Metaglossia: The Translation World

Eljay Castro Deldoc is a Palanca award-winning playwright, director, and translator

 

"Yemaya is unlike any play being staged in the Philipping theater circuit today, and that’s exactly what director Ed Lacson Jr. set out to do. 

 

As 9 Works Theatrical’s first attempt at a straight play, Yemaya is a triumph for stage, sound, and lights design. The Black Box at The Proscenium Theater in Rockwell is transformed into an otherworldly space, like a cavern at the bottom of the ocean. The audience is immersed in a world swathed in blue hues and warm sunshine that seems to be situated somewhere on sand and below sea. Set pieces float and sink like anchors from above. A beautiful soundscape ripples throughout the theater space. Everyday items like dominos and coconuts, feathers and rice, and SPAM and Coca-Cola become the focal points of emotionally charged choreography. 

 

Nothing less is to be expected from Lacson. He is a multiple Gawad Buhay Award winner, two of which he won Outstanding Stage Direction and Outstanding Set Design for his last directorial work for 9Works Theatrical, Himala: Isang Musikal. Building worlds on stage through imagery and scenic design is his greatest love and biggest strength. It is what attracted him to Yemaya’s Belly in the first place when he first encountered the obscure but beautiful script by Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes. 

 

“I knew it was going to be a difficult material to do. But it has a lot to offer as a material to a director because of the images it conjures in your mind, and then how you’re going to use your imagination to create this world that [Hudes] painted for you.” 

 

 

MAGIC IN EVERY SCENE. Benedix Ramos as Jesus/Mulo performs on a stage that feels like its own very real world. Photo by Dan Esguerra 

The play follows a boy overcoming hardships with persistence and imagination, leading him to hop on a raft to sail towards the United States of America, a land of dreams, wonders and the promise of a fresh start. Hudes’ storytelling is rooted in magical realism, where a sip of Coca-Cola becomes a mystical experience and voices from the sea call their children to them. It is also grounded in very real experiences of domestic life, death, displacement, and immigration. If the Odyssey is about a hero’s journey home, this epic is about what it takes to leave it behind. 

 

The material checked all the boxes Lacson was looking for in a comeback production after years away at sea working on cruise ships. Choosing an obscure but beautiful work by a non-white female playwright allowed him to introduce a new voice to Philippine theater as well as exercise his scenic design muscles. But there was just one more hurdle they needed to overcome: the play is in English.  

 

Filipino, but not the Philippines

“I was very specific to do [this production] in Tagalog. That was a non-negotiable for me. So luckily, 9Works was brave enough and kind enough to just accommodate my request and I asked Eljay, of course, to translate for me.” 

 

Eljay Castro Deldoc is a Palanca award-winning playwright, director, and translator. His celebrated work, Si Maria Isabella at ang Guryon ng mga Tala, led to his first collaboration with Lacson, who directed a production of it back in 2015. Lacson describes Deldoc’s command of the Filipino language as masterful. 

 

“The lyricism that Eljay uses is on that fine line of accessible but not too colloquial. It’s an elevated way of using the Tagalog language, which I think is very beautiful.” 

 

However, Deldoc’s challenge was not simply translating the material to Filipino, but fulfilling both his responsibility to the original playwright and upholding the trust and vision of his director.

 

“Yes, confident ako sa pag-handle ko ng Filipino language. Pero siyempre, di ko rin alam kung anong naririnig ni Ed sa vision niya, sa imagination niya. Malinaw sa akin na ang ise-serve ko ay si Alegria [Hudes] tapos si Ed, silang dalawa. I have to be faithful [to the source material] dahil translation siya tapos pagdating naman kay Ed, kailangan kong ma-capture kung ano man ang naiimagine niya na feeling niya kaya kong i-deliver.” 

 

(Yes, I’m confident in my grasp of the Filipino language. But of course, I didn’t know what Ed hears in his vision, in his imagination. It’s clear to me that I will serve Alegría Hudes and Ed, the two of them. I have to be faithful to the source material since it’s a translation, and when it comes to Ed, I have to capture what in his imagination that he feels I can deliver.)"

https://www.rappler.com/people/human-interest/yemaya-play-english-filipino-translation/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Finnish translator of Polish literature wins 2026 Transatlantyk Prize
  
Tapani Kärkkäinen, an acclaimed translator of Polish literature into Finnish, has received the 2026 Transatlantyk Prize from the Polish Book Institute.

Tapani Kärkkäinen, winner of the 2026 Transatlantyk Prize.Kuba Ociepa/Polish Book Institute
The annual award recognises the most outstanding promoters of Polish literature and culture abroad — translators, publishers or critics.

The prize was presented at a gala ceremony on the second day of the World Congress of Translators of Polish Literature in Kraków, southern Poland.

Grzegorz Jankowicz, director of the Book Institute, said that thanks to Kärkkäinen, "Polish literature is present in Finland today, not only in bookstores but also on theatre stages."

He added that the translator's "commitment to bringing Polish culture closer to Finns also includes his own books, notably guides to the cultural heritage of Warsaw and Kraków."

Born in 1962, Kärkkäinen has translated books by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, Ryszard Kapuściński, Hanna Krall, Andrzej Sapkowski, Bruno Schulz, Wojciech Szabłowski and Wojciech Tochman, as well as stage plays by, among others, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Sławomir Mrożek and Tadeusz Słobodzianek.

His translation of Tokarczuk's Bieguni (English title: Flights) won him the Mikael Agricola Prize, a prestigious Finnish literary award.

