My consecutive kit

Source: A word in your ear

In this post there are videos showing an  interpreter’s approach to note-taking.

See: A word in your ear

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Franglais row: Is the English language conquering France?

Source: BBC

The French parliament is debating a new road map for French universities, which includes the proposal of allowing courses to be taught in English. For some, this amounts to a betrayal of the national language and, more specifically, of a particular way at looking at the world – for others it’s just accepting the inevitable.

It all started with a faux-pas – to use a French phrase commonly borrowed by English-speakers.

On 20 March, when French higher education minister Genevieve Fioraso unveiled the proposed road map, she mentioned that there were only 3,000 Indian students in France.

In order to attract more foreign students, she added, French universities would have to start offering courses taught in English.

“We must teach in English or there will only remain in France a handful of experts discussing Proust around the table,” she said.

But Proust was an unfortunate choice. The author is actually one of France’s best literary exports and the reason why many students in the world take up French at university.

The influential Academie Francaise, the official authority on the French language founded in 1635, led a chorus of disapproval of Fioraso’s proposals.

Few countries guard their linguistic heritage as jealously as France, and defend it so vigorously from foreign threats – such as the growing worldwide influence of English. Though, interestingly, the institution was originally founded by Cardinal Richelieu to fight off the invasion of Italian in the French language. Today, there are as many Italian as there are English originated words in the French language. More.

See: BBC

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‘Linguistic treason’ as France prepares to accept English teaching for university sciences

Source: The Independent

The French language will finally concede defeat in its 1,000 years old war with English on the floor of the French parliament tomorrow.

The French minister for higher education, Geneviève Fioraso, will, according to her critics, propose the capitulation of the “language of Molière” before the all-conquering “language of Shakespeare”.

Ms Fioraso will table a draft law that will allow the teaching of some scientific courses in French universities in the English language. The intention is to allow France to attract the best foreign students and make future generations of French scientists better able to speak, and write, the international language of scientific research.

Ms Fioraso’s proposal has ignited a passionate debate in France, which has long tried to resist the linguistic imperialism of English. The Académie Française, which had been codifying and defending the French language since the 17th century, accused Ms Fioraso of linguistic treason. She was, the academy said, “favouring the marginalisation of our language”.

Bernard Pivot, the veteran host of literary programmes on French television, said: “If we allow English to infiltrate our universities and become the sole means of describing science and the modern world… French will become a banal language, or worse, a dead one.” More.

See: The Independent

Unicef to deal with linguistic diversity

Source: Times of India

In a bid to bridge the huge gap in language that is used in school and the one used at home among children in the state, Unicef has come up with some suggestive measures to cope with the linguistic diversity which is the biggest hurdle in providing primary education in Jharkhand.

Unicef has sought the help of education department, women and child development department, welfare department, all universities, tribal forums and NGOs. The events will help around 45 lakh students between Class I and Class V studying in over 40,000 primary schools across the state.

Binay Pattnayak, education specialist of Unicef in Jharkhand, said, “This is a grave issue. The medium of instruction in all the primary schools should be the mother tongues which are the tribal languages or mostly the regional languages.”

As per the latest data released by Unicef in association with Jharkhand Tribal Welfare Research Institute (JTWRI), more than 96% of children at primary level fail to follow classes while at school where at present the medium of instruction is Hindi.

This is because only 4% of the rural population in Jharkhand speaks Hindi. Mother tongue of over 96% of rural population in the state is either tribal or a regional language. With an aim to fill this void created by linguistic diversity, Unicef has set up a language research cell called M-TALL, which is Mother-Tongue based Active Language Learning, in the JTWRI to understand the nature of the language disadvantages of the children and also to explore possibilities to address the disadvantages.

See: Times of India

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English atop the Eurovision pile, yet again

Source: Johnson

LAST Saturday saw Denmark win the Eurovision Song Contest, the country’s third win in the contest’s history. A prototypically apple-cheeked blonde (pictured) took the trophy for her country, but she did so with the rather un-Danish name of Emmelie de Forest and the equally un-Danish title, “Only Teardrops”.

