Metaglossia: The Translation World

The ability to communicate in multiple languages proves beneficial in more ways than communication. Students able to speak multiple languages continue to reap the many benefits.

Languages are a curious thing; every single one of us speaks at least one, yet there are some people who can speak up to 5 times that amount. Research shows

Until Congresswoman Gabri-elle Giffords was shot in the head on Jan. 8, 2011, most people had never heard the word "aphasia," which means difficulty talking, reading and writing as a result of brain damage.

Does translating have a therapeutic value? I think so. It has been known for a long time that certain types of work have the power to heal wounded soul, or at least make people feel fulfilled and r...

Study: Learning A Language Changes Brains

October 8, 2012 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.
LUND, Sweden (UPI) — Intensive learning of a new language can make certain areas of the brain increase in size, Swedish researchers say.
Scientists studied young recruits at the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy who learned a new language at a very fast pace, going from having no knowledge of a language such as Arabic, Russian or Dari to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months.
Measured against a control group of university students who also studied intensively but in subjects other than languages, the researcher found specific parts of the brains of the language students grew.
The parts that increased in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.
“We were surprised that different parts of the brain developed to different degrees depending on how well the students performed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course,” said Johan Martensson, a researcher in psychology at Lund University.
Students with greater growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning had better language skills than the other students, the researchers said.
Some previous research has suggested Alzheimer’s disease has a later onset in people who are bilingual or multilingual.
“Even if we cannot compare three months of intensive language study with a lifetime of being bilingual, there is a lot to suggest that learning languages is a good way to keep the brain in shape,” Martensson said.

Creativity is comprised of four factors. Just remember this equation: Creativity = Surprise + Originality + Beauty + Utility.

Today I want to talk about the components of creativity or the underlying factors of the creative process. One way to approach the problem is by looking at how we measure or evaluate a creative product.

Creativity is sometimes broken up into divergent thinking and convergent thinking; though I argue that essentially same processes are involved in both.

Divergent thinking is measured using Torrance test of creative thinking (TTCT). TTCT consists of both verbal and figural parts. Divergent thinking is also measured by Guilford’s Alternate uses task in which one has to come up with as many uses as possible for a common household items (like brick).

These creativity test results are scored keeping in mind a number of different creativity criteria. The most common (common to all of the above) criteria are:

1. Flexibility: This captures the ability to cross boundaries and make remote associations. This is measured by number of different categories of ideas generated.

2. Originality: This measures how statistically different or novel the ideas are compared to a comparison group. This is measured as number of novel ideas generated.

3. Fluency: This captures the ability to come up with many diverse ideas quickly. This is measured by the total number of ideas generated.

4. Elaboration: This measures the amount of detail associated with the idea. Elaboration has more to do with focussing on each solution/idea and developing it further.

Convergent thinking is measured by tests like remote associations test or insight problems. These problems are solved when you apply one of the methods below:

1. Make unique association between parts of the problem. This looks again similar to flexibility or how fluid is your categorisation schema enabling you to think out of the box and

As if you needed yet another reason to get through shopping period as quickly as you can, a team of Yale researchers have discovered a cognitive mechanism that can cause stress to shrink the human brain.

The study, led by postdoctoral researcher Hyo Jung Kang, found that a type of genetic switch called a “transcription factor” can repress the expression of certain genes necessary for connections between brain cells, or synapses, to form properly. Without these connections, a loss of brain mass in the prefrontal cortex can occur, since cells cannot properly grow without the expression of the gene. The study found that the transcription factor in question, GATA1, is activated in conjunction with stress and feelings of depression.

“We wanted to test the idea that stress causes a loss of brain synapses in humans,” Ronald Duman, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and senior author of the study, said. “We show that circuits normally involved in emotion, as well as cognition, are disrupted when this single transcription factor is activated.”

