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To individualise its four language issues, Bona now has language indicators on the mastheads and different shots of its cover star, to distinguish between the English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho editions. The March 2015 issue features Khanyi Mbau.
"This is the only South African magazine to be published in four languages every month," says Editor Linda Mali, "therefore, we wanted to do something a little different for each of the languages to individualise them. It is important for us not to have just three translations of a magazine on the shelf. We want to be able to connect with our readers in their language through our content and our advertising. So, this is a further way for us to be able to do that."
OTTAWA - A veteran Liberal MP wants assurances from Treasury Board President Tony Clement that federal ministers communicate in both official languages on social media networks like Twitter.
According to the government's official policy, federal institutions must ensure that their communications conform to the Official Languages Act, Stephane Dion writes in a letter to Clement.
Dion, the Liberal official languages critic, said an overwhelming number of ministers — including Clement himself — do not do so on social media.
"You yourself, minister, fail to meet bilingual requirements in your electronic communications on government matters," Dion wrote. "And you are not alone in this. Many ministers use almost only English in their Twitter communications."
Dion listed 16 Conservative cabinet ministers who tend to tweet primarily in English. He added that International Development Minister Christian Paradis often fails to communicate in English in his online communications.
He says the tendency raises concerns that social media becomes a way to circumvent the requirements of the act.
"The bilingual requirement must fully extend to ministers' electronic communications," he wrote.
Dion's letter follows a scolding from the commissioner of official languages, who said federal ministers should be tweeting in both English and French.
Acting on a complaint, Graham Fraser concluded that former foreign affairs minister John Baird and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney violated the language laws with unilingual tweets.
Fraser's office said cabinet ministers don't have to be bilingual, but when they communicate with the public in their official capacities, they must use both official languages.
Dion urged Clement, whose department is responsible for enforcing language policy, to correct the situation.
"He is the one who must ensure that everyone respects the Official Languages Act," Dion said in an interview. "It is difficult to achieve when he (Clement) himself does not do it."
Clement told Postmedia News last year that he'd prefer turning off his Twitter account rather than having to submit to language rules.
None of the Conservative ministers contacted last week were willing to comment on Fraser's preliminary conclusions.
Dion raised the matter Tuesday during question period, but was quickly shot down by Shelley Glover, the federal minister of heritage and official languages.
"What the member of the opposition has said is ridiculous. The government regularly communicates in both official languages," Glover said, noting the Twitter accounts in question were personal accounts.
"We take the two national languages of our country seriously."
One Conservative MP, Laurie Hawn, blasted Fraser's report last week, arguing that ministers should be allowed to express themselves in a language of their choice.
"Commissioner of Official Languages says cabinet ministers MUST tweet bilingual. Quelle idee stupide," Hawn wrote on his own Twitter account.
The Official Languages Act says parliamentarians can use one language in their private office and with staff.
They must, however, use both official languages when communicating "objectives, initiatives, decisions and measures taken or proposed by a ministry or the government,'' the report said.
The commissioner's investigation was prompted by several complaints.
The report states that during a two-month span, 181 of Baird's 202 tweets were English-only.
Blaney's Twitter account produced 31 tweets over two months and the vast majority were in both languages. Two were French-only and one was in English.
The report said parliamentarians should be communicating in both languages on all social media platforms, not just Twitter.
The commissioner declined an interview about the report because it is not yet public.
— Follow @melmarquis on Twitter
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DuckDuckGo, the small and upcoming search engine, announced that their instant answers are supported in four new languages.
DuckDuckGo claims they can provide instant answers for around 9 million different queries and now they are supported in the following four languages, outside of just English. The new languages include French, German, Czech and Polish. DuckDuckGo said you will see these new answers automatically if your web browser is setup to prefer any of these languages or you can change your language on the DuckDuckGo settings page.
DuckDuckGo promises more language support in the near future, with Spanish and Russian coming really soon.
Here are screen shots of sample answers in German and Czech:
Sometimes, a smile can say everything. But has :-)—the emoticon version of a happy grin—crossed that line into becoming a socially acceptable way of communicating?
For some bilingual speakers, it turns out emoticons often are useful and may be used as vehicles to communicate when words and phrasing are difficult.
Cecilia Aragon, associate professor of human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, joined an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, psychologists and linguists from around the world as she presented her research about trends of emoticon use among bilingual speakers in a session, "Emotion in Informal Text Communication," Feb. 14 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Jose, California.
Specifically, Aragon and her collaborators have found that one group of bilingual speakers used emoticons more often when typing in their second language in casual, online communication than they did when typing in their native tongue.
"As with any language, we're seeing a proliferation of new vocabulary across languages. Some of the face-to-face patterns we see in bilinguals are being echoed online," Aragon said.
Aragon's presentation was part of the larger symposium, "Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Bases of Communication: New Analytic Approaches."
Many past studies have shown that people rely more on nonverbal communication—facial expressions, hand gestures and body language—when speaking in their second language. As emoticons have emerged as a nonverbal, visual language of their own, Aragon's research team was curious whether bilinguals were using symbols in online communication as they might employ gestures and body language in face-to-face communication.
"Under certain conditions, bilinguals increase their use of nonverbal communication in their second language, and we discovered the same thing online with emoticons," she said.
The researchers analyzed a dataset of AOL Instant Messenger chat logs among 30 astrophysicists in the U.S. and France. They found that native French speakers used more emoticons when they communicated in English.
Aragon's team is now looking with a sociolinguistic lens at how emoticons are used in casual conversations on other microblogging platforms such as Twitter, story comments and online forums.
Other symposium presenters included Munmun De Choudhury of Georgia Institute of Technology; Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Victor Kuperman of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada; Yousri Marzouki of Aix-Marseille University in France; and Patrick Wong of Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Also participating as co-organizers were Laurie Beth Feldman of the University at Albany-State University of New York and Judith Kroll of Pennsylvania State University. Both collaborated with Aragon on the bilingual study.
A Federal Court judge has rejected a call for a temporary injuction over French-language concerns in Quebec to hold off on public hearings into TransCanada's controversial Energy East pipeline project.
Environmental groups and French-language protection groups had applied for a temporary injunction into the National Energy Board review because the gas and oil company had not finished translating its 30,000-page application in both official languages.
Energy East’s latest hurdle? French-language protection groups
TransCanada applies to NEB for Energy East approval
Energy East pipeline gets support from Quebec energy board
The unlikely alliance included:
The Quebec Environmental Law Centre.
The David Suzuki Foundation.
Greenpeace.
The separatist Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society and the Mouvement Québec français.