The contest has always been about more than music. Every year comes a slew of articles about the political nature of the voting. Countries that share ethnic or political friendships routinely give each other high marks: Greece and Cyprus typically give each other the maximum of 12 points while stiffing Turkey with nul points, for example. Estonia and Latvia this year gave Russia 12 points, no doubt because those countries’ large Russian populations voted for their neighbour.

Language, of course, plays a role in this as well. “Ethnicity” in Europe is often linguistic: an ethnic Russian is not apparent on the streets of Riga until he opens his mouth. Linguistic neighbors will tend to be generous to one another. Finland and Estonia are friendly not only because they are nearby but because their Finno-Ugric languages resemble each other, while being utterly unrelated to their neigbours’. (Hungarian is also Finno-Ugric.)  Each country can give 12 points to only one other country, and this year Denmark and Sweden gave their 12’s to Norway, Norway its 12 to Sweden, as befits the Scandinavian language continuum. More.

See: Johnson

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Words that stand the test of time

Source: Waikato Times

A University of Waikato academic involved in a groundbreaking and controversial new study on words which have remained in use for around 15,000 years says the team involved expected the results to be controversial but the years of work that went into it were worth it.

“It‘s a new thing and won’t be accepted by everyone,” Dr Andreea Calude says.

Dr Calude, from the University’s Department of General and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, was part of a team led by Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England, which has come up with a list of words which can be traced to old forms around the time of the last Ice Age.

These ‘ultra-conserved’ words suggest that separate language families – thought to be unique – can be traced back to a common ancestral language dating back centuries and used across much of Europe to North America and as far south as the Indian Sub-Continent.

Dr Calude says it had been generally accepted that while languages could be classified into families, there was no good way of making links between the different families. More

See: Waikato Times

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Linguistic thriller with a touch of northern noir (book review)

Source: The Australian

To complicate linguistic matters further, The Last of the Vostyachs was written 11 years ago in yet another language, Italian, before being translated, last year, into English.

The wild man in question is Ivan, a Vostyach of the Tajmyr Peninsula in northern Siberia and a former gulag inmate whose language causes all nature to quake and makes men want to pray.

A kind of philological Holy Grail for academics seeking a Siberian connection between the ancient languages of the Baltic and those of North America, Ivan’s lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay, “the mysterious semi-consonant of the American Indians”, attracts the attention of the Russian philologist Olga when he stumbles into the remote village where she is conducting her research.

The professor to whom Olga confides about Ivan is Jarmo Aurtova, the villain of the piece, whose theories of Finnish ethno-linguistic superiority are upended by the discovery and who therefore decides to ensure it never becomes public knowledge.

Diego Marani’s obsession with language, translation and meaning should come as no surprise. In addition to working as a translator for the European Commission, he has invented his own language, Europanto, which he has used to write articles for various newspapers, and his previously published novel, New Finnish Grammar, was animated by similar concerns as the one under review.

It is to the credit of Marani’s translator, Judith Landry, that the only questions surrounding language and translation that occur to the reader of The Last of the Vostyachs are the ones posed by the author, most notably during a lengthy dialogue between Olga and Aurtova in a sauna in the middle of the book. More.

See: The Australian

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Alarm bells over future of Arabic language

Source: The National

With about 400 million speakers and a billion Muslims who have at least some basic knowledge of the language, such a prospect seems absurd.

But a growing number of experts are ringing alarm bells about the future of Arabic. The culprits are everything from globalisation, colonialism, outdated teaching methods, the creeping influence of other languages, especially English, and a lack of political will to stop the rot.

At a conference in Dubai earlier this month, it was revealed one of the newest and most disturbing trends was among young Arabs, who increasingly spoke either a foreign language or a hybrid popularly known as “Arabizi”, heavily populated with foreign words. For many, this new tongue represented coolness, modernity and sophistication.

Dr Muna Al Saheli was one of the participants at the Second International Conference on Arabic Language, organised by the International Council for Arabic Language in cooperation with Unesco, the Association of Arab Universities and the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States.

