State Library Talking Book and Braille Center are available without charge to anyone living in New Jersey who, for any physical reason, cannot read printed material.
Slovakia’s Language Law
Posted on: 13/01/2010
The OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Knut Vollebaek, issued the following statement:
“The Government of Slovakia has adopted the Principles for the Implementation of the amended State Language Act. The Principles are effective as of 1 January. They were elaborated on my recommendation in order to address ambiguities, add clarity and provide a single authoritative interpretation of the Law. The text of the Principles underwent a number of changes in the process of adoption. However, I welcome the adoption of the Principles, since they provide the needed guidance for applying the provisions of the amended State Language Law and for overseeing the implementation of the obligations it establishes.
It is essential that steps taken to promote the State Language do not undermine linguistic rights of persons belonging to national minorities. The Government Principles for the Implementation of the State Language Law provide for the respect of principles of non-discrimination and proportionality and should thus safeguard the right of persons belonging to national minorities to use their mother tongue in the private and public sphere.
I expect the Slovak authorities to closely monitor and evaluate the implementation of the State Language Law, particularly with regard to the imposition of fines in order to avoid undue limitations to the use of minority languages. I intend to remain engaged with this and other matters until the balance between strengthening the State language and protecting minority rights is achieved.”
Yiddish – Personal Experience
Posted on: 13/01/2010
Ron Grossman:
“Mine is a generation that learned Yiddish because our parents didn’t want us to. To them, it was the language for keeping family secrets. They’d use it as an S.O.S. when children happened upon a discussion considered unfit for youthful ears.
“Sha!” one parent would say. (“Hush!”)
“Shpeter, veln raidn mir,” the other would respond. (“Later, we’ll talk.”)
My mother and father pushed English. To their ears, it was the linguistic highway to the American dream. It was the language spoken on college campuses, in fancy law firms and doctors’ offices — a world they peeked at from afar. Like Moses who saw a Promised Land he couldn’t enter, the ivory tower and learned professions were closed to them. My parents had both left high school to help put food on the family table. They were determined we’d have opportunities life denied them.
Years later, I was taken to tea with Abba Eban, an Israeli politician who spoke English with dulcet Oxford tones. I thanked him on behalf of countless Jewish children who’d risen above their origins because of him.
When he represented Israel at the United Nations, our mothers would sit in front of a television set mesmerized by his elegant delivery. “You should learn to talk like him, a beautiful English,” we’d be admonished.
Yet despite the attempt to keep Yiddish off limits, we learned it. What better incentive than to be able to decipher juicy scandals? Like how an aunt rescued her daughter from a gold digger’s clutches. (The greedy suitor must have set his sights low. That branch of the family lived in a second-floor rear apartment in Logan Square.)
We didn’t master a literary Yiddish. Our vocabulary was tilted toward reproaches and invective. It’s easiest for me to fashion a sentence ending in an exclamation point or question mark. Like: “Mach nit kein narishkayt!” (“Stop the foolishness!”) Or: “Far dos, zainen gegangen mir tsu Amerike?” (“For this, we came to America?”) That last expression was our elders’ running commentary on a younger generation’s ingratitude, misbehavior or faulty work ethic.
Our parents spoke a more well-rounded Yiddish. They had to: Their immigrant parents didn’t know much English, at best speaking a wondrous mishmash. I remember my maternal grandfather see-sawing from an English noun to a Yiddish verb, back to an English object, and so forth, creating a sentence indebted to Old and New World languages.
In a way, he had history on his side. Yiddish’s nickname is “zargon” (“jargon”), reflecting its mixed parentage as an amalgam of German, Slavic languages and Hebrew. As English entered Yiddish vocabulary in the U.S., the resulting dialect was dubbed “Yinglish.”
Living between two languages is a common denominator of the immigrant experience. The same process, for example, has taken place in families from south of the border, producing a North American variety its users call “Spanglish.”
Such is the cycle of language lost, language regained and language reinvented.
My father compressed the process into a lifetime. Toward the end, in a nursing home affiliated with a Christian denomination, he reverted to Yiddish. There he was in as Yankee surroundings as he had ever experienced. Yet he spoke Yiddish to me, the language once banned from our dinner table. Perhaps he was shy of exposing feelings to strangers. Maybe he longed for a touchstone of youth. He’d say:
“Zun.” (“Son.”)