Lawyers were in Federal Court in Montreal last week to argue on behalf of a francophone landowner.
TransCanada argued the vast bulk of the documentation is available in both languages on the company's website, and said it would work hard to ensure anyone who wants documentation in French can get it.
TransCanada's proposed Energy East pipeline would ship crude from Alberta to New Brunswick. (The Canadian Press)
TransCanada is trying to build a 4,600-kilometre pipeline to carry western crude to refineries in Eastern Canada and new markets across the Atlantic.
The judge ruled Monday there was no proof the rights of those who wished to participate in the hearings were compromised, and that an injunction to stop the National Energy Board's work would not be in the public interest since it would cause unnecessary delays.
The deadline to participate in the hearings is March 3.
AS an emotional nation, the month of February reminds us the right to language. This right is recognised in the entire world but its protection is not guaranteed with the same gravity. Despite clear constitutional mandate subsequently backed up by a specialised law, the dignity and glory of Bangla language is on the wane.
Articles 3, 23 and 153 of the Bangladesh Constitution, 1972 envisages right to language, literature, culture and heritage. Section 3 of the Bangla Language Application Act (BLAA), 1987 obliges courts, government offices, semi-government and autonomous institutions except in foreign relations to use Bangla. Under section 137 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 and section 558 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 Bangladesh government may issue Order making use of Bangla language mandatory in superior and subordinate judiciary. On June 7, 1988 the Eighth Amendment Act of the Constitution was enacted substituting the spelling 'Dacca' with 'Dhaka' and 'Bengali' with 'Bangla', but the later one has no tangible impact.
Bangla is used in the subordinate judiciary to a large extent but very minimal in the Supreme Court. The recognition of the mother tongue, as an aftermath of painstaking sacrifice is also ignored in the other government and non-government offices. Out of 81 private universities, only five universities have 'Bangla Literature' as a separate department undermining the concept of full-fledged university. Children in the Hill Tracts areas in Chittagong are deprived to use around 75 mother tongues in their educational institutions despite obligation under the laws including Parbatya Zilla Parishad Act, 1989 and the National Education Policy, 2010.
Around 1792, English entered into the field of education in India and about 1830 it became the de facto official language in the colonised territory. In 1991 Census, 1576 mother tongues were recognised and grouped into 114 languages in the country. The Indian constitution, 1950 declares Hindi and English as official languages, while Schedule VIII of the supreme document has recognised 22 state languages. The post apartheid South African Constitution, 1996 has recognised 11 state languages. There are nearly 6,500 languages in the world and out of which 5,000 indigenous languages are on the verge of extinction. The United Nations has officially recognised six languages while English and French are the working ones undermining the linguistic equality. Bangla turned as a state language of the then East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh) after a valiant sacrifice of leaders including Salam, Rafiq, Jabbar, Barkat in the language movement of 1952. As part of recognition of the martyrs, the 21st February is declared as the International Mother Language Day by the UNESCO in 1999.
Language has been a thriving stone behind astounding success for many countries including China, France, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, and Malaysia. Most of the people in these countries use their mother tongues as medium of instruction in education, office and personal dealings but do not hesitate to learn second language preferably English. They do not compromise with their own language while attunes the quote of Nelson Mandela that “if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head and if you talk to him in his own language that goes to his heart.” Contrarily, European, Latin American and Arab universities are now switching to English language scaring the isolation and linguistic inability to face globalised competitors. Roman Empire might have been the cradle of the last great global language “Latin” but now their universities have embraced English as the medium of global business communication.
On February 16, 2012 Bangladesh Supreme Court in an order outlawed 'Banglish' the mixed use of Bangla and English at all levels terming the distortion of language “tantamount to rape” and instructing the government initiating efforts to protect Bangla having 1,000-year history. The court on February 17, 2014 directed the government to take steps to use Bangla in all advertisements of electronic media, signboards, personal name plates and registration plates of vehicles within a month submitting a compliance report within April 1 of 2014 but no change apparently. Previously, the apex court in Hasmat Ullah v Azmiri Bibi and Others [44 DLR (HCD) 1992] held that as the government did not declare any order under section 137(2) of the CPC of, 1908 and so in spite of enactment of the BLAA of 1987, the proceedings of the subordinate court could be continued in English. But in Eldridge v British Columbia, [1997] 3 S.C.R. 624, the Canadian SC ruled that sign language interpreters must be provided by doctors and other health care providers in the delivery of medical services to those having hearing impairments and doing so is necessary to ensure effective communication to avoid the risk of misdiagnosis and ineffective treatment.
So, rhetorically Bangla is getting recognition with meagre protection facing double whammy. The government should implement the existing laws adopting a timely language policy avoiding one sided emphasis on English only.
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The writer is Assistant Professor of Law at Southeast University.
Published: 12:00 am Tuesday, February 17, 2015
The Yomiuri Shimbun
A 250-strong group of volunteers who will communicate with and help foreign runners will debut at the Tokyo Marathon 2015. Such efforts at one of the international sporting events held in the nation can serve as a test for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics in 2020.
About 36,000 participants will run a course through Tokyo in the marathon event cosponsored by The Yomiuri Shimbun. The Tokyo Marathon joined the World Marathon Majors, which consists of international major city marathons, in 2013. Before then, the Tokyo Marathon only had about 3,000 foreign participants, but the number rose to about 5,000 in 2014. This year as well, almost the same number of runners are expected to participate from 113 nations and regions.
Mainly 5 languages
About 250 people who are proficient at mainly in English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean and German will work as foreign language volunteers to help runners. On the day of the marathon event, they will help foreign runners around the start and goal points, wearing badges on their chests that indicate the languages they can use and wearing green caps.
Students of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies are expected to be the main volunteer force.
“[Foreign] runners will hopefully be relived to find they can communicate in their own languages,” said Sumire Saito, 18, a first-year student of the school of language and culture studies. “I want to reduce their feelings of nervousness, even a little.”
Foreign students who study in Japan and professional interpreters are also set to work as volunteers.
“I hope I will help runners with my language skills,” said Shuto Kajiwara, 35, who usually works as an interpreter in Spanish and Portuguese. “I will proactively talk to those who are in trouble.”
Translation apps
Although about 10,000 volunteers will participate in the event, not all of them speak foreign languages. A helpful aid for such people is a translation app that can be downloaded to smartphones and other tablet terminals and used for free. The Tokyo Marathon Foundation, the organizer of the event, is instructing volunteers to use the application in manuals handed out to volunteers and at orientation sessions for them.
The app was developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, and covers 14 languages for audio translation and 27 languages for writing translation.