Past recipients of the Transatlantyk Prize include Anders Bodegård (Sweden), Albrecht Lempp (Germany), Ksenia Starosielska (Russia), Bill Johnston (United States), Lajos Pálfalvi (Hungary), Antonia Lloyd-Jones (United Kingdom), Ewa Thompson (Poland) and Tokimasa Sekiguchi (Japan).
(mk/ał)
Source: Polish Book Institute"
04.07.2026
https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7791/Artykul/3705092,finnish-translator-of-polish-literature-wins-2026-transatlantyk-prize

#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Intelligence artificielle : pourquoi Le Caire et Kigali unissent leurs forces

L’Égypte et le Rwanda veulent accélérer leur coopération dans l’intelligence artificielle. Les deux pays cherchent à peser dans la définition d’une voie africaine de l’IA, au moment où le Maroc, le Kenya ou encore l’Afrique du Sud avancent eux aussi leurs pions.

La rencontre s’est tenue le 29 juin au Caire. La ministre rwandaise des TIC et de l’Innovation, Paula Ingabire, y a été reçue par son homologue égyptien des Communications et des Technologies de l’information, Raafat Hindi. Les deux gouvernements ont convenu de préparer un protocole d’accord dans le secteur des technologies de l’information, appelé à encadrer une coopération plus large entre administrations, universités, centres de recherche et acteurs de l’innovation.

Des projets pilotes dans la santé, l’agriculture et les services publics
Les discussions ont porté sur le lancement de projets pilotes utilisant l’IA dans plusieurs secteurs jugés prioritaires dont la santé, l’agriculture, les services publics numériques et les technologies adaptées aux langues locales. L’objectif affiché est de produire des résultats mesurables, au-delà des grands discours sur la transformation numérique.

Chaque partenaire arrive avec ses arguments. L’Égypte s’appuie sur sa stratégie nationale d’intelligence artificielle 2025-2030, qui fait de l’IA un levier de modernisation économique, de formation et de services publics. Le pays dispose déjà de hubs technologiques, d’instituts de formation et d’une ambition assumée de leadership régional.

Le Rwanda, lui, cultive depuis plusieurs années son image de laboratoire numérique africain. Kigali a récemment approuvé la création d’une Agence nationale de l’intelligence artificielle, chargée de coordonner les investissements, l’innovation, l’adoption et la gouvernance de ces technologies. En avril 2025, le pays avait aussi accueilli le premier Sommet mondial de l’IA en Afrique, qui a réuni plus de 1 000 participants venus de plus de 90 pays, selon le PNUD Rwanda.

Une compétition africaine déjà bien engagée
Ce tandem égypto-rwandais s’inscrit dans un paysage continental de plus en plus concurrentiel. Le Maroc investit fortement dans l’IA, notamment autour de l’Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique (UM6P), du centre AI Movement et de solutions appliquées à l’agriculture de précision, comme AgriEdge. Rabat veut aussi développer ses capacités de calcul, ses data centers souverains et la formation de talents.

Le Kenya, de son côté, mise sur son écosystème numérique, ses startups, ses infrastructures et sa capacité à attirer les talents. Dans l’AI Talent Readiness Index for Africa 2025, le pays occupe la 4e place, derrière l’Afrique du Sud, la Tunisie et l’Égypte, mais devant Maurice, le Rwanda et le Ghana. Le Maroc y apparaît en 9e position, ce qui confirme à la fois son potentiel et la marge qui lui reste pour structurer son vivier de compétences.

Face à ces trajectoires différentes, Le Caire et Kigali font le choix de la complémentarité : poids démographique, industriel et universitaire côté égyptien et agilité réglementaire et capacité d’expérimentation côté rwandais.

Faire émerger une voix africaine sur l’IA
Au-delà des projets bilatéraux, l’enjeu est aussi diplomatique. L’Égypte et le Rwanda veulent promouvoir une approche africaine de l’intelligence artificielle, fondée sur la responsabilité, l’inclusion et le développement durable. Les deux pays entendent également mieux coordonner leurs positions dans les forums régionaux et internationaux consacrés à la gouvernance de l’IA.

Alors que les grandes puissances technologiques imposent déjà leurs modèles, leurs plateformes et leurs normes, l’alliance entre Le Caire et Kigali envoie un signal politique. L’Afrique cherche à former ses talents, protéger ses données, adapter l’IA à ses langues et à ses besoins, et peser dans les règles du jeu mondial.

La bataille du leadership africain de l’intelligence artificielle ne fait que commencer. Mais elle se joue déjà entre laboratoires, ministères, data centers, universités et diplomatie. Dans cette course, l’Égypte et le Rwanda viennent clairement d’accélérer."
Kofi Ndale
5 juillet 2026
https://www.afrik.com/intelligence-artificielle-pourquoi-le-caire-et-kigali-unissent-leurs-forces
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Suppression en masse des filières langues au profit de l'IA

"Plusieurs dizaines d'universités chinoises ont supprimé des programmes de langues étrangères au cours des derniers mois. Un rapport du gouvernement chinois, publiée en mai 2026 et portant sur 70 établissements, a ainsi documenté des coupes sévères dans ces disciplines. Car les outils de traduction par IA menacent directement les débouchés des diplômés en langues. Le gouvernement chinois a donc engagé une refonte à grande échelle de l'enseignement supérieur.

Huit filières de japonais supprimées dans les universités chinoises en un an
Le cabinet éducatif MyCOS a analysé les changements annoncés par ces établissements. Huit cursus de japonais ont disparu des catalogues, ainsi que cinq en allemand et cinq en traduction. Ces disciplines figuraient pourtant parmi les formations à la croissance la plus rapide en Chine. Le développement du commerce international après 2001 avait alimenté cette expansion sur plus de dix ans.

Le gouvernement a aussi revu des milliers de programmes dans d'autres secteurs. En 2025, seize cursus de marketing ont été retirés de l'échantillon étudié. Le commerce en ligne, longtemps porté par Alibaba et JD.com, avait déjà subi des coupes entre 2020 et 2024 après le ralentissement de l'économie numérique. Plus de 30 % des diplômes du premier cycle ont ainsi été modifiés entre 2021 et 2025.