“Yo, tate,” I’d reply. (“Yes, Dad.”)
“Zun.”
“Yo, tate.”
“The nurse, du vaist, di shiksha,” (“you know, the gentile.”)
I nodded, though they all seemed to fit that description.
“She’s …” he whispered, motioning me to come closer and switching seamlessly to English. “She’s a nice kid.”
Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-talk-grossman-yiddishjan12,0,6963325.story
Decades ago, poor children became known as “disadvantaged” to soften the stigma of poverty. Then they were “at-risk.” Now, a Washington lawmaker wants to replace those euphemisms with a new one, “at hope.”
Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin says negative labels are hurting kids’ chances for success and she’s not a bit concerned that people will be confused by her proposed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like “at risk” and “disadvantaged” are used.
The bill has gotten a warm welcome among fellow lawmakers, state officials and advocacy groups.
“We really put too many negatives on our kids,” says Franklin, who is the state Senate’s president pro tem. “We need to come up with positive terms.”
Republican Rep. Glenn Anderson disagrees, saying the potential cost of getting the bill from idea to printing — an average of $3,500 — is too much. And besides, he says, he is insulted more by the idea of the bill than what he called the political correctness it represents.
“It’s not the label, it’s the people who show up to help (children) that make the difference,” he says. “What helps is a smart, well-structured program, that has funding and credibility.”
Positive labeling is more than a gimmick or political correctness, Franklin says. She believes her idea could lead to a paradigm shift in state government and to changes in classrooms across the state.
In some ways, both lawmakers are correct, says Alison Bryant Ludden, associate professor of psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
Labels can work like self-fulfilling prophecies, Ludden says. The most relevant research on labeling concerns stereotypes concerning gender or race. For example, if a kid knows a teacher has low expectations because of his race, he’s likely to not work as hard, Ludden says.
But Ludden says labels pale in comparison to the impact of real help for kids.
“What matters is the time that we invest in them and the support that we provide for their success,” she says.
The National Conference of State Legislatures says the proposal is the first they’ve heard of changing the way poor kids are described in state law.
But there’s one group that’s glad about the possibility of getting rid of the phrase “children at-risk.” The people who publish the annual humorous List of Banished Words banned “at-risk” in 2000, calling it an overused and misused phrase.
But the idea of changing state statutes to say “at hope” instead drew a giggle from Tom Pink, a spokesman for Lake Superior State University. Pink’s office also banished “politically correct” in 1994 along with politically correct words and phrases.
“While I respect what the legislator wants to do, I think we can all agree that changing the words doesn’t change the problem,” Pink says, adding “it maybe even takes attention away from what perhaps should really be happening.”
Franklin says she’s been thinking of this idea for a while.
She saw a way to turn her notion into a bill after visiting the local Boys and Girls Club and observing how they were working with a national organization called Children At Hope to change kids’ ideas about themselves and influence the way adults think and talk about them.
The chair of the Senate Education Committee doesn’t expect Franklin’s bill will go very far this legislative session, which began Monday. But she says that won’t stop the proposal from having an impact on the adults who gather in Olympia.
“At least we’ll hear the voices of the young people,” said Democratic Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, who promised the bill would get a hearing.
Wally Endicott, the northwest director of the Phoenix-based Children of Hope, says he was excited to talk to Franklin about the bill.
But he is not thrilled with the idea of using “children at hope” to refer just to the disadvantaged. His group uses the concept to talk about all kids, not just those in poverty, because all children have obstacles to their success.
If Franklin’s proposal is approved, Pink has no doubts the idea has the potential to catch on quickly.
Years from now, he says, “at hope” could even make Lake Superior’s List of Banished Words.
Source: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/jan/12/wash-lawmaker-wants-banish-negative-language/
Cultural and religious concepts are the hardest to translate. Many words are culturally loaded and have evolved in the holy books and its teachings among the multilingual community of followers. They are often embellished and reinforced by their distinctive sociolinguistic environment and have acquired specialised contextual meanings.
In the lexicon of a language some words have a direct referential or denotative meaning – the most obvious being a name. “Ali” refers to or denotes the person of Ali. Others have a referential meaning as well as a connotative or implied meaning eg “pig” refers to the pig (animal) but it can be used to imply the pig’s characteristics such as “gluttony” as in “You are a real pig”. However this expression would be culturally offensive to a Muslim or Jew to whom the pig is taboo. Similarly the idiom “like a pigsty” should not be translated literally and would need a translation relevant to the particular language and culture.