Duman said that researchers based this new study on previous research that had been conducted on rodent models. He said these tests showed chronic stress could cause atrophy of neurons in brain regions that control emotion, mood and cognition, and that this helped the team to identify the genes that were altered in a depressed subject’s brain. To isolate the genes involved in synaptic connections, the researchers examined the entire genome to find the genes whose expression was affected by the transcription factor in question.

Once the brain regions in question were identified, Duman said, the team collected samples for analysis. In this case, samples of brain tissue from deceased depression and chronic stress sufferers were examined.

Duman said the study’s findings demonstrate atrophy of synaptic connections in human depression for the first time, consistent with the rodent studies. The results also show that GATA1 underlies the effects of depression and stress on synaptic atrophy, he said.

“[The study’s results] identify specific synapse related genes that are altered in depression,” Duman said.

LANGUES — En 2013, l’anglais sera enseigné à la plupart des élèves de primaire romands.
Par Benoît Perrier. Mis à jour le 01.09.2012
L'étude du latin améliore l'orthographe

Apprendre une langue supplémentaire a des conséquences positives sur la première. Confrontés à des systèmes de règles différents, les multilingues jettent un regard plus acéré sur le fonctionnement de leur langue maternelle. «Ils savent par exemple qu’il peut exister plusieurs mots différents pour désigner le soleil, explique le linguiste Raphael Berthele. Que leurs sons sont différents et que, dans le cas de certains mots, l’étendue des concepts peut ne pas se recouvrir complètement. Les langues romanes peuvent aussi avoir un effet bénéfique sur l’orthographe du français.» Alors, retour au latin pour tous? Le spécialiste est loin d’être convaincu: «Les élèves qui l’étudient maîtrisent souvent mieux leur langue maternelle. Mais il n’y a pas de lien causal. Ces jeunes ont des profils sociaux spécifiques qui les rendent plus proches de la littératie (développement des compétences d’un individu à traiter des informations écrites) et donc sont des locuteurs plus performants. Il se trouve ensuite qu’ils choisissent le latin, pas l’inverse.»

De quoi on parle?

Le mois dernier, le Syndicat des enseignants romands a dit son inquiétude face aux modalités de l’introduction de l’anglais à l’école primaire.

Les dates

En 1975, des recommandations de la Conférence des directeurs de l’instruction publique (CDIP) ouvrent la voie à l’enseignement d’une deuxième langue nationale supplémentaire à l’école primaire.

Rentrée 2013

la plupart des cantons romands débuteront l’enseignement de l’anglais pour les élèves dès 10 ans (tous les cantons romands le feront en 2015).

Rentrée 2014

En Romandie, après plusieurs réformes, l’allemand sera commencé partout à 8 ans au minimum. Les Vaudois passeront d’une sensibilisation à un véritable enseignement.

Mots-clés

Autopsie: les pages Santé du Matin Dimanche
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A l’étranger, le Suisse est loué pour son caractère polyglotte. Une évidence pour un pays disposant de quatre langues officielles, ce multilinguisme est renforcé par des années d’enseignement des langues nationales. Alors que le plan d’études romand rend obligatoire d’ici à la rentrée 2015 l’enseignement de l’anglais en 7e HarmoS (10-11 ans), quelques mythes sur l’apprentissage des langues ne résistent pas à un examen scientifique.

Contrôle renforcé

Tout d’abord, le bilinguisme n’altère pas le cerveau, insiste Jean-Marie Annoni, professeur de neurologie à l’Université de Fribourg. Pas plus qu’il ne cause de troubles de la personnalité comme on pouvait le croire il y a cent ans, ajoute Raphael Berthele, professeur à l’Institut de plurilinguisme de Fribourg.

Walking speed in late life may be an early marker of the development of mild cognitive impairment, study shows.

Walking speed in late life may be an early marker of the development of mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

In a study of elderly persons aged 70 years and older, 54 had intact cognition at baseline, 31 had nonamnestic MCI (naMCI; mainly characterized by language, visuospatial, attention, and other impairments rather than by memory problems) and eight had amnestic MCI (in which memory problems are the main impairment).