Pékin impose 38 nouveaux diplômes centrés sur l'intelligence artificielle
En avril 2026, le ministère de l'Éducation a approuvé 38 nouvelles formations pour la rentrée. Neuf campus, dont l'Institut de technologie de Harbin et l'université Beihang, accueilleront des étudiants en « intelligence incarnée ». Cette discipline forme aux technologies d'IA physique, notamment la conception de robots humanoïdes et de machines autonomes capables de percevoir leur environnement. Le catalogue officiel compte désormais 883 diplômes répartis en 13 catégories.

Les autres programmes couvrent l'IA commerciale, l'ingénierie des semi-conducteurs et la gestion de l'économie dite de « basse altitude ». Par ailleurs, Ao Manyun, enseignante en traduction à Pékin, a reconfiguré son cours de swahili vieux de soixante ans. Ses étudiants remettaient en cause l'utilité de la traduction humaine face aux performances des outils automatiques. Ils apprennent désormais à piloter et évaluer ces systèmes plutôt qu'à traduire eux-mêmes.

Les universités chinoises redessinent l'enseignement supérieur mondial
Aux États-Unis, les masters en intelligence artificielle ont aussi presque doublé entre 2022 et 2026. Quelque 304 établissements américains proposent désormais des diplômes en IA, dont 193 au niveau licence. Mais le modèle américain reste décentralisé et chaque université décide seule de ses propres offres sans approbation gouvernementale.

Certains dirigeants de la tech américaine défendent pourtant la valeur des sciences humaines. Jensen Huang, PDG de Nvidia, a qualifié l'anglais de filière « potentiellement la plus performante ». Car cette discipline serait, selon lui, le véritable langage de programmation de l'IA. Le gestionnaire d'actifs BlackRock a de son côté indiqué privilégier les diplômés en histoire et en lettres lors de ses recrutements.

Yingyi Ma, professeure de sociologie à l'université de Syracuse, estime néanmoins que Pékin pourrait « sous-évaluer certaines disciplines avant d'en comprendre l'importance à long terme ». La Chine fait face à un chômage des 16-24 ans de 15,6 % et doit absorber 12,7 millions de diplômés cette année. Les premiers étudiants formés en intelligence incarnée dans les universités chinoises arriveront sur le marché du travail à partir de 2028."
05 Juil 2026
Auriane Polge
https://www.science-et-vie.com/technos-et-futur/les-universites-chinoises-suppriment-en-masse-les-filieres-de-langues-au-profit-des-cursus-sur-lintelligence-artificielle-247603.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Une expérience en Australie et des tests sur les couleurs montrent comment la langue oriente nos automatismes mentaux sans enfermer la pensée.

"Votre langue maternelle manipule radicalement votre perception de la réalité...? Entre l’intuition de Benjamin Lee Whorf et la critique de Steven Pinker, les études récentes dessinent une réponse nuancée : nos langues ne nous enferment pas, elles tracent des habitudes de pensée.

 

Des Aborigènes alignent le temps selon les points cardinaux, des russophones trient les bleus plus vite que vous. Que révèle votre langue de vos réflexes de pensée les plus secrets ?

 

Depuis près d’un siècle, linguistes et philosophes se demandent si la langue que nous parlons change notre façon de penser. Dans un village aborigène du nord de l’Australie, quand on demande à des habitants de ranger des images où un homme vieillit ou un crocodile grandit, ils les alignent spontanément d’est en ouest, quel que soit l’endroit où ils sont assis. Pour un francophone, ce geste demande un effort conscient.

 

Ces habitants sont les Kuuk Thaayorre de Pormpuraaw. Lera Boroditsky et Alice Gaby ont montré en 2010 dans Psychological Science que leur langue, qui parle toujours en points cardinaux, les conduit à organiser le temps sur un axe est-ouest. Entre l’intuition de Benjamin Lee Whorf et la critique de Steven Pinker, les études récentes dessinent une réponse nuancée : nos langues ne nous enferment pas, elles tracent des habitudes de pensée.

 

De Benjamin Lee Whorf à Steven Pinker : le vieux débat relancé

Dans les années 1930-1940, Benjamin Lee Whorf avance que la langue structure nos expériences, au point que certaines catégories de pensée dépendraient des catégories grammaticales. Plus tard, Steven Pinker défend dans The Language Instinct l’idée d’un code mental indépendant, le « mentalese » : la langue serait l’habillage de la pensée, pas son squelette.

 

Les expériences contemporaines déplacent le débat. En 2007, Jonathan Winawer et ses collègues montrent dans PNAS que des russophones distinguent plus vite deux bleus quand l’un est goluboy (clair) et l’autre siniy (foncé). L’avantage disparaît dès qu’on leur occupe la « petite voix intérieure » avec une suite de chiffres. La langue ne crée pas de nouvelles couleurs, elle rend certaines frontières plus rapides à percevoir.

 

Espace, temps… et ce que les mots révèlent de nous

Chez les Kuuk Thaayorre, décrits par Lera Boroditsky et Alice Gaby, on ne dit pas « à gauche » mais « au nord » ou « au sud ». Pour parler, il faut donc savoir à chaque instant où se trouve l’est. Le même schéma sert pour le temps : les suites d’images vont d’est vers l’ouest, alors que des anglophones les ordonnent de gauche à droite et des hébréophones de droite à gauche. Le temps emprunte la forme spatiale proposée par la langue.

 

Les philosophes rappellent que cette influence va jusque dans notre vie intérieure. Maurice Merleau-Ponty écrit : « Nous nous donnons notre pensée par la parole ». Julien Auriach résume, à propos du langage, que la « diversité des langues est aussi une diversité des regards sur le monde ». Pour Sigmund Freud, le « moi n’est pas maître en sa propre maison » : les lapsus, ces mots qui « sortent tout seuls », montrent que des couches inconscientes s’emparent aussi de notre langue.