“Allah” is a culturally loaded concept in Islam both in the language of the Quran and the language of its Malay Muslim adherents in Malaysia. It is imbued with many meanings including the 99 attributes of God familiar to the Muslims. To juxtapose “Allah” in the culturally distinct Christian milieu is to translate what is basically an untranslatable concept – both of the unity in the Muslim understanding of God and the Trinity in the Christian conception of God. These concepts are highly complex and abstract in themselves. Why confuse people further with a poor translation?
In translation theory there is the notion of “untranslatability” and when a concept is untranslatable the translator resorts to employing the generic term supported by notes or an explanation. In this case the generic Malay word for the concept of the universal God “Tuhan” can be used in the Bible translation with notes and an explanation about the Trinity.
Translators must demonstrate the highest linguistic sensitivity and exercise the greatest caution when they translate important texts and documents. Not only must they be specialists in the subject area but linguists in their own right. Ideally, the translator must be a native speaker of one of the two languages involved and have a mastery over the other.
Methodist Healthcare System is dismantling the language barrier with a new translation system. A state-of-the-art interpretation service makes communication with anyone from any country easier.
When you are in the hospital, time is of the essence. The last thing you want to worry about is whether the health care professionals can understand you.
“It’s very frustrating if you are trying to take care of a patient and you can’t ascertain the information that you need to make the appropriate choices in their care,” said Pam Dwyer, RN, director of nursing operations.
Methodist is the first hospital system in the southern U.S. to offer this service, a connection to interpreters within 15 seconds of dialing the phone. Hospital personnel dial up an office in Philadelphia where thousands of certified medical interpreters are available to help speed up the question and answer process.
Patients are happy for the help. “They are surprised. They are happy. They feel relief,” explained Tatiana Sultzbach, manager of diversity and inclusion. “And what better way than to be able to communicate your health care issues in the language you prefer.”
Web cams enable deaf interpretation on the spot. Where there used to be delays of an hour or two for language help, that aid is now immediate.
“We love it. We absolutely love it,” stated Dwyer. “It is essential to taking care of our patients in a timely manner.”
“We’re here not only to service the people who speak English, but everybody who needs it,” added Sultzbach.
The top five languages used by Methodist so far are Spanish, Burmese, American Sign Language, Arabic and Swahili.
Reviving Ojibwe
Posted on: 12/01/2010
When Dorene Wiese was a young girl she would listen to the stories her family members told as they gathered around her kitchen table.
Relatives often reminisced about harvesting rice, or more precisely manomin, from the marshes of northern Minnesota. They told stories of getting into canoes and using hand paddles to knock the grains into their baskets. It was an annual event, filled with ceremony that brought their Ojibwe community together as they worked to parch, separate and clean the rice, before bagging it for storage.
Wiese (pronounced WEE-see), who’s now 60 and is the president of the American Indian Association of Illinois, said that although the stories were robust — as a child she easily lost herself in them — she realized years later that because her family no longer spoke the Ojibwe language, their stories may have lost meaning and color by being told in English.
So Wiese, who has a doctorate from Northern Illinois University, has been working for the last three decades to revive the language. Her research is in oral history, and she has studied the ways in which learning is passed down through generations.
Revival is necessary, she believes, because for so many years, native languages withered for various reasons. Among them is that generations of Native American parents stopped speaking in their native tongues, believing their children needed a mastery of English to succeed economically.
In addition, Native-American children who were taken from their homes and placed in boarding schools from the late 1800s to about the 1940s were punished for speaking anything other than English.
“But language is the thread that keeps culture together,” said Wiese. “Language is woven into our brains and psyches and memories. Today when we say the word “medicine” in English, we think Walgreens. But in Ojibwe, the word is “midewin” (pronounced ma-DAY-win), meaning ‘from the earth.’ It’s the healing that takes place directly from mother earth.
“That seems like a minor detail, a definition of a word, but when you look at how it means that medicine isn’t just something from a pill or a bottle but from a cornucopia of plants from the Creator, it makes a difference in the way you see it, feel it and remember it.”