“We do not have pride in our language, which is the vocal expression of our identity, because the colonist was successful in making us think it is inferior,” she says.

“They told us it is the reason behind our stagnation and was not fit for learning and the sciences.

“If a people have no pride or understanding of their identity, they become an easy prey for colonisers.”

Fouad Bu Ali, adviser to the Moroccan minister of information, agreed, using the example of postcolonial Maghreb countries. He says there was a war against the re-establishment of the Arabic language by the francophone lobby. “Language, especially one like Arabic, is not just a tool for communication,” he says. “It represents the moral, religious and historical values of a culture.

“It is the channel through which we disseminate our culture, a link to our rich historical heritage and the catalyst for our renaissance as Arabs and Muslims.”

For Dr Al Saheli, a professor of literature at Benghazi University in Libya, the issue can be summed up in two words. Arabs are suffering from an “inferiority complex”, a natural result of years of living under the colonial yoke and brutal dictatorships.

Some of Arabic’s problems are self-inflicted, says Dr Al Saheli, who criticises teaching methods as being outdated, boring and monotonous.

“When students study Arabic, they feel that they have entered a time machine and have been transported to a bygone era,” he says. “The curriculums used are highly detrimental to the development of the language, disconnecting it from the present and reinforcing the idea that Arabic is archaic and belongs to the past and not the present.” Read more.

Average English child says ‘like’ five times more than their grandparents as 20 year language study finds standards are also slipping at the House of Commons

Source: Daily Mail

A new study from Cambridge University reveals language is becoming more informal and even royalty and MPs are speaking incorrectly.

The average English child is likely to say the word ‘like’ five times as often as his or her grandparents and the word ‘love’ is used more than six times as often as ‘hate’.

The research is part of the Cambridge English Corpus – one of the biggest collections of words in the English language in the world. Read more

See: Daily Mail

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Highlights from ELIA Munich ND

Source: eMpTy Pages

My view of a conference is usually determined by the quality of the sessions related to MT and translation automation, or sometimes other sessions  that may trigger new thoughts on innovation and business process evolution. The ELIA conferences I have attended, stand out for me because I think they have better content in general than most, and one actually learns new things. To me it is clear that business translation is evolving beyond a focus on software and documentation localization (“the SDL mindset”) and I look for content that recognizes and addresses these emerging issues and market imperatives.

One of the most interesting sessions and perhaps the only one by a translation buyer was entitled “How Cloud TMSs are Changing the Relationship Between a Translation Buyer and LSPs” by Elina Lagoudaki of Turner Broadcasting. She described how cloud-based technology is used to manage a growing stream of digital media localization projects. Turner is a good example of a translation customer who has many small jobs (micro translation), often involving social media content and usually also closely  linked to dynamic web content that needs to go out in 15 languages. Elina presented her very organized and structured process to identify, administer and supervise translation projects and also provide final quality feedback to translators on an ongoing basis. Some things that she pointed out about her process included:

• A preference for a SaaS or Cloud-based TMS solution (WordBee in her case) over inflexible, costly, arcane and management-heavy onsite solutions
• The need for a management dashboard that allowed high level and job-specific status monitoring
• A translation management environment that allows and facilitates collaboration between translators
• A translation management environment that allows and facilitates online review and content sign-off
• A translation management environment that allows and facilitates ongoing feedback to translators
• A translation management environment that allows and facilitates that enabled terminology and TM collection and centralization
• A translation management environment that allows and facilitates that facilitates vendor comparison and selection. More.

See: eMpTy Pages

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Five useful dictionary tricks

You’ve probably ditched your paper dictionary, but do you know how to use OS X’s built-in one? This week’s video shows you how.

Transcript

Whether you need to know what a word means or just how to spell it, the days of leafing through hefty paper dictionaries are gone. But few Mac users really know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Today I’ll show you five tricks for doing just that.