 

Des habitudes mentales, pas une prison pour la pensée

Les études citées par GE Editing insistent sur un point : tout ce qui est possible pour un locuteur l’est pour un autre, mais pas toujours avec le même effort. Les russophones peuvent apprendre d’autres découpes du bleu ; les anglophones peuvent ordonner le temps d’est en ouest ; les Kuuk Thaayorre peuvent utiliser « à gauche » si on leur enseigne. Ce qui change, c’est le réflexe spontané, surtout quand l’esprit est occupé.

 

Lera Boroditsky écrit dans Scientific American que les « formes de pensée disponibles pour les humains » sont influencées par « la langue particulière qu’ils parlent ». Un article de GE Editing donne l’exemple du mot allemand Schadenfreude : les anglophones connaissent très bien le plaisir un peu honteux devant l’échec d’autrui, mais, faute de mot unique, ce sentiment est moins immédiatement disponible. La langue ne dicte pas ce que nous pensons ; elle règle ce que nous pensons sans y penser.

 

En bref

Depuis les travaux de Benjamin Lee Whorf jusqu’aux études de Lera Boroditsky, chercheurs et philosophes interrogent le lien entre langue et pensée.

Des expériences sur les bleus en russe ou l’orientation du temps chez les Kuuk Thaayorre montrent que la langue façonne nos automatismes cognitifs sans créer de barrières absolues.

Entre Merleau-Ponty, Freud et les neurosciences, l’article montre comment mots, lapsus et vocabulaire disponible orientent nos jugements au quotidien."

Publié le 03/07/26 à 08:35Par La Rédaction Peaches

https://www.peaches.fr/psycho-love-sexo/je-lai-appris-a-40-ans-la-science-prouve-que-votre-langue-maternelle-manipule-radicalement-votre-perception-de-la-realite-228315.html

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"The UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance Should Tackle the AI Language Gap

The United Nations will convene the Global Dialogue on AI Governance on July 6-7 in Geneva. The gathering is open to all UN member states and hundreds of stakeholders. Heated consultations on the agenda of the Dialogue have produced a draft program that is predictably generic. Such thematic breadth is unavoidable and largely by design in UN processes.

Nevertheless, the Dialogue is an opportunity to zoom in on policy areas that receive insufficient attention elsewhere, and to generate real political momentum. As the Dialogue will have a uniquely high concentration of representatives of diverse language communities, one of these issues is multilingual artificial intelligence.

Why should policymakers care about multilingual AI?
Current AI systems are less accessible, less useful and less safe for users of so-called low-resource languages. These are languages which may well be spoken by many but for which little digitized data is available to power large language models. Market forces have not mobilized the necessary investment to address these shortcomings. Fierce economic and geopolitical competition funnels attention and resources into the development of a narrow set of frontier models, which are optimized for a small set of dominant and well-resourced languages.

This imbalance results in a global inequity that warrants policymakers’ attention in and of itself. But it also creates a cumulative advantage for those benefiting from unfettered access to more powerful AI systems over time. Simply put, the longer the gap exists, the wider it becomes. If AI generates a net positive impact on socio-economic development, as is widely assumed, addressing this imbalance is urgent.

AI models underperform in low-resource languages
The systemic weaknesses of low-resource language AI models are well studied by a growing body of academic research.

Access to frontier AI capacity is limited by a lack of infrastructure and high cost, especially in low-income countries. And even for those with technical access, language can be a constraint. Frontier models are developed and optimized only in a few well-resourced languages, resulting in a “language gap.” The development of localized models optimized for specific linguistic or cultural objectives has seen progress in recent years and some commercial labs scale up relevant research, but low-resource languages remain largely underserved.

Models can process prompts in different languages today. But on top of generating poorer quality outputs in low-resource languages, multilingual capacity alone does not remove all access barriers. Researchers point to a so-called ‘token tax’; access to models is usually billed by use of tokens, the units into which natural language is split for processing. Studies have shown that low-resource and morphologically complex languages systematically require more tokens to represent the same content compared to English, which drives up cost and latency. In other words, using an AI model optimized for English in a low-resource language is more expensive and slower.

AI systems are less useful for low-resource language users. Their performance is significantly lower when prompted in those languages. Simply translating prompts into English cannot fully close this gap. Some researchers have even identified performance differences for specific tasks prompted by native versus non-native speakers of English.

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Similarly, models generally reason more effectively in English than in another language, studies show. Beyond accuracy, pivoting to English for internal reasoning also risks producing outputs that are biased towards the linguistic and cultural norms encoded in English. Poorer representation of a language in training data and, consequently, the concept space underpinning a model lead directly to weaker cultural and linguistic alignment.

The language gap in AI systems is a safety risk. Researchers have shown that it is possible to jailbreak AI systems — that is, to breach their safeguards — by machine-translating prompts into low-resource languages. In addition to such vulnerabilities, there is also a broader safety gap: studies have demonstrated that translating malicious input into a low-resource language is more likely to generate unsafe content. Most safety research is conducted in English and a handful of high-resource languages, and the alignment stage requires manually annotated data, which is even harder to come by for low-resource languages than unlabeled data used in pretraining.