“Back in previous meets, it was hard for me to explain when foreign runners asked me some questions,” said Masaru Matsuyama, who will join in the marathon meet for the fifth time as a volunteer.
The advertising company worker in his mid-30s plans to use the app. “They talk to me in various languages during the meet,” he said. “I think I can communicate with confidence if I have the app.”
The event organizer prepared a handout that carries basic English conversation examples for those who are not good at using smartphone and other devices. Topics range from “Venue guide,” to “Keeping and returning of runners’ belongings” and “First aid,” along with specific examples based on actual questions asked by foreign runners in previous meets, which helps users to communicate by pointing at certain phrases.
Eyes on Tokyo Olympics
Learning how to help foreign guests is one of the major tasks ahead for the coming Tokyo Olympics, as well. The Tokyo metropolitan government set a goal of having 35,000 citizen volunteers able to talk to foreigners and help them by fiscal 2019, based on its assumption that the number of annual foreign visitors will be 15 million in 2020. The metropolitan government is calling the volunteers omotenashi (hospitality) language volunteers for foreigners, and began free lectures to train them.
In addition, it plans to train 10,000 so-called urban volunteers who will guide visitors in transportation and sightseeing at airports, major stations and sightseeing spots by 2020.
“The experiences of the Tokyo Marathon will serve as an advantage for the 2020 games,” said an official in charge of the Olympics. “We want to extend the atmosphere of omotenashi to even those cheering for the runners along the sides of the street, as well as among runners and volunteers.” Speech
Nunavut language, culture celebration to stress kinship terms
Uqausirmut Quviasuutiqarniq runs Feb. 16 to Feb. 27
NUNATSIAQ NEWS
This map shows the distribution of the main Inuit language dialects between Greenland and Alaska. (WIKIMEDIA COMMONS IMAGE)
The 2015 version of the 11-day Uqausirmut Quviasuutiqarniq, will emphasize the connections between language, family and culture, the Nunavut government’s heritage and culture department said Feb. 16 in a news release.
To that end, organizers have chosen a theme based on the use of kinship terms: Tuqłurausiit/Ilaruhiriigut.
“The purpose of Uqausirmut Quviasuutiqarniq is to celebrate and strengthen the use of Inuktut in all areas of our lives,” Nunavut’s languages minister, George Kuksuk, said in the release.
(In government circles, Inuktut is now the preferred term for the Inuit language.)
The event, which used to be called Inuit Language Week, will run from Feb. 16 to Feb. 27.
In one of the event’s highlights, Kuksuk and Sandra Inutiq, the languages commissioner, will co-host a three-day conference in Iqaluit from Feb. 24 to Feb. 26.
The conference, held in collaboration with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and the Inuit Uqausinginnik Taiguusiliuqtiit language authority, will focus on the connections between culture, identity and language.
The Department of Culture, Heritage and Resources has distributed boxes of Inuktut resources to every school, daycare and library in Nunavut.
Those boxes contain books, flashcards, posters and an information sheet about the 2015 theme.
Also, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association is holding a Facebook video contest for beneficiaries living in the Qikiqtani region.
“You need to express in your video why you feel the Inuit language is important and how we can all make sure it continues to be vibrant in Nunavut and elsewhere in Canada,” the QIA said in an information sheet.
Information on how to enter the QIA contest is available here, in a downloadable PDF.
There is Faiz in the air. Urdu, the “lost” language of the poets, the hopeless romantics and the ardent idealists, is “re-emerging”. Several online Facebook groups are dedicated to varied Urdu poets, and Urdu learning websites such as Rekhta and Urduwallahs are becoming popular. Pakistani soap operas, broadcast on Zindagi channel, too are helping “revive” the language that “got lost due to Partition”. A large number of mushairas and qawwalis are being held in metropolitan cities, thus further helping Urdu make a “comeback”.
The question, however, is, did Urdu really go away? If anything, it has stayed on, through Bollywood songs, and since the 1990s, through Hindi news channels. Hindi news channels relay “khabrein”, not “samachar”, as was by Doordarshan. Reporters talk of a “shakhs”, not a “vyakti”, and use “adalat” instead of “nyayalaya”, for example. So, since the 1990s, the use of Urdu in popular media has gone beyond just Hindi cinema and extended to television news. Certainly, the language has not been “dying” as Urdu “revivalists” claim.
What has been dying is not the language, but the credit given to the language. Most people don’t know that many of the words spoken in Hindi films or news channels are Urdu. This is not a case of war between Hindi and Urdu. Both languages are closely linked to and depend on each other for their survival. After Partition, Urdu came to be identified with Muslims. “Muslim” Urdu became the state language of Pakistan and was imposed on native Punjabi, Sindhi and Pashtun speakers. In northern India, the land of Urdu and Hindi, the language lost its popularity among non-Muslim Hindi speakers because of its “Muslim” label. Publishers of Urdu books began focusing only on religious literature, further making it less attractive for the non-Muslim audience. In sad contrast, there was a time when Hindu poets like Firaq Gorakhpuri added so much to Urdu heritage.
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After Partition, and even now, it is Hindi cinema and news that have ensured Urdu its space in popular culture. But let’s not get patronising here. Urdu writers such as Salim Khan, Javed Akhtar, Sahir Ludhianvi and Shakeel Badayuni have contributed immensely to Hindi cinema. In fact, many Hindi film titles are in Urdu, like Mohabbatein, Kurbaan, Dil, etc. Most Hindi film singers and actors take classes in Urdu diction. Had it not been for Urdu, would we ever have timeless Bollywood dialogues like “Mogambo khush hua” or “Kitne aadmi the” or “Main tumhara khoon pee jaaoonga”?
Yes, “khush”, “aadmi” and “khoon” are Urdu words. And here is the flipside to the Hindi-Urdu marriage. Urdu has so often been used in Hindi cinema — which is a good thing — that Urdu words are now mistaken as Hin
In the 30 years since her first impromptu interpreter job, Linda Foster has gone from the occasional request for her services to working up to seven interpreting jobs per day.
Foster, the only full-time licensed interpreter in the Permian Basin until San Angelo, said she likes her job because she can be the voice of those who only speak Spanish.
“Just knowing that you are the voice of another person” is part of the reason why Foster said she loves her job. “And they’re putting all their trust in you and so is the judge and so is the jury. And that’s a big responsibility.”
Foster said her interest in language was cultivated from an early age, as growing up in Mexico her parents made Foster and her siblings speak in English to their father and Spanish to their mother — even though the parents could speak both languages.
Her parents told the children that they needed to know both languages and taught them from a young age to keep using both regularly.