Over the course of a three-year monitoring period, the subjects with naMCI proved to be nine times more likely to have a slow average weekly walking speed than a fast or moderate speed. The degree of fluctuation in walking speed was also associated with MCI (Neurology. 2012;78; 1946-1952).

On a related note, the severity of diabetes may contribute to accelerated aging: Both diabetes and poor glucose control among well-functioning diabetes patients were associated with worse cognitive function and greater decline in a nine-year study of nearly 3,100 elderly adults (mean age 74.2 years). At the start of the study, 717 (23%) of the men and women had prevalent diabetes mellitus (DM) and 2,353 (76.6%) did not, but 159 members of the latter group developed DM throughout follow-up.

Somatotrophic hormones, including growth hormone (GH), insulinlike growth factor 1 (IGF-1), and growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH), decrease with aging and may have a role in cognitive impairments.

Can language affect the way we experience emotions? More than ever, researchers are finding that language not only affects the way we communicate, but also the way that we think (see my previous post) and as has recently been discovered, the way that we experience emotions. This may come as no surprise to those who have grown up in a bilingual household, or are bilingual themselves. As is sometimes depicted in movies and TV shows, although it may be exaggerated, bilingual speakers sometimes switch between languages when expressing or feeling different emotions (think Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky).
Recently, Stephen Chen and Qing Zhou, psychological scientists in the United States, published an article about the emotional aspect of “code-switching”, which is the linguistic term for using multiple languages in conversation, in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. According to these researchers, the languages used by parents to talk about and express different emotions can affect the way that their children experience emotions. For example, because it is not common to directly express emotions in Finnish, a parent who speaks both English and Finnish may use English to share feelings of love with children. In turn, these children would come to understand that when their parents speak in English, they are more likely to be expressing emotions.

George Miller, Princeton's James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology Emeritus and a pioneer in cognitive science, died of natural causes Sunday, July 22, at his home in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 92 years old.

Miller, who joined the faculty in 1979, was an innovator in the study of language and cognition, helping to establish psycholinguistics as an independent field of research in psychology. In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor awarded by the United States, in recognition of his contributions to understanding processes of the human mind. He received an honorary doctor of science degree from Princeton in 1996.

Miller, together with Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky, led the "cognitive revolution" that replaced behaviorism as the leading psychological approach to understanding the mind in the 1950s, said Christiane Fellbaum, senior research scholar in computer science who worked closely with Miller at Princeton. "George believed that the human mind in all its aspects was interesting and worth studying — believe it or not, that was revolutionary at the time," she said.

Writing literature in the one and the other language By Francois Grosjean, Ph.D....

We saw in an earlier post that some bilingual authors write literature in their second or third language (see here) despite the fact that writing is one of the most demanding skills ever acquired. What is even more amazing is that other authors write their works in two languages, not just one.

Many of these authors go from writing in their first language to writing in their second or third language, usually after having emigrated. For example, Vladimir Nabokov, born in Russia in 1899, started by writing in Russian (e.g. Mashenka, The Gift) before becoming famous in the English-speaking world for his novels written directly in English (e.g. Bend Sinister, Lolita).

A similar itinerary was followed by Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, who was born in Ireland but who moved to France permanently at age 31. His first novel, Murphy, was written in English but after World War II, he started to write in French (e.g. Molloy).

Hunter College Professor, Elizabeth Beaujour, has analyzed why authors such as these shift over to writing in their second or third language. The first reason is obvious—it is to gain a wider audience, even if the émigré community is quite large in their new country. A second reason is that bilingual authors are rarely happy with the translations that are done of their works. They either redo the translations themselves, even though the process is particularly tormenting for many of them, or they write new works directly in their second or third language.

Writing literature in a second or a third language By Francois Grosjean, Ph.D....