What difference can the Dialogue make?
The reason for the weaker performance of models in low-resource languages is not that these are somehow categorically less suitable for LLMs; rather, they are caused by specific model design choices and the lack or limited availability of training datasets. Until now, market forces have not redirected resources to address this, and are unlikely to do so. Policymakers can correct course by building momentum and awareness and designing policy incentives. The upcoming Dialogue at the UN is a timely opportunity to tackle the issue. It should consider the following:

Generate political momentum by reframing the challenge: multilingual performance of AI systems is commonly framed as an inequity issue or is subsumed under more general labels such as ‘responsible and inclusive AI’. This does not adequately highlight the safety concerns and cumulative disadvantages users are exposed to over time when using AI in low-resource languages. Participants at the Dialogue should frame investment in multilingual capacity as an urgent issue of national or regional interest, on a par with efforts to bolster ‘sovereign’ AI. Many countries and regions have started investing in local models in an effort to increase ownership and control over AI systems. Models optimized for local languages would make it faster and cheaper to train on local data and context.
Amplify technical solutions and help prioritize targeted R&D investment: researchers point to technical solutions on at least three tracks: more multilingual datasets, more engagement of human annotators from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and more priority and compute for multilingual LLM research, especially on safety. Simply calling for more investment in thousands of underserved languages, however, is hardly practical; and neither is a purely national approach where every country launches its own initiative. But the Dialogue can articulate top priorities by clustering, aggregating, and organizing needs, interests and resources across national or regional borders. It can identify principles or criteria to determine where to begin: to decide which investment in which language would generate the most benefit for the most people. And it should serve as a platform to promote co-creation and co-design approaches, to better involve the communities this technology is intended to serve in the relevant research and development processes.
Share policy levers and incentives to strengthen multilingual capacity: researchers have suggested requiring more transparency from model developers to articulate and document the language coverage of their products explicitly. As pre-deployment testing is being institutionalized more broadly, the Dialogue presents a timely opportunity to press for the inclusion of language-specific vulnerability checks in these processes. But more broadly, representatives of low-resource language communities could use the Dialogue to strategize on how to leverage access to their markets and data to affect change in frontier model development. Permission to process local datasets, especially when mediated through official institutions such as archives, public broadcasters or cultural institutions, could be tied to commitments by model developers to improve multilingual performance and safety. Licensing agreements between media companies and AI labs are an example of how access to data can be leveraged. Similarly, public procurement processes could require specific investment in multilingual capacity as a condition for government contracting. The Dialogue is not the place to negotiate such arrangements, but to build alliances and coalitions that lead to better bargaining positions. The languages may vary across regions, but the underlying demand is the same.
By delivering on a tangible issue such as multilingual artificial intelligence, the UN’s first Global Dialogue on AI Governance has a shot at creating genuine added value, and proving its usefulness as a new platform. Tackling the systemic disadvantage faced by users of AI systems in low-resource languages addresses a real need that is not being solved elsewhere. And by prioritizing it now, it can help close a gap in access, usefulness and safety that — unchecked — grows wider the longer it exists.

A dialogue platform has real limitations. It's unrealistic to expect it to boost capacity across all, or even most, languages spoken globally. The Dialogue can, however, reframe the issue as an urgent policy challenge that goes well beyond equity, articulate and prioritize the most promising areas of research and development, and aggregate political will and bargaining power to enable representatives of low-resource language communities to accelerate progress by influencing frontier model development more effectively. That would be a useful and impactful contribution."
Christian Schlaepfer / Jul 1, 2026
https://www.techpolicy.press/the-un-global-dialogue-on-ai-governance-should-tackle-the-ai-language-gap/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

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#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"On an extended visit to prewar Taiwan, a Japanese writer discovers herself

 

Antonia Finnane Books 3 July 2026 

 

When the International Booker Prize committee awarded this year’s prize to Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue it continued a laudable tradition of diversity. In the eleven years since its relaunch in 2016, the prize has gone to books translated from eleven different languages. Taiwan Travelogue, a Chinese-language novel brought to the English-reading public in a thoughtful translation by Lin King, is the prize’s first Chinese-language recipient.

 

A Taiwanese writer of Chinese heritage, Yang has an ambivalent relationship with the language in which she writes: the language of the People’s Republic of China, the “them” against which the “us” of Taiwan is defined. In contemporary Taiwanese television and movies, it is common now to hear Taiwanese (Hokkien) spoken. Yang Shuang-zi seeks to evoke in writing what on the screen is readily projected: an imagined community for Taiwan, with a history and cultural references that belong to it alone. In Taiwan Travelogue this is not linguistically bound community, but language is effectively deployed to show it struggling to come into existence. Most obviously, Taiwan is a place that has to be translated to be understood. The entire novel is in fact one long translation process.

 

The novel is imaginatively framed, with an informative introduction at the beginning and a series of afterwords revealing the afterlife of the text that constitutes the main narrative. This introduction should not be skipped: it is part of the novel. The purported writer, Hiyoshi Sagako, Taiwan-born of Japanese ethnicity, is a fictional character, and her account of the novel’s various editions a 1954 Japanese original translated into Chinese (in abridged form) in 1977 and then again, with elisions restored, in 2020 is also fictional. The only translation that a reader has to believe in is the one into English by Lin King, first published in the United States by Graywolf Press in 2024, from a Chinese-language original published in 2020.

 

From the introduction, we learn that the fictional Japanese original is a first-person narrative by literary celebrity Aoyama Chizukyu, who arrives in Taiwan in 1938 on an official visit organised by the Japanese Government-General. By then, Taiwan had been under Japanese control since 1895. Aoyama encounters a complex society, with Japanese “mainlanders” like herself in the top stratum. A second stratum consists of Japanese locals like Hiyoshai Sagako, who in the introduction discusses the ambiguous status of Taiwanese-born Japanese. Aoyama’s first allocated guide, Mishima, belongs to this stratum.

 

The third stratum is composed of populated by ethnically Han (Chinese) locals like Aoyama’s main guide and companion, Ông Tshian-hóh, known as Ō Chizuru in Japanese but referred to in the novel by Aoyama’s affectionate nickname for her, Chi-Chan. The Han population is itself diverse, as Aoyama learns. At one point Chi-Chan introduces Aoyama to a barely explored bottom layer, Taiwan’s First Peoples, impressing Aoyama by her erudition in talking about them as “indigenous” (yuanzhu zhongzu, as opposed to tuzhu, or “natives,” for example).