When she was in college, Foster said she taught at a Berlitz Corporation institution in Guadalajara, which offered language classes.
Then in 1985, Foster said, she moved to Midland and worked with her sister, who occasionally got called to interpret for attorneys.
Back then, the industry was not regulated, Foster said, and anyone with knowledge of the languages could be an interpreter in court and for depositions.
So one day when Foster’s sister could not help out on an interpreting job, Foster said she took the opportunity to help out.
“It was scary,” Foster said, explaining that the attorney had to take 20 minutes to explain to her how to properly translate for the record. “It went well and I thought, ‘This is very interesting.’ ” That started Foster’s career, where at first she could keep a schedule in her head without a calendar because not many people knew about her.
But then Foster said more and more people started contacting her, to the point where now she often does an average of three to four interpreting jobs per day.
Rick Navarrete, a Midland attorney, said he’s been around the state and in federal courts, but he puts Foster above all other interpreters he’s encountered.
“There have been times that I’ve continued hearings and continued trials because Linda wasn’t available,” Navarrete said. He also said because Foster does simultaneous interpretation, or interpreting while someone is speaking, “it helps you forget that the other person doesn’t speak English.”
Navarrete also said that because translating literally from English to Spanish and vice versa can create problems in understanding, it’s important that an interpreter understand the meaning of a word or a phrase.
Foster said she prides herself on being able to understand the slang and “Spanglish” that often dominates this area of Texas.
One time, Foster said she was in a case where the defendant was accused of manslaughter. The defendant was describing what happened, she said, but the defendant used some vulgar words to do so.
Foster said even in those cases, she’s required to interpret those words true to the language and not just the exact meaning.
In another case, Foster said some Spanish words she was interpreting to English included a vulgar way of saying a person is drunk. In such a case, simply saying “drunk” or even “wasted,” as is common in some slang, didn’t fully capture the meaning of the word.
“You can’t translate everything literally,” Foster said.
Foster’s name carries such recognition that judges also recognize her and prefer her services, partially because she’s the only licensed interpreter in the area, something required by law when interpreting services are needed.
“It’s pretty much been common knowledge that she’s been the go-to person for years,” 70th District Judge Denn Whalen said. “Even before I took office.”
Whalen said the court accommodates her schedule as much as possible because sometimes she’s not available.
“I’ve known her for probably 20 years,” Whalen said. “The key is she interprets accurately and I think everyone on both sides of the docket trusts her interpretation of the testimony.”
Being so busy can be good and bad, Foster said. While she enjoys her job and likes having the work, she also said it’s difficult being the only licensed interpreter.
The test to become a licensed interpreter has become much more difficult over the years, she said, with some questions in the oral portion of the exam being so abstract that they ask the test takers to describe the mechanisms on an old typewriter.
“You really have to have a good dominion of both languages to pass this test,” Foster said.
But Foster said that’s a good thing, because interpreting could influence a case or even someone’s liberty; having a difficult test is necessary to have the best interpreters possible.
In the past, Foster said she had to watch local news in both languages and interpret in the other language to keep up her skills.
“Because of the demand I have, I get so much more practice,” Foster said. “I don’t always want to be this busy because it is very stressful. But it keeps me energized.”
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio - Duolingo offers an easy path for students to learn a language using a tool they already love: their smartphone.
Duolingo, a program that teaches language on mobile devices and online moved into Shaker Heights High School German classrooms about three years ago. Students latched onto the software because it feels less like a school assignment, and more like a game.
"This is all in their phones which they have on them all the time," German teacher Andrea Bradd Cook said. "It's fun."
The program, which launched in 2012, is free and boasts 70 million users, company spokeswoman Gina Gotthilf said. It's also mostly mobile: Only 15 percent of users log on using their computer. The company runs on investments and money generated through translation services.
The company designed Duolingo to keep people coming back.
"In order to learn a language people need to practice regularly," Gotthilf said.
The company originally created the app for personal use, but noticed an uptick of use in schools. Teachers liked the program, but had no way to monitor their students' growth. Shaker Heights kids showed their teachers screenshots of their work to show their progress.
The company last month rolled out a feature that allows teachers to track students' progress. Since its launch, the company has seen 20,000 teachers accounts created.
Bradd Cook and fellow German teacher Keith Szalay incorporated the program into their Classroom Without Walls curriculum, which requires students to choose from several activities outside of school to better understand culture, such as eating German food or visiting a museum. Of the 80 children enrolled in introductory German this year, about 30 choose to use Duolingo to fulfill a portion of the requirement.
The teachers noticed an increase in vocabulary among their pupils.
Children throw words around in class that teachers haven't covered, and credit Duolingo.
"When they first get it they go pretty crazy," Szalay said.
Learn five official SA languages online with UNISA
Did you know that the University of South Africa (UNISA) offers free online courses where you can learn five of our eleven official Nguni languages?
The courses offering lessons in isiZulu, Northern SeSotho, Southern SeSotho, isiXhosa and SeTswana have been around for a while now and are the only form of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) offered by the nation’s biggest tertiary institution.
There is, however, word that UNISA will begin offering its courses online to avoid future troubles with postage and late deliveries as a result of the past few months’ postal strikes – we’ll be keeping an eye for official word on that from the institution.
Each course gives you a brief description and history of each language, its origins and where most of its native speakers reside.
The subject material teaches you basic things such as greetings, commands and courtesies and you don’t have to write any tests or submit any assignments for each one. You can also listen to an audio clip of each sentence to polish up your pronunciation.
Head over to the UNISA free online course portal and get started with your chosen lesson.
[Source and image – UNISA]
It’s official: Spain is a happy hunting ground
By annanicholas
If a new study is to be believed human language veers towards happiness with most people using positive rather than negative words to express themselves. Experts at the University of Vermont apparently drew from 24 sources of written material to study the 10,000 most common words used in ten languages, grading them on a happiness scale of one to nine.
Is Spain the happiest nation?
Words such as ‘laughter’ received at least eight points whereas ‘greed’ scored only three which seems a bit rum. Surely when applied to Spanish cuisine greed could prove the source of great happiness when tucking into a plate of chorizo, paella or slow-roasted oven cooked lamb?
I digress. Despite the country’s economic woes Spain was declared to have the most positive and happy language with Portuguese nipping at its heels, followed by English, German and French. The Chinese seemingly picked the short straw and came last. Meanwhile another survey by messaging app, Viber, revealed Spain to be the most romantic and loved up nation, with its citizens sending more amorous stickers to one another than any other country. Perhaps when the economic chips are down, happy words, love and romance serve as an antidote to stress?