Writing is one of the most demanding skills that is acquired, and writing literary works is an art that only a handful of people ever master. And yet, there are some very special bilinguals who write literature in their second or third language, and sometimes even in two languages.

There are many writers who are bilingual or multilingual but they usually write their works in their first language (e.g. Isaac B. Singer, Czelaw Milosz), or in their most proficient writing language when they changed language dominance in their childhood. This is the case of Richard Rodriguez, the author of Hunger of Memory, whose first language was Spanish but who writes in English, his dominant language. It is also the case of Eva Hoffman, of Lost in Translation fame, who moved to Canada from Poland when she was thirteen and who uses English as her literary language.

Its part of the human experience to tell ourselves a story about the kind of person we are and why we choose to do what we do. This innate storytelling tendency extends to the professional personas we build as sign language interpreters.

According to an analysis of over 300,000 results from one popular measure of creativity, the Torrance Test, divergent thinking, or the ability to connect seemingly unconnected ideas, has declined significantly since 1990 even thought IQ scores have continued to rise.

[W]hile IQ levels have been rising owing to enriched environments (the Flynn effect), creativity scores have actually been falling over time. After analyzing up to 300,000 Torrance scores from children and adults (the gold standard in creativity measurement), it has been discovered that although creativity scores rose along with IQ scores until 1990, creativity scores have since dropped significantly.

RSA Thursday

Sebastian Seung, a dynamic young professor at MIT, is at the forefront of a revolution in neuroscience. He believes that the basis of our identity lies not in our genes but in the connections between our brain cells – connections that are absolutely unique to every individual (even the genome isn’t unique between identical twins).

By mapping this “connectome”, Seung hopes to unlock the mysteries of identity and personality. Seung and a dedicated group of researchers are leading the effort to map these connections, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. Just as the genome was mapped, so Seung plans to map the “connectome”.

As it turns out, learning languages is easier -- and more pleasurable -- for some folks than for others. In fact, there is a group of individuals who find the process so enjoyable that they take it to another level entirely.

Cross-Cultural Psychology is a leading textbook offering senior undergraduate and graduate students a thorough and balanced overview of the whole field of cross-cultural psychology.

Apprendre une deuxième langue tout petit, lorsque le cerveau est en plein développement, est bien plus facile qu’une fois grand. Surtout quand il s'agit de la langue maternelle de l'un de ses deux parents !

Reading a nasty word in a second language may not pack the punch it would in your native tongue, thanks to an unconscious brain quirk that tamps down potentially disturbing emotions, a new study finds.

When reading negative words such as "failure" in their non-native language, bilingual Chinese-English speakers did not show the same brain response as seen when they read neutral words such as "aim." The finding suggests that the brain can process the meaning of words in the unconscious, while "withholding" information from our conscious minds.

The ability to speak two languages can make people better able to pay attention than those who can only speak one, a study says.

Figure éminente de la psychanalyse française, Jean Laplanche est décédé dimanche 6 mai à l’âge de 87 ans.

...

Depuis les années 1980, il dirigeait aux Presses universitaires de France (PUF) l’édition scientifique des œuvres complètes de Freud (en 21 volumes), toujours inachevée. Dans le cadre de ce travail, il s’intéressa de près aux questions posées par la traduction et au rapport entre langage et inconscient. Parallèlement, il développa une œuvre personnelle autour d’une vingtaine d’ouvrages, dont Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (1987) et Traduire Freud (1989). Son Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, coécrit en 1967 avec Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, est traduit en 25 langues.

A new study found certain brain functions that are enhanced in teens who are fluent in more than one language. The finding gives new insight into how our senses help shape our brains.

Bilingualism has multifaceted benefits: economic, cultural, cognitive and even medical. Ellen Bialystok's research work has brought the discussion about the benefits of bilingualism to the forefront for nearly a decade. She is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada. She engaged herself in research studying the effects of a second language acquisition on school children. There was a startling finding out of a simple question to children.