Metaglossia: The Translation World

The case was drawn out because prosecutors and Salinas' lawyers could not find an interpreter who spoke Chatino, a language spoken in south-central Mexico.

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Salinas, 60, had been living in Madison with family members before being charged in July 2008 with raping a child.
He spent almost four years in the Madison County Jail and had four separate trial dates set, before entering a guilty plea on a lesser charge of first-degree sexual abuse in May.
The case was drawn out because prosecutors and Salinas' lawyers could not find an interpreter who spoke Chatino, a language spoken in south-central Mexico.
There are an estimated 23,000 to 40,000 Chatino speakers in the world, most located in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Chatino includes seven dialects of the indigenous people living in the villages of south-central Mexico, including Salinas' Santa María Temaxcaltepec.
Alabama law provides for the payment of interpreters for court cases, and the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts has a long list of certified interpreters who can be called upon. Most of the interpreters speak Spanish, but services are also available in Mandarin, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Vietnamese. But not Chatino.

Letting languages disappear is a crime against humanity, asserted a recent article.

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There are scientific reasons why linguistic diversity is important. Linguistics and cognitive sciences study how the brain processes language and thought; such sciences try to determine what language is, and what combination of influences affects its structures: intelligence, environmental factors,innate factors. The more languages available to study, the better the science will be. As well, 75 per cent of plant-based pharmaceutical drugs we use were discovered though practitioners of bush medicine, whose medical knowledge had been passed on in languages which are now dying, along with such traditional knowledge.
But that’s not why we should care about language death. If we are able to simply step off a plane and hear a speaker of our language and sigh in relief, finally feeling that we are home, perhaps it is difficult to imagine not having such an essential pleasure. The despair of Indigenous people around the world is that their right to belong, to have an identity, which, for many, is located in language, is constantly under threat. And their efforts to preserve such culture are belittled.

Read more: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=32073

The subject of language as the powerful tool used for oppression,deprivation and exclusion is largely viewed as a long overdue phenomenon by the elite in the main.

In the past few decades we've all learnt to pay at least lip service to ecological matters, and millions of people in this country are members of environmental organisations. But maybe we should also focus attention on an issue that could be one of the big causes of the 21st century - the disappearance of languages.
While estimates suggest that in the next 100 years perhaps five per cent of species will be wiped out, but languages are under as much or more threat. The consensus (Mark Abley's book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, for example) seems to be that on current trends, between 50 and 90 per cent of the world's 6,000 or so languages will cease to exist over the next century.