It’s a funny old thing about the Spanish language. When I first arrived in Palma, I entered a bar and heard what I thought was an almighty row breaking out among regulars. There was nothing happy sounding about the loud and fast dialogue, the raised voices and exaggerated hand gestures. In some concern I decided to beat a hasty retreat but was stopped by the bartender who perhaps sensing my unease, laughingly told me that this was a normal chummy and happy way of talking in Spain. It transpired that locals were discussing the results of a lively football match from the night before and there was a good deal of bantering going on. Once I’d grown accustomed to the cadence of the voices and witnessed the ensuing laughter and friendly pats on back, I realised how mistaken I’d been.
In Soller, my mountain town, listening to locals discussing football or politics – or even simple topics such as the price of bread – in Mallorquí dialect can sound even more rumbustious than in the Castilian language. I consider both to be positive and happy languages although Mallorquí is particularly robust and usually delivered with the volume button turned up. Now I don’t turn a hair when I hear excitable Spanish being spoken around me and if anything I find it rather comforting and heartening: an affirmation of life. So, in the words of Pharrell Williams ‘I’m happy’ especially knowing that the Spanish – regardless of straightened times – have at least something to be happy about too.
Anna Nicholas is an award winning blogger and the author of five humorous books about living in rural Majorca. Find out more about Anna Nicholas here or follow her on Twitter @MajorcanPearls
Spanish is the Language of Love. English, of Poetry.
by ORION JONES
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Data just released by the VoIP app Viber indicates that the Spanish exchanged more love-related stickers in 2014 than any other nationality. This new data set is consistent with prior research that found Spanish has more words with a positive bias than any other language.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just published a study, completed in 2014, by researchers at the University of Vermont, who combed through billions of words belonging to the world's 10 most spoken languages to find the 10,000 most-used words of each language.
Researchers used sources like Google Books, Twitter, subtitles on films and TV shows, song lyrics, and The New York Times in Spanish, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, and German.
"For example, the words ‘lying’ and ‘cried’ were plotted on the negative side, while ‘love’ and ‘laughter’ were positive words. Once all of these words were plotted, the researchers found that every language studied was inherently positive, and more words fell on the right of center than the left."
Spanish was the most positively biased language followed by Portuguese and English. China landed at the end of the list, having used the fewest positive words of the 10 most spoken languages. Each language contains a complex history in which certain words became more important according to custom, practicality, and culture.
Because England was never completely conquered by the Romans, its language contains many Latin words as well as the original Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The result is a rich mélange that makes it extremely effective at precise, yet fluid descriptions, helping to explain, says trilingual poet Jorie Graham, the rich tradition of robust poetry in the English language.
In fact, American English may well be the richest, most diverse language on the planet.
"So you have this already very rich pool, and then you bring that language across to the colonies, and you have a very absorptive greedy English language that begins to basically, unlike many romance cultures, happily steal words from Native American languages and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese and French, a lot of Native American languages in particular and a lot of Spanish. So that, because it is a mercantile culture right from the start, it wants to be able to buy and sell, it needs every language that it can to do so."
A Queensland academic has come up with what's being termed the first online searchable and extendable dictionary for the Indigenous Yolngu languages.
Creator John Greatorex, from Charles Darwin University, said it was a way to make the languages accessible to students and researchers around the world.
John Greatorex speaks to SBS Radio:
The Yolngu come from remote north-east Arnhem Land in Australia's north.
Mr Greatorex said students and others interested in their languages would no longer need to buy CDs or apps to access them.
"Most people who are looking at languages and studying languages have computers, but often they don't have CD or DVD drives now," he said.
Mr Greatorex said up to 80 per cent of the students of the Yolngu languages were external, including large numbers of Japanese and German students.
"Particularly Japanese seem to have a relationship of understanding," he said, "a relationship with their environment where they're keen to learn from other peoples about their connection with the environment."
He said the Yolngu languages revealed a deep connection between the people and the environment.
"Not only are these old societies, but, also, from my perspective, very modern cultures and languages reflecting a profoundly rich connection with the environment," he said.
"And [it's in] a way in which, I would hope, Western cultures and many other cultures around the world could learn from the complex relationship that these languages have with the environment in a sustainable way."
Mr Greatorex said an important aspect of the dictionary was anybody who discovered a new word or new meaning of a word could send it to a temporary database for consideration. A team of Yolngu advisers to the university and Yolngu elders would then decide upon its entry into the dictionary.
Lessons in primary schools across the Amazigh enclave in Libya have started providing Amazigh language tuition for students. In an attempt to rectify the damage sustained to Amazigh culture during Gaddafi’s ‘Cultural Revolution’, teachers and activists are making language books readily available for use in the classroom across the area.
Below is an article published by Middle East Eye:
The children wear woolen hats to stay warm inside their classroom in the Nafusa mountain range southwest of Tripoli, while they study a virtually unknown alphabet.
"We are currently offering three hours a week of Amazigh language, (Tamazight), between the first and fourth grades of primary education," said Said Azabi, the school manager in Mezzo, a district of Jadu, a town of 6,000 in the Amazigh enclave.
Also called Berbers, the Amazigh are native inhabitants of North Africa, with a population extending from Morocco’s Atlantic coast to the west bank of the Nile in Egypt. The Touareg tribes in the interior of the Sahara desert share the same ancient tongue. However, the arrival of the Arabs in the region in the seventh century was the beginning of a slow yet gradual process of Arabisation. Today, official estimates put the number of Amazighs in Libya up to almost 600,000, about 10 percent of the total population.
"The first lessons in Tamazight, the Amazigh language, started in makeshift schools here, in the mountains, when the war was not even over," said Azabi during recess, referring to the 2011 civil war that brought down Muammar Gaddafi. The school books and the teachers are “the result of the selfless work of a legion of volunteers”.
In 1973, Gaddafi launched a “Cultural Revolution” under which any publications not in accordance with the principles espoused in his “Green Book” were destroyed. That included those mentioning the Amazigh. According to Gaddafi, the Amazigh were of “Arab origin” and their language “a mere dialect”. Registration of non-Arab names was forbidden, Libya's first Amazigh organization was banned and anyone involved in their cultural revival prosecuted.
Alongside his twin brother, language activist Madghis Buzakhar was put in jail after a book collection they had gathered was confiscated by the former regime's security forces. Today, Buzakhar is part of the group releasing the language books used in schools like the one in Jadu. The 33-year-old points to a “massive joint effort”.
“We literally started from scratch, and now we are all struggling to recover the time we painfully lost,” Buzakhar said from the headquarters of the organization he co-founded in 2011 with his brother, Tira Research and Studies, in central Tripoli.