1. Use pop-up definitions

A useful, and chronically underused, OS X feature is systemwide pop-up definitions. In most Mac applications—including Safari, Mail, Pages, TextEdit, Twitter, you name it—just position your cursor over the word you want to define and press Command-Control-D. A pop-up window appears containing the definition, synonyms, and any relevant Wikipedia entry.

Click the header for Dictionary, Thesaurus, Apple, or Wikipedia to open Dictionary to the relevant page.

2. Use contextual menus

Say you’ve forgotten the Command-Control-D shortcut already. Are you out of luck? Of course not. In most applications, you can instead select a word and Control-click (or right-click). A contextual menu appears. Select Look Up in Dictionary (or Look Up) and the definition appears.

See: MAC World

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Numbers of children speaking Welsh more than double those of working age or pensioners

Source: Wales Online

The Welsh Government said today the figures were “encouraging”, but campaign organisation Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg said the government remained a “barrier” to progress. Despite the larger number of Welsh-speaking children, the figures showed there is a clear lag between teenage boys learning Welsh and girls.

See: Wales online

Should there be room for translation errors?

Local translators in a recent meeting refuted the harsh criticism directed at some of their colleagues for their blunders, which have created quite a stir among local readers and undermined their trust in translators, by stressing that it’s impossible to produce flawless translated versions, as translating is a process in which translators contemplate and convey the original author’ s ideas through their own lens.

The latest blunders by reputable translators include “bo mat vi ung thu tu cung” (Dad died from uterus cancer) in Cao Viet Dung’s translated version of the “Les Particules élémentaires” (The Elementary Particles), a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq.

Up to 264 errors of various types and levels of seriousness were also detected in Dung’s translation of “L’Ignorance” (The Ignorance) by Milan Kundera. Here Dung, who studied his postgraduate course in France, translated “philtre” (love-potion) into “cai phin” (coffee filter).

Dung’s translation of “La Carte et le Territoire” (The Map and the Territory) by Michel Houellebecq was also reclaimed early last year due to prevalent translation errors.

He ‘earned’ last year’s “Trai Coc Xanh” (Green Amberella), a ‘prize’ given away by Tuoi Tre Cuoi for outrageous art works and events.

Similarly, Tran Tien Cao Dang’s translation of “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien also fell into ‘translation traps’ numerous times. An example is his translation of “Dr. Scholl foot powder” (which means the foot powder branded Dr. Scholl) into “Dr. Scholl’s foot powder”.

See: tuoitrenews

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Italian political slang dictionary

Source: The Telegraph

Slang: What Aussies call other Aussies

Source: Australian Geographic

It was inevitable that the first British settlers in Australia developed a new vocabulary to describe their alien surroundings, given that everything in Australia was so different from all they had known.

Prison slang crept into general use, indigenous language was incorporated, and new words coined – much to the alarm of the anglophile establishment.

The English-born ‘Sterlings’ looked down their noses at the Australian-born folk. They called them ‘Cornstalks’, because the new generation were taller than their forebears. The name stuck, and so did the custom of giving regional names to our fellow Aussies.

We ‘Sandgropers’, or Western Australians, once used the term ‘Wise Men from the East’ in reference to visitors from the other side – especially the ones who enjoyed telling us how we could improve.

The names for Victorians have a bit of a sting to them: Victoria was called the Cabbage Patch because of its small size, hence ‘Cabbage Patchers’ hailed from the garden state. ‘Gum Sucker’ was formerly applied to all colonials for their pastime of sucking the sweet gum from some species of wattle. How it came to refer solely to Victorians is a mystery.

Tasmanians, too, suffered prejudice, and ‘Taswegian’ was once used almost derisively to describe the mob who in kinder moments were called ‘Apple Islanders’. Those Taswegians were once also known as ‘Barracoutas’, after the creature that supported fishing families and was a staple during the starvation years. The name is rarely heard now, and the ’couta, too, have almost vanished.

See: Australian Geographic

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Web marketing for translators (part two)

Source: Translator T.O.

Daniel Freedman, web strategist for LinguaLinx, concludes his two part series by discussing how translators can best use the Web to establish themselves as professionals who solve business problems.

