Metaglossia: The Translation World

Kirsty Sword Gusmão gave a terrific public lecture Language, language policies and education in Timor-Leste on 20th July at ANU. You can watch the talk here. Key points for me were:

her passionate commitment to expanding opportunity for Timor-Leste’s children through education
her belief that mother tongue medium instruction in the early years is a key to this education
the problems faced in a country with 2 official languages, 2 working languages – how to create effective multilingualism
the hard question of how you go about mother tongue medium instruction in a small and poor country which has to start from scratch
documenting languages
training teachers
creating school materials
If you had, as I had, ideas about whizz-bangery stuff on computers [1], forget them for the moment in a country like Timor-Leste where kids are lucky to have books.