Although based in Tripoli, the Buzakhars are native of the Nafusa Mountains. Climbing to more than 2,500 feet (750 metres) above sea level, the mountain ranges are doubtless the community's main stronghold in Libya but not the only one where their ancient language has survived.
A second important enclave for the Libyan Amazigh is in the coastal town of Zwara (Zuwara), about 60km from the Tunisian border. Much of the cultural activity here takes place in a compound that hosts the local radio station. Today, around 15 volunteer teachers are attending a workshop on the new language materials for fourth and fifth grades.
"The majority of us have Tamazight as our mother tongue, but it wasn't until 2011 that we started to use our own alphabet too. We call it Tifinagh, and it was forbidden during Gaddafi's time,” said Noha Alasi, a 24-year-old architect who volunteers in the language program. “The only way to learn how to read and write during Gaddafi was through the Internet. That's how we all taught it to ourselves.”
The new books teaching the Amazigh children a language that they previously would not have been allowed to learn outside their homes (MEE/Karlos Zurutuza)
Sitting next to Alasi, Fatwa Halib gives figures to illustrate the dimension of the challenges ahead.
"Today we have 60 teachers working in 26 schools in Zwara, but it is far from being enough," said the 33-year-old volunteer, who is in charge of evaluating new teachers. Halib said there is “a lack of both a qualified staff and an overall plan to improve education levels in the long term”.
According to UNICEF, around 33 percent of schools were damaged and 24 percent were used for military or humanitarian purposes during the conflict in 2011. UNICEF also says that about 20,000 of the estimated 70,000 people internally displaced by the conflict are children, “many of whom are not attending school”.
For Najib Sasi, an arts teacher and head of the office of Tamazight teaching at the Libyan Ministry of Education, there are other hurdles beyond those dealing with plain logistics.
"On the one hand, we have to deal with a mindset that is deeply rooted in Arabism, and we cannot forget the growing political turmoil in the country. By the time we manage to get started with one government, this one changes and we're back to square one," Sasi said from his desk in Zwara.
Three years after Gaddafi was toppled and killed, Libya remains in a state of chaos that has put the country on the brink of civil war. There are two governments and two separate parliaments - one based in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk, about 600 miles (1,000km) east of the capital. The latter, set up after elections in June when only 10 percent of the census population took part, and which was largely boycotted by the Amazigh community, has international recognition.
Accordingly, Libya is an open battlefield where several militias fight grouped into two paramilitary alliances: Fajr (“Dawn” in Arabic), led by the Misrata brigades controlling Tripoli, and Karama (“Dignity”), commanded by Khalifa Haftar, a Tobruk-based former army general. Haftar has conducted several air strikes against Zwara over the the past few weeks.
"How can we possibly work in these conditions?" said Hafed Fatis from the battered coastal town. At 48, Fatis was selected in 2013 to attend a three-month course in the Spanish Basque country at the invitation of Garabide, an NGO that shares its experience in the normalisation of the Basque language with members of other minority languages.
"We were 14 in total in a group that included Kurds, Aymaras, Quechuas... That workshop was very much an eye-opener for me," said Fatis, today striving to turn what he learned into tools that can bring tangible results in his native Zwara. That will take time.
"Many here want immediate results, but one thing I learned from the Basques is that the normalization of a long-neglected language is a project for the long term," said Fatis.
Children attending the third grade in Jadu will grow up to see the fruits of such efforts with Tamazight. However, they are all too young to keep any memories of the times when the language they are now studying at school could only be spoken inside their homes.
A few among the 20 in the class in Mezzo did not even live in Libya before 2011. One of whom is Talia. Both of her parents arrived from Sudan soon after the war. Even so, the nine-year-old is almost as fluent in Tamazight as the rest of her classmates. The reason may look only too obvious:
"My house is here, in Jadu. I'm Libyan," says the girl, shortly before the end of the class.
Photo Courtesy of Middle East Eye
Athens, Ga. - The University of Georgia's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute recently received a $1.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, positioning it as a National Resource Center for Latin American Studies. Over the next four years, LACSI will leverage the grant to offer student fellowships and facilitate further education, outreach and research initiatives in Georgia and across the U.S.
Since it was established as an institute in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences in 2006, extramural funding has allowed LACSI-affiliated faculty to launch and administer initiatives that promote Latin American culture and language in several areas. These include a focus on the arts; language exchange; creation of K-12 educational materials; education in sustainable agricultural practices; establishment of the Latin American Botanical Garden on UGA's north campus; promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in Latin America; preservation and teaching of indigenous languages; and support of organizations and individuals serving Georgia's fast-growing Latino and Hispanic communities.
One of LACSI's initiatives also houses the Portuguese Flagship Program, which is funded through the National Security Education Program.
"This new grant will allow us to dramatically expand the reach of our academic, research and outreach programs while continuing to support our students and faculty affiliates," said LACSI director Richard Gordon. "Receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Education is a testament to our vision and commitment since LACSI was founded to put UGA on the map as a national resource for Latin American languages and area studies."
The U.S. Department of Education grants are designed to help the U.S. enhance its leadership role in world markets, global engagement and scholarship. To address this mission, LACSI will use $1 million of the grant money to offer foreign language and area studies fellowships to support students studying less-commonly taught Latin American languages, such as Portuguese and Quechua.
The other portion of the grant will help LACSI assume the designation of an Undergraduate National Resource Center for Latin American studies. These centers carry out instruction, research and outreach focused on specific world regions, international studies and the teaching of less-commonly taught languages. Activities include teacher training programs—for ages ranging from pre-kindergarten to undergraduate students—that provide an understanding of the culture, language, history, politics and economics of Latin America; collaborations with overseas institutions of higher education and other organizations; and projects with centers and institutions that address themes of global importance.
"We're excited to continue to work with our current and future faculty affiliates and students to develop programs that increase understanding and knowledge about Latin America's peoples, languages and cultures," Gordon said.
For more information on LACSI, see www.lacsiuga.org.
The jury’s still out on that, but it could well be the best candidate out there if you ever wanted to get computers to speak
With an NDA government in power, claims about India’s hoary and glory past are back in the news. The Pushpak Vimaans, plastic surgery and claims of renaming Pythagoras’ Theorem aside, the most interesting ones revolve around Sanskrit and how it is the best, most evolved, ‘insert-your-superlative’ scientific language. Is it?
There are actually two claims made around Sanskrit — that is the most scientific, and that it is best suited for computer science. Let’s look at both these claims separately.