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In the first part of this series, I provoked some lively discussion with the provocative suggestion that translators should reject much of the conventional wisdom about web marketing.

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The advice was to de-emphasize Facebook, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). My contention was that if you are a translator, your attention should be focused instead on just two key things:

1. Establishing yourself as a translation expert
2. Making sure you have a website that proves your expert status

More.

See: Translator T.O.

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Is globalisation just a recent phenomenon?

According to a recently published study, our linguistic interrelations and similarities could possibly be traced back to the retreat of glaciers in Eurasia at the end of the last ice age, 15,000 years ago.

The research, called “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia”, was conducted by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude and Andrew Meade.

The results presented offer a very controversial hypothesis in the world of historical linguistics as they assert that “ultraconserved words” could be found in several language families of the Eurasiatic superfamily.

The researchers came to their conclusion through the use of “a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 years ago”.  Continue reading →

See: TermCoord

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The Interpreter: Your Best Company when Internationalising

Source: Wired into Words

Regarding our last post, Internationalisation: Taking Action, today we will focus on the spoken side of the language requirements that may come up during this process, that is, interpreting.

Thanks to the interpreter’s work, the hard task of internationalising a company in a non-English speaking country may be smoother, as we are guaranteed a fluid communication despite not having a good command of the target country’s language. We all know about the importance of communication in every field of life, even more in a marketing field where exportation is desired.

Apart from all the written documentation that will need translation during this process, interpreting, i.e. spoken translation, plays a significant role in spoken communications carried out during the internationalisation process. We can’t forget that, thanks to the Internet revolution, many communications could be carried out via e-mail; however, there will always be topics and situations that would require a human presence, whether it is by phone, by videoconference or a physical presence in the country we wish to do business.

We must take into account then, that the interpreter will appear after studying whether the project is viable or not, therefore, when entering a foreign market. More.

See: Wired into Words

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German dialect in Texas is one of a kind, and dying out

Source: BBC

The first German settlers arrived in Texas over 150 years ago and successfully passed on their native language throughout the generations – until now.

German was the main language used in schools, churches and businesses around the hill country between Austin and San Antonio. But two world wars and the resulting drop in the standing of German meant that the fifth and sixth generation of immigrants did not pass it on to their children.

Still the biggest ancestry group in the US, according to Census data, a large majority of German-Americans never learned the language of their ancestors.

Hans Boas, a linguistic and German professor at the University of Texas, has made it his mission to record as many speakers of German in the Lone Star State as he can before the last generation of Texas Germans passes away.

Mr Boas has recorded 800 hours of interviews with over 400 German descendants in Texas and archived them at the Texas German Dialect Project. He says the dialect, created from various regional German origins and a mix of English, is one of a kind. More.

See: BBC

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What’s the best way to teach languages?

Source: The Guardian

How do students best pick up languages? Martin Williams talks to academics, teachers and multi-lingual speakers to find out about the science of learning a language

a report by the British Academy this year found there was a growing deficit in foreign language skills. Increasingly, children are choosing not to study languages beyond the compulsory stage – and only 9% of pupils who take French GCSE progress with it to A-level.

“We’re failing to inspire people,” says Alex. “I had a mix of good and bad teachers – the most inspirational ones just focused on giving you the confidence to speak. Then I’d pursue it outside the classroom: I would watch films, find out new words and read things.”

Language pedagogy has come a long way since the days when repetitive grammar-translation methods were regarded as the only way to learn. Today, task-based approaches are widespread in British schools, emphasising communication and the practical uses of language.

For Christelle Bernard, a French and Spanish teacher at St Gemma’s High School in Belfast, these methods of teaching allow her to cast aside the textbook whenever she can. “You need a little bit of grammar, but my approach is much more topic based with as little grammar as possible,” she explains.

Her task-based teaching embraces ideas which range from lessons using computers, to audio-visual and kinesthetic learning. She explains: “For instance, if I’m teaching pets, I’ll bring in soft toys to use in the lessons.” More.

See: The Guardian

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