 

Aoyama, the reader soon learns, is taller than most Japanese men. Her towering presence in the novel is a metaphor for the overweening presence of a colonial power. Chi-Chan is tiny by comparison — comparable in height to the sparrow-like schoolgirl Tân Thsiok-bi, who like herself is the love object of a robustly built Japanese. Since Taiwanese were on average taller than Japanese in this period, the metaphor is slightly strained but the author, writing for a Taiwanese readership, can probably depend for credibility on historical impressions of Japanese power.

 

The novel is a love story of sorts, with the developing romance between Aoyama and Chi-Chan tenderly evoked. The two women share a consciousness of the restraints placed on women by a society that doesn’t allow them to casually eat by the roadside or drink in a bar, and in which heterosexual marriage is an expectation that they will have to meet. Physical contact between them is never more than tentative.

 

As a story about attraction between women and linked issues of living in a patriarchal society where women are fated to be married off to men, this novel is worth comparing with its shortlisted competitor, Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash’s debut novel She Who Remains. Karabash takes up the baton from Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Prize in 2005, with a story set, like Kadare’s Broken April, among blood-feuding families of Albania’s Accursed Mountains. There is a love story in the novel, again between two women, but it is fleeting. The main protagonist, a “sworn virgin” who has adopted a male persona in accordance with the grim Kanun code, embodies the problem of the socio-sexual regime of which not only she but also her male family members are victims. It is plainly a novel about patriarchy.

 

Taiwan Travelogue, by contrast, is unmistakably a novel about colonialism. The love story is foregrounded but the main theme could easily have been developed with a heterosexual relationship at its core. Writing the love story is a way of writing, critically, about power extended by the “mainland” (neidi, in this case Japan) over Taiwanese. For Karabash, the national context is immaterial. She is not interested in Albania per se; the Accursed Mountains are merely an opportune setting. Yang Shuang-zi, on the other hand, is undoubtedly writing about Taiwan. Hers is not a story that could easily be transposed.

 

Aoyama herself is not a conscious agent of Japanese imperialism. She has never been a fan of the Imperial Japan’s Great Southward Expansion and resists being caught up in the propaganda war supporting it. She is critical of an imperial project that threatens to destroy the existing ways of life of the colonised peoples. At the same time, she is an intellectual who assumes the right to know, love and explain the colonised territory, simultaneously seeking to know, love and explain Chi-Chan. She is the Japanese “Orientalist” par excellence.

 

The journey is a gastronomical one. Aoyama has a gargantuan appetite, voraciously consuming every meal or snack that comes her way, generally because it is provided by Chi-Chan. A metaphor for colonialism is again evident. The book’s chapters are organised by foodstuff or dish, beginning with the simplest of local foods, melon seeds, and working up to the most complex, the twelve-dish full menu and its distillation in a “leftover soup.” Food is a teacher and a mediator.

 

By the fifth chapter, when Aoyama is introduced to braised minced pork in its different iterations, northern and southern, she has begun to think about cultural erasure as a problem in Japanese colonialism. In the eighth chapter, she accommodates Chi-Chan’s food preferences by making Japanese sukiyaki with pork instead of the customary beef. Cultural accommodation is underway, although it is not evenly balanced. In the same chapter Chi-Chan wears a kimono to please Aoyama, but she wears it under sufferance.

 

In the course of her travels Aoyama is presented with a dizzying array of dishes and ingredients, which even in a world of fusion cooking will probably be lost on most readers of the translation but must be deeply meaningful to Taiwanese readers. In a place where the difference between being Chinese and being Taiwanese is a work in progress, food has become a touchpoint of difference. Yang Shuang-zi exploits this trope to the full. Not every dish or ingredient she mentions is peculiar to Taiwan, but taken as a whole, the cuisine has its own grammar. A local argot of food terms is one means Yang has found for writing Taiwan into the inflexibly Chinese text.

 

The narrative proper concludes on poignant note with a single bowl of fruit and jelly ice shared by Aoyoma and Chi-Chan. By this time, Aoyama has been helped to a deeper understanding of her relationship with Taiwan and with Chi-Chan by her original guide, the ethnically Japanese Mishima, in an unexpected and wonderfully timed turn in the novel as it approaches its conclusion.

 

After the war, Taiwan passed from Japanese to Chinese hands. The Japanese mainland (neidi) was replaced by a Chinese mainland (dalu). By using the term “mainland” in her translation, Lin King keeps the parallel in the reader’s mind. The difference between these two mainlands is the difference between past and present. Taiwan has come to terms with its Japanese colonial past and accepts its Japanese legacy. China, by contrast, is a present threat.

 

Taiwan Travelogue deals with this time gap by shifting the entire framework back in history. Just as the Japanese legacy is plain in contemporary Taiwan, so too was the Chinese cultural legacy in Japanese Taiwan in the 1930s. Chi-Chan loves classical Chinese literature. She owns to a Chinese ethnicity by wearing a qipao (or cheongsam). It is the Japanese present she finds challenging.

 

But just in case anyone thinks a Chinese legacy too obviously entitles the People’s Republic of China to some sort of prior ownership of Taiwan, King sedulously avoids the terms China and Chinese in the text. For the name of the country, she employs the Japanese term “Shina,” expressed in characters deployed for their sound, not their meaning. For the word Chinese in a literary sense she uses the term han, a synonym for the English term “Chinese” in many contexts.

 

In a note at the end of the book, King explains her decisions about translating in a way that sustains the illusion of a Japanese urtext and supports the historical context of the story. The strategies she adopts are true to the tenor of Yang Shuang-zi’s writing. They are consistent, too, with a Taiwanese nationalist historiographical trend towards identifying “China” as the modern state that emerged in the twentieth century as the Republic of China, following an historical trajectory completely separate from Taiwan’s own.