At the very core of any claims made about Sanskrit lies Panini, who is said to have lived and worked in the 6th century BC. What is clear is the scientific nature and the rigour with which he described Sanskrit grammar (its rules, morphology, phonetics, sentence creation, forming compound words etc) in the Ashtadhyayi. It is one of the earliest known scientific works on grammar.
Of the over 4,000 sutras that make up Ashtadhyayi, the one most relevant to this argument is the rule pertaining to sentence structure. It describes the creation of sentences in recursive form, from smaller non-overlapping units — phrases, words and letters. In the west, such grammar came to be known as ‘context-free grammars’ or ‘block structure.’ Sanskrit comes very close to having a context-free grammar, thanks to Panini.
The ‘scientific’ description of Sanskrit grammar influenced 19th century German linguists and modern linguists like Noam Chomsky. The ‘block structure’ of context-free grammar lends itself to rigorous mathematical analysis and makes for particularly efficient methods to describe the language using a small subset of independent symbols.
One of the first computer languages, Algol, used a context-free grammar to describe its syntax. This became a standard feature of most modern computer languages (Java, C). The notation describing the syntax became known as the Backus-Naur form (BNF). Since the BNF is as powerful as Panini’s constructs, there have been calls in recent times to rename it as Panini Backus form. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that concepts which underpin computer science had been discovered independently in ancient India a millenia ago.
While Sanskrit may be more ‘scientific’ than most languages, why it should be ‘most suited’ for computer languages is still a mystery. Ask any Hindu nationalist and you will immediately be pointed to a paper by a certain Rick Briggs, Nasa scientist.
In the paper, Briggs describes the effort to represent concepts of natural language in a manner that makes it amenable to computer processing, aka, artificial intelligence. Pointing out that most such efforts have failed, he goes on to state that Sanskrit is most suited for this task, because of its context-free grammar. This paper, which claims that Sanskrit would be the ideal bridge between computers and artificial intelligence, is perhaps the genesis of all ‘Sanskrit is the perfect, most logical language’ arguments. Any explanations posited are mostly post facto and designed to prove the assertions made in this paper, not the other way round.
Whether or not Sanskrit would make for a good computer language remains unanswered and would probably be measured by creating a computer language, a parser, and comparing it with other well-known ones like Java or C. No one yet has taken up the challenge.
Sanskrit would in fact be the best candidate out there if you ever wanted to get computers to speak. Given the one-to-one mapping between orthography (what you write) and phonography (what you say), the process of getting computers to read text would be much simpler than say English. This ambiguity around English pronunciation has perhaps been immortalised by “if d-o is do, then why is ‘g-o’ not goo” in the film Chupke Chupke.
Ambiguity around English pronunciation necessitates the creation of structures and other concepts to predict the context that a word is used and guesstimating the exact pronunciation. However, what English lacks in orthography, it more than makes in its role as the world’s business lingua franca. The number of people who speak and understand Sanskrit today is so low as to immediately render useless the commercial prospects of such a system.
Sanskrit is an ancient language with a rich literature and one of the first formally described grammar structures. Most of the commentary that abounds on the internet is half-educated, extrapolated guess work. Such lofty claims do more disservice to Sanskrit than anythng else.
(The writer is chief technology officer at EnglishHelper Education Technologies)
Timothy Doner, 16, from New York City, has taught himself to speak 23 languages from Hebrew and Arabic to Swahili and Chinese.
BONA Magazine, South Africa’s most read monthly glossy magazine, has employed a bold and innovative way to distinguish its four language editions from each other with language indicators on the mastheads and different shots of its cover star.
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“BONA is the only South African magazine to be published in English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho every month,” says editor Linda Mali, “but we wanted to do something a little different for each of the languages to individualise them. We’re now customising each language’s cover by bringing to the fore what BONA has been successfully achieving for years.”
Starting with the cover photo, Mali and her team chose different shots of cover star, Khanyi Mbau and then employed a masthead addition with the published language included.
“It’s so important for us to not just have three translations of a magazine on the shelf,” continues Mali. “We want to be able to connect with our readers in their language through our content and our advertising. So this is a further way for us to be able to do that.”
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A study has found that English language song lyrics are less positive than Russian literature, making them one of the most miserable forms of writing analysed in a new study. A stock image of Thom Yorke from Radiohead is shown, whose lyrics include, 'if you'd been a dog they would have drowned you at birth'
A random sample of English language lyrics ranked 22nd for ‘happiness’ out of 24 categories in different languages.
However, overall, the study concluded that human language as a whole is positive.
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In 1969, two psychologists proposed the Pollyanna Hypothesis - the idea that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently than negative ones, so that humans think, and talk, on the bright side of life.
Since then, scientists have investigated whether the idea is true.
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Only Chinese novels and Korean film subtitles – which can be full of violence and gothic themes – were ranked less happy than English song lyrics (Shown above). Spanish was found to be the happiest language, with its Google searches ranking the most positive in terms of words analysed
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Despite noting the unhappiness of English language pop lyrics, overall, the study concluded that human language as a whole is positive. Lana Del Rey's first album was titled 'Born to Die'
A team of scientists at the University of Vermont used a vast data set made up of many billions of words to confirm the 1960s guess.
They gathered billions of words from around the world using 24 types of sources including books, news outlets, social media, websites, television and film subtitles, and music lyrics.
Mathematician Chris Danforth said: 'We collected roughly 100 billion words written in tweets.'
From these sources, the team then identified about 10,000 of the most frequently used words in each of 10 languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic.
Analysing a random sample of words from Arabic film subtitles, Twitter feeds in Korean, the famously dark literature of Russia, books in Chinese, music lyrics in English, and even the war-torn pages of The New York Times, they found the types of writing – and probably all human language, is skewed towards the use of happy words.
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The study found that English language song lyrics are less positive than Russian literature, which has brought us less-than-cheery novels such as Anna Karenina (a screen shot from the film starring Keira Knightley is shown left) and Crime and Punishment (right), capable of draining the most optimistic person of happiness
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The team of researchers studied 100,000 words across 10 languages (a yellow box indicates the row language is more positive than the column language, and a blue background shows the reverse) Spanish was the happiest (pictured) and Chinese was the most negatively skewed
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A random sample of English language lyrics ranked 22nd for ‘happiness’ out of 24 categories in different languages, but overall, the study concluded that human language is positive. The Smiths are known for their less than uplifting songs such as 'Heaven knows I'm miserable now' and 'what difference does it make'
Mathematician and co-leader of the study, Peter Dodds looked at 10 languages and found ‘in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones.’
Despite violent films and miserable song lyrics, he said that ‘positive social interaction’ is built into global languages’ fundamental structure.