Reviving the Ojibwe language hasn’t been an easy undertaking. Wiese said that there are 60 tribes and bands of Ojibwe people throughout the United States and Canada. The language also was mostly not written down, and the dialects along with word usage and meanings vary depending on geographical areas.
Wiese is the former president of Chicago’s Naes College, which had been the country’s only urban American Indian college until it lost its accreditation for funding reasons and closed in 2007.
To start over, she opened the American Indian Association of Illinois and began a partnership with Eastern Illinois University offering general education courses as well as language classes. But for those who aren’t pursuing degrees, she runs free language workshops on the side.
On Wednesday evening, Wiese, two teachers and about 20 students — ranging in age from 2 to 70 — gathered in the basement of St. James Presbyterian Church on North Rockwell Street studying Ojibwe.
It’s a once-monthly workshop that includes music and show-and-tell type demonstrations to help students learn a language that is sometimes elusive because pronunciations vary and words are spelled phonetically.
“Our long-term goal is to write the language down so we can teach it in our college program,” said Wiese. “We’re also trying to create the first American Indian charter school with Chicago Public Schools and Eastern Illinois University as our partners so that we can get students at a very young age to teach them Ojibwe.”
Wiese said that if there’s a single event that solidified her need to revive the Ojibwe language, it occurred while she was attending a religious ceremony in the 1970s. One of the speakers said that God gives everyone a native language.
“He said that if you can’t pray in your language, the Creator cannot hear you,” said Wiese. “I wanted to learn how to pray in Ojibwe. I wanted to learn how to tell our stories in Ojibwe. That’s the only way we can be whole again as a native people.”
Georgina teaching Ojibwe
Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-trice-11jan11,0,4759894.column
Avenir de la langue française (Future of the French language) and eight other groups called on the government to put a stop to the Anglo-onslaught in a pair of opinion pieces in two national daily newspapers on Friday.
Quoting Michel Serres, a leading French philosopher, they warned: “There are more English words on the walls of Paris than German words under the (Nazi) Occupation”.
As France is embroiled in a heated government-led debate about national identity, the group cited a recent poll suggesting that 80 per cent of the French see their language as crucial to national cohesion.
That cohesion was under threat as “French is methodically ousted in favour of simplified English that zealously promotes the international business oligarchy,” the group warned in articles in Le Monde and l’Humanité.
France introduced the “Toubon” law in 1994, making the use of French obligatory in official government publications, in state-funded schools, in advertisements and French workplaces. This means, for example, that all English words on billboards come with a French translation in a footnote.
However, according to the groups, companies have exploited loopholes in the law to “Anglicise” a host of well-known shop and brand names. Thus, the supermarket chain Auchon has changed the names of its smaller stores from Atac to “Simply Market”.
France’s high-speed rail operator, SNCF has launched a new ticket offer called “TGV Family”.
The MEDEF employers’s union’s even has a slogan in English, “Ready for the Future!”.
France Telecom recent decision to drop the acute accents on its e’s came under attack, as did its launch of a relocation programme dubbed “Time to Move”.
Unions blasted the scheme as a brutal “Anglo-Saxon” ploy to demoralise workers, which they claim was behind a wave of suicides at the company.
Some of the signatories are also on the board of the Académie de la Carpette anglaise, translated as the “English Doormat Academy”, which awards an annual prize to “members of the French élite who distinguish themselves by relentlessly promoting the domination of English over French in France and in European institutions”.
Last month they awarded the top prize to Richard Descoings, the head of the prestigious Sciences Po university, for opening a new site in Reims where all classes are held in English. There was a special mention for Peugoet Citroën, the French carmaker, whose boss, Philippe Varin, decreed that all top meetings and technical documents should be in English, “the universal language”.
They said that the retreat of the French language was eminently “avoidable” but there was a lack of political will.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose English is rudimentary, pledged to push the use of French during his presidency of Europe in last year. But Marc Favre d’Echallens, Paris head of the group Défense de la Langue Française, said the president was obsessed with making France a bi-lingual country and had not stemmed the falling use of French in the EU.
In 1997, 40 per cent of documents at the European Commission were first written in French, compared to 45 per cent in English. In 2008, the ratio had fallen to 14 per cent French versus 72 per cent English. Last year French was down to 11 per cent.
The groups are demanding a “great national debate” on defending the French language, so that its “planned assassination cannot continue in silence”.