 

There are costs to clarity for an English-language readership. Decisions about the rendering of names and terms have yielded a cluttered text that is more difficult to read in translation than in the original. The original has footnotes built in as part of the fiction of translation from the Japanese, and many more footnotes again have been added to the English translation. Japanese names with diacritical marks sit alongside Mandarin terms with tones superimposed, with Taiwanese (Hokkien) words in italics. English-language readers are presented with orthographically complex terms they cannot begin to understand unless they are well versed in the histories, languages and romanisation systems of three different East Asian territories.

 

Historical context apart, persuasive translation into English is rendered challenging by differences in literary conventions and cultural dispositions. It takes a while to get used to a character who “dimples” as much as Chi-Chan does. “Dimples” is not a word easily deployed in serious fiction. Rosamond in Jane Eyre has dimples, but Rosamund is definitely not the woman with whom Rochester falls in love. Yet King had limited translation choices here. Chi-Chan was endowed with dimples by the author. There are no synonyms for dimples.

 

Particularities of time, place, and language complicate the text but don’t impede enjoyment of it. Aoyama’s journey of discovery never ceases to be interesting. Dialogue between Aoyama and Chi-Chan carries it along lightly. From melon seeds to jelly ice, the story follows a compelling narrative arc. Not unexpectedly, Taiwan Travelogue proves to be a book for its time, a work of historical fiction set on an island with a difficult past and an uncertain future, a country that is recognised by no great power but that is refusing simply to go away. •

 

Taiwan Travelogue

By Yang Shuang-zi | Translated by Lin King | Scribe | $32.99 | 320 pages"

https://insidestory.org.au/journey-to-the-interior/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Translating a People Is Lion-Sized
Jul 3, 2026, 12:36 PM
What do I have in common with illustrious writer and translator, Yardenne Greenspan? I live in Japan while she’s in NYC. Yardenne holds her corner of the world with translation from Hebrew to English. I speak almost none. She is a transmitter of story that should be, could be, and must be told. This is no small thing. She becomes a translator of a people.

Highly accomplished in her own right, she is also the wife and partner of Shai Davidai. Yardenne wears a T with the words, “Accidental Activist” on the front, which, of course, I ask about.

Yardenne says that she regards her translation work as a form of activism. “I think bringing Israeli voices to the world, especially now, is really important. So many people don’t really know Israel; they don’t know Israelis; they don’t know what we’re about.”

Of course. Yardenne has written about book stores declining to show or stock Jewish or Israeli authors, and journals skittering in how they support long-time Jewish/Israeli/Zionist contributors.

Yardenne is all of this, translating the works of some of the most heralded modern Israeli writers. Take her newest work: her second linguistic collaboration with Yishay Ishi Ron–-Girl Who Rode the White Lion, published just recently, June 2027, is her sixteenth-full-length translation.

Her first work of translation with Yishay Ishi Ron was Dog, also from Son­ca­ta Press, a tender dive into the world of PTSD from the perspective of an elite combat soldier. This is new terrain for many non-Israelis, that, with Yardenne’s expertise in translation, is suddenly open.

Of course, I have my own experience with soldiers who come on their big trip to us here in Tokyo. I’ve had the sweetest young men tell me with embarrassment that they need to change their bunk sheets each day because of their bad dreams and night sweats. Or the too-many-stickers-on-the-wall here of friends they each know and carry across Japan, Vietnam, or Laos. How much more would the world respond with understanding and goodness if they read contemporary and more historical Israeli authors about their realities of peace and war.

Girl Who Rode the White Lion, Yardenne’s masterful translation, shares Ron’s historical fiction of a family that hid Jews from death during the Holocaust—not in their closet, attic, or barn, but in their circus.

With lions.

I eagerly await my copy of Girl Who Rode the White Lion, refreshing the tracking function each day, as it slowly makes it way to Asia. I anticipate grim realities of such hiding and the horrendous realization, still, if they had no hiding place. I also anticipate hope and beauty in the words–both in Ron’s and Greenspan’s. Together, it’s the Hebrew and English I am after, but what about everyone else who would never have such a window and thus stay disconnected?

Not every American Jew has 11-plus beds set up every night to host Israelis. Not everyone gets to sit with officers fresh out from their longest service and relax over Japanese potato chips and Bamba. I know what a gift this is. But also, not every one of my guests has the most sophisticated English lexicon. Even when they do, how much I miss when they speak from their second language, and not the one learned in school, not their mother tongue from speaking with grandparents and hearing searing conversation, carrying deep memory and all they experience.

I rely on those around me to help bridge those gaps. It’s how I can better care and know our guests. It’s also my way into knowing Israel.

In our chat, I ask her about the kind of translation she is drawn to these days, especially after October 7th, 2023.

“At the moment,” Yardenne replies, “I am hungry to translate anything that shows the fullness of being an Israeli.”

“At the moment,” Yardenne replies, “I am hungry to translate anything that shows the fullness of being an Israeli.”

She goes on, “The fact that in a single sentence people will utter a mixture of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic. The fact that they will have relationships with people of different religions, that they will fight side by side with people who not just voted differently from them, (that’s putting it mildly)–people who think the other person’s politics are abhorrent, but they will fight together, anyway. The millions of little contradictions, like how, you know, we’re strong and resilient, but we’re also so… I mean, I can’t speak; I’m not living in Israel right now, but I’m talking to my family and friends, and it’s so vulnerable right now, even while at the same time, they’re exhibiting this amazing resilience.”

Yardenne tells me about a translator who was frustrated seeing Israeli authors write about their mundane, everyday lives when “war and conflict were the reality and should have been reflected”. She tells me about a growing wave of people writing what you could call bourgeois novels set in Israel, books with characters dealing with careers, marital strife, and middle-age crises. This other translator was upset, saying, “I don’t understand how Israelis can’t see that while we’re in this emergency, how can they be writing about anything but the conflict?”

Yardenne told her, “You know, on the one hand, I completely understand what you’re saying.” Of course.