The scientists also asked native speakers of the languages to rate words according to how positive or negative they find them. The results were published in the journal PNAS.
TOP 10 HAPPIEST LANGUAGES
1. Spanish
2. Portuguese
3. English
4. Indonesian
5. French
6. German
7. Arabic
8. Russian
9. Korean
10. Chinese
From these speakers, they gathered five million individual human scores of the words, with laughter scoring 8.5, for example, and terrorist, 1.3.
Once all of these words were plotted, the researchers found that every language studied was inherently positive, and more words scored higher than five.
Over all, Spanish was found to be the happiest language, and English took third place, behind Portuguese.
A search of Chinese books had the lowest ‘average word happiness,’ but all 24 sources of words scored on average above the average happiness score of five, including song lyrics.
When the team translated words between languages and then back again they found that ‘the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages.’
‘Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language,’ the mathematicians wrote in the study.
‘The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use.'
The scientists also built a computer programme called the hedometer, which was named after the Greek words for pleasure and gauge , to track levels of happiness in language over time, for example on Twitter.
They found that over the past year, English speaking Twitter users used the most positive language on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and Thanksgiving, and used the most unhappy language to talk about the death of Robin Williams, Charlie Hedbo attacks and the Ferguson protests.
The tool was also used to analyse the high and low points of 10,000 books to show that Moby Dick is an emotionally turbulent novel and that the Count of Monte Christo ends on a jubilant note.
Language used in Crime and Punishment was predominantly positive but ended on a very low point.
Read more:
Human language reveals a universal positivity bias
During an online conference from Sony Computer Entertainment Korea, Hideo Kojima officially announced in a pre-recorded video that the Korean language will be supported in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The menus will be in Korean and subtitles in the language will also be added.
It seems that Kojima and Konami have understood that localization is very important so that their market will improve. Russian and Chinese languages will also be supported in the game in a view that the game will be played and enjoyed by people all around the world.
Due to the inclusions of native languages, the development process has taken bit more time and Konami has not announced a release date for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. However it is said that the game’s development phase has been completed and Konami plans to release the game in 2015 simultaneously all around the world.
Saathi Connect is trying to reach out to the LGBT students, to develop a multimedia anthology for LGBTQ youth hailing from Hindi and Marathi-medium backgrounds, between the age of 18 to 30. Saathi Connect is a campaign that was kick-started in the IIT Bombay campus, by the research group 'Saathi', to introduce more LGBT-themed content in vernacular languages.
Aditya Shankar, 21, member of Saathi Connect group talking to iamin said that most people feel that there is no scope for regional queer literature. Especially when it comes to vernacular languages, there is hardly any content people are aware of. So, we want to introduce more LGBT-themed content in vernacular languages.
The team members began the Saathi Connect campaign on January 24, this year. The campaign is funded by Fondation Rainbow Solidarite, and also supported by Humsafar Trust, Mumbai.
"We have approached students belonging to the queer community, from different colleges to share their experiences through write-ups, videos or both, so that we can develop more content in regional languages. They can share their relationship experiences, the problems they encounter when they discuss their sexual orientation,” said Shankar, who is pursuing a degree in electric engineering in IIT Bombay.
The group will accept entries till the end of April. Shankar added, “Till the month of June we will shoot the videos and then compile the content to make an eBook after which we will begin the distribution process.”
You can contact the Saathi Connect team through their facebook page here.
For the longer version of the report, click here
Brazilian operator Oi, together with social network for language learning busuu, has created the application Oi Languages by busuu, reports iG. The application provides content for learning ten languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Mandarin. The application allows the user to learn the language and practice with other members of the busuu community, which now has over 45 million users. Through the existing social network, it is possible for users to demonstrate their writing skills to native speakers and to be corrected by them. The app has versions for iOS and Android and is available exclusively to Oi customers. The subscription costs BRL 4.99 per month with unlimited access to content.
On Friday, Feb. 13, Russian book industry experts noted that online retailer Amazon had launched a special section for e-books in Russian. Although Russian e-books had been available on the site before, there was no technical support for them nor any official section. GodLiteratury.ru, the official source of the Year of Literature, spoke with Vladimir Kharitonov, C.E.O. of the Russian Association of Web Publishers, about this news.
GodLiteratury: What has actually happened?
Russian writers urge readers to read legally
Vladimir Kharitonov: On Feb. 13, Amazon launched several new sections for e-books on different foreign languages. Now, visitors to this online store can buy e-books in Hungarian (one book), Latin (13 books), Polish (one book), Russian (9,500 books) and Hindi (58 books for users from Russia and 87 for those in the U.S.). Now e-books in 31 languages are available at Amazon. Russian is one of the eight languages that have the highest number of books. That's not surprising - for several years e-books in Russian appeared on Amazon in different ways. But there was no concrete place for them and it was difficult to find them through the search function.
GodLiteratury: What does this mean for those who read in Russian? What does it mean for those who have no Kindle reader?
V.K.: This news means that there is now another source of e-books in Russian. It's not so big as the e-catalogues of litres.ru or the Bookmate.com e-library, where you can find hundreds of thousands books. The Amazon catalogue consists of some books for a general audience (Boris Akunin, Alexandra Marinina), some classic literature and academic publications (the New Literary Review, for example). There are also many books by self-published authors. This catalogue is quite random now, so in the future in will not only increase, but also be filtered. Those who have no Kindle can just buy a book with a credit card at Amazon and then read it in the Kindle program at any device: PC, Mac, Andoid or iOS.
GodLiteratury: Should Russian traditional publishing houses care about this?
Why do you need to learn Russian?
V.K.: Amazon did a smart thing when it didn't announce officially the launch of the new section with Russian books, because it is obviously not ready yet – the interface is still in English, prices are in dollars. The main consumers for these books are foreigners who are studying Russian and Russians living abroad who are not aware of Russian e-books distributors – where all these books cost between one-third and one-fifth of the price [at Amazon].
GodLiteratury: What will Amazon’s relationship be with Russian e-commerce or independent publishing houses?
V.K.: Russian publishing houses should be happy because many of them have had contracts with Amazon for a long time and sales are now beginning. The launch of this new section doesn't mean the launch of full-fledged sales, but it's a step in the right direction.
Independent publishing houses and self-publishing authors won't be affected, as Amazon has a special Kindle Direct service for them.
At the beginning of the winter, the Kindle Direct Program stopped accepting Russian books for publication, explaining that the Russian language is not officially supported. Independent publishers and writers had even made a public request to Amazon to allow the publication of books in Russian, but this petition did not produce any results.
First published in Russian by GodLiteratury.ru
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