Found in Translation
Posted on: 12/01/2010
“Translation”, wrote Anthony Burgess, “is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” In making intelligible the cultures of other tongues, translators have shaped the culture and history of the English-speaking world. No book has influenced British life more than the King James Bible — the most famous of English translations and the greatest work of literature ever written by committee. The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Arabian Nights are part of the nation’s cultural inheritance, yet few native English speakers now read ancient Hebrew, classical Greek or Arabic — or, for that matter, any other foreign language. These works have been absorbed by generations through the efforts of translators.
The understated art of translation will be recognised this evening at the Times Literary Supplement’s Translation Prizes. The translators of seven books published in English last year, each out of a different language, will be honoured. The paradox of their work is that successful translators pass unnoticed. A good English translation will read as if the book were written in English in the first place. A translation that is clumsy or stilted will scream its presence.
Able translators are distinguished not only by linguistic expertise but also by skill in writing. Michael Gove, the politician and columnist, asked recently in this newspaper whether there were some foreign works that had lost nothing in translation. Times readers responded immediately and at length. Even the greatest writers have been translated into editions that are themselves towering works of literature. They include the English translations of Proust by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, and the German translations of Shakespeare by August Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.
Appropriately, two of the TLS prizes — for translations, respectively, from French and German into English — are named after these men of letters. Through the work of their successors, English readers have access to outstanding works of more recent literature.
Among this year’s award-winners, The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, dramatises the Basque country after the Spanish Civil War. The novella Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Anthea Bell, is one in a series of recent translations of the work of an outstanding 20th-century writer. An Austrian Jew who committed suicide in exile in 1942, his library in Salzburg having been razed by the Nazis, Zweig is revered in France as well as Germany and Austria. Yet he is unjustly barely known among English readers.
Translators illuminate not only the mental lives of great writers. Samuel Johnson remarked that “a translator is to be like his author, it is not his business to excel him” — and there is something in this. Among the most remarkable feats of translation in the last century was to render into English the worst of all books. Ralph Manheim, an American, was commissioned to translate Mein Kampf in the early years of the Second World War. It has remained the definitive, scholarly edition of a volume that has long been banned in Germany. Its peculiar skill lies in replicating the ranting, incoherent and prolix tone of the original. The art of translation offers a window into history and the human mind.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6982969.ece
Ajami Script
Posted on: 12/01/2010
It’s a writing system called Ajami, it’s a thousand years old, and a Boston University professor thinks it could help unlock the story of a continent.
Read more: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/10/the_lost_script/
Money Talks to Translators in China
Posted on: 11/01/2010
Chinese translators of Southeast Asian languages are earning top dollar as demand for their skills has boomed with the launch of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA).
“We need many more ASEAN languages translators,” said Ruan Jingping, general manager of Kunming Renyida Translation and Exhibition Cooperation in Yunnan Province, which boarders Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.
Ruan said the CAFTA would increase demand for translation services and translators. Her company was offering more services to facilitate project contracts, international exchanges and conferences, and would probably expand to tourist and service industries.
The CAFTA, comprising the 11 member states of China, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, was launched on Jan. 1. The CAFTA area has a third of the world’s people, a ninth of its GDP and the third largest trade volume after the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Yunnan Province needed at least 600 ASEAN language translators each of the last two years, according to statistics from the government of Kunming, capital of Yunnan. Kunming government also required its officials aged below 50 to learn basic Vietnamese, Myanmar and Lao.
Read more: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/07/content_12771834.htm
Translators Boosting India’s Writers
Posted on: 11/01/2010
After years of uninterest, a new flurry of finely wrought English translations from India’s vernacular languages promises to bring the country’s literary map fully into focus.
For a network whose English strain is diverse, highly developed, and globally circulated, Indian literature is surprisingly short on high-quality translations of works from its other languages into English. The number of memorable translations of fiction from the basket of Indian languages – Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Oriya, Gujarati, Kannada, to name only a few – into English could be counted on one’s fingers.
This is unfortunate, for no single branch of India’s literature can possibly encompass the representation of diverse social realities that a flourishing national literature requires. As the poet and critic Vinay Dharwadker wrote recently in Indian Literature (the little-read and poorly distributed – though increasingly well-designed and well-produced – bimonthly journal of literature published by the Indian government’s academy of letters, the Sahitya Akademi): “Indian-English literature by itself is inadequate to represent who we are to the rest of the world. Only a broad representation of the full range of Indian literatures, translated into a world language such as English, can do what is needed.”
Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100107/REVIEW/701079996/1194/foreign
Numerous Vietnamese literary works will be translated into foreign languages following signed documents between the Vietnam Writers’ Association, publishing houses and translators in Hanoi on January 8.
As part of an international conference on promoting Vietnamese literature held from January 5-10, the signed agreements will be implemented from 2010 to 2015 within 10 countries.
Foreign signatures included the Joiner William Centre of the United States , the India-Vietnam friendship and solidarity committee, the Lao Writers’ Association, the Russia Writers’ Association, the Hungarian Diary Journal, the Aria Publishing House of the Philippines , the Tranan Publishing House of Sweden, and translators Ahn Kyong Hwan from the Republic of Korea and Dashtvel from Mongolia .
Source: http://www.nhandan.com.vn/english/culture/090110/culture_v.htm
Promoting Literacy Via TV
Posted on: 11/01/2010
A professor in Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) noticed this and worked to transform this into a tool for promoting literacy levels among children and adults. And, it has worked.
Professor Brij Kothari’s research on Same Language Subtitles (SLS) showed how Bollywood music programmes on DD like Rangoli, Chitrahaar and Chitrageet helped bridge the gap between the education system and potential readers. The study shows how exposure to SLS more than doubled the percentage of children who became good readers and halved the number of children who remained illiterate.
Kothari said, “The idea occurred to me when I was watching a Spanish film with friends as a PhD student at the Cornell University in New York. The subtitles were in English and we discussed that if the subtitles were in Spanish it would have helped me learn the language faster. Soon after I finished the course and came to IIM-A, I started working on this project.”
The pilot test of the research was done in Gujarat when a controlled experiment with primary schoolchildren from disadvantaged backgrounds, by creating SLS content for an existing weekly 30-minute programme of Gujarati film songs — Chitrageet. “Gujarat became the first site in the world where SLS was implemented expressly to promote mass literacy in the first language,” said Kothari.
Positive Language Helps Smokers Quit
Posted on: 11/01/2010
A new study conducted at Yale University describes a relationship between stressing the benefits of quitting smoking — a gain-framed approach — versus stressing the potential losses of quitting smoking with actual quitting success rates.
Researchers assessed specialists from a New York State Smokers’ quitline and determined those smokers who received the gain-framed messages were significantly more likely to attempt to quit and had a higher rate of abstinence from smoking.
“The fidelity outcomes from this study should encourage quitlines to test novel counseling strategies for their ability to increase smoking cessation rates and, thus, prevent cancer,” study authors wrote.
“Quitline program directors need more specific evidence concerning the types of counseling strategies that are most effective and how to maximize the use of pharmacotherapies,” Robert T. Croyle, Ph.D., of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., wrote.
Source: http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=23283
The state-run Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) aims to broaden its activities into a wider range of genres this year, its president Kim Joo-youn said.
“The institute’s translation projects will expand from Korean literature into other genres such as arts, history and philosophy,” Kim said in an interview with The Korea Herald. “The procedure for revising the related bill is now underway in favor of broadening the categories that would get the government’s support.”
The Korea Literature Translation Institute is in charge of translating Korean literature into foreign languages and promoting Korean literary culture overseas,
The KLTI, which became a state-run agency in 2005, has so far focused on helping translate Korean novels and poems that could appeal to foreign readers.
In the past five years, the institute boosted its public standing by organizing various events and projects involving Korean writers and translators, while continuing to introduce Korean literature in overseas markets and training translators at home and abroad.
Read more: http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2010/01/07/201001070050.asp
A nine-month-old child is typically developing if he can speak even one word. With the benefit of proper scaffolding, he’ll know fifty to one hundred words within just a few months. By two, he will speak around 320 words; a couple months later — over 570. Then the floodgates open. By three, he’ll likely be speaking in full sentences. By the time he’s off to kindergarten, he may easily have a vocabulary of over 10,000 words.
For years, the advice has been that the way to kick-start a child’s language learning was to simply expose kids to massive amounts of language. However, as we explain in our book “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children,” the newest science has concluded that the central role of the parent is not to push massive amounts of language into the child’s ears. Rather, the central role of the parent is to notice what’s coming from the child and respond accordingly.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/tips-toddlers-develop-language-skills/story?id=9491324
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