“I truly understood her point”, Yardenne says to me, “but at the same time, I couldn’t help but also argue that there’s something dehumanizing about limiting our experience just to war and conflict.”

She goes on, “If we want people to understand Israelis, that means also understanding all the ways in which we’re kind of like everyone else–how you sit in traffic on your way to work and get frustrated, and then you have conflict with your boss, so you go home, and you are short with your children, and then regret it. So life. I’m hungry for all of it”.

Agreed.

After October 7, she translated everything she could– a Nova survivor’s memoir, biographies for a memorial website at Kibbutz Be’eri, and work to help coin language for describing the atrocities of that day. Grief and expression. Translation became her activism and something she could do.

“There was so much helplessness”, Yardenne says, “especially in the first few months after the 7th. So to, to be able to actually do something, to give someone a voice, to help, like, create a little bit of memory to validate what happened, I was honored to do it”.

For me, too. In hosting Israelis, I know to listen, as well as write their stories of survival, their stories of loss and heartbreak, and simply, life. I’m hungry for all of it, too.

Me, too.

In hosting Israelis, I know to listen, as well as write their stories of survival, their stories of loss and heartbreak, and simply, life. I’m hungry for all of it, too.

What if I was so fixated on only hearing stories of my guests’ and friends’ heartache? I’d miss the joy! I’d have no part of it with them, and I’d certainly be inaccurate in any way of portraying them. I’d miss the humor. I’d miss it all.

And if I gloss over tragedy? Impossible. In my first podcast episode of what became Tokyo Shishi, I make matbucha with my guest. He tells me his best friend’s funeral is happening today–on the same day we are in my home cooking. There in our time of tomatoes, paprika, and spice, he tells me, and we becmme far closer because of it.

And this is what I’m also after as a reader. I’m here to listen and see complex people. Protagonists with nuance. Language so beautiful that you want to underline each word and cry. To all of this, I owe a great thanks, a “toda” and “arigato gozaimasu” to Yishay Ishi Ron and to Yardenne Greenspan.

So sure, maybe more and more, some of the lit coming out of Israel may seem like the mundane–and for me, too, as I clean our guest space upstairs. Sinks get clogged. So much laundering. We have seemingly ordinary moments of transition within living in nearness with our guests, day-to-day—in grocery shopping, running into my Israeli guests on their way to the gym in my modest Japanese neighborhood, where they are the only ones working out in Teva or in a sports bra and Lululemon bike shorts. We run into each other in favorite cafés or speak passionately about travel, their Psikhometri test that awaits, and all kind of life when they’re waiting for the shower or telling me we need more toilet paper.

I see them vulnerable when they are not feeling well and missing their mothers. I see concern in them, grief, and also pride and hope. I am with them cooking and hearing them on the phone with their mothers. Recognizing their voices outside on the stairs and getting to share them with a wider world is everything.

It’s also my accidental, and quite intentional, activism.

I reflect on our chat and Yardenne’s shirt. There is something similar in translating events, people, and encounters–moments that change us. I reflect on the cover of this newest book, and how lucky I am to read and receive such stories from Israel into the port of this whole world. It is no small thing; it is lion-sized."

Melissa Uchiyama is an author and writing mentor to young people. She's an American Jew who's made Japan her home for nearly 20 years...
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/translating-a-people-is-lion-sized/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Ulysses in isiZulu: why an African translation of the classic Irish novel matters in today’s world
Published: July 2, 2026 3.22pm SAST

Every year on 16 June, readers around the world celebrate Bloomsday, the annual commemoration of Irish writer James Joyce’s landmark 1922 novel Ulysses.

The date marks the single day on which the novel unfolds: 16 June 1904, when its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, wanders through the city of Dublin. What began as a literary observance has become a global celebration of reading.

In 2026 the festivities in Johannesburg had a special South African quality to them. At the centre of the event was South African writer and translator Sandile Ngidi’s isiZulu rendering of the character Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy, the concluding episode of Ulysses.

As a scholar of African literatures, I am interested in how literary ideas travel. My research has shown how writers from very different contexts can grapple with similar political and artistic questions. Ngidi’s translation opens up one of the most challenging works of literature to new readers.

Simon & Schuster
The isiZulu translation represents only a small portion of this vast and notoriously difficult novel. Ulysses is based on one ordinary day in the lives of three characters who live in Dublin. It uses their experiences to explore identity, memory, desire, and modern life in early 20th-century Ireland.

Since its publication, Ulysses has been formally translated into more than 40 languages, mostly within Europe. Its journey into isiZulu reminds us that literature travels most powerfully when it crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries and returns us to the urgent questions of our own time.

Translation as an act of imagination
Bridge Books, a community-centred bookshop in inner city Johannesburg, hosted the Bloomsday event, which also included readings from South African writers Ivan Vladislavić and Terry-Ann Adams.

By holding a multilingual Bloomsday celebration in parts of the city where anti-immigrant groups have been marching, the organisers underscored a simple but powerful point: the civic imagination at the heart of Joyce’s work remains relevant wherever diverse communities claim space through stories and conversation.

Ulysses is really about random and seemingly mundane interactions. Molly Bloom is one of the main characters, an opera singer who spends the day mostly in bed. Bloomsday is named after her and her husband, who is also a main character. He’s wandering the city remembering the death of their son, and stewing in the knowledge that Molly is having an affair. This is the universal drama of human life.

Molly Bloom’s monologue in a French staging of Ulysses. Sigoise/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Ngidi’s translation matters. It challenges assumptions about which languages are considered suitable for conveying the so-called world literature. African languages are not peripheral to global literary culture but active participants in it, capable of carrying, reshaping and reinterpreting some of the most demanding works ever written.

In fact, reading Joyce in isiZulu raises larger questions about literary inheritance. Who owns a literary classic? Joyce himself was deeply concerned with the relationship between language and power.

Writing from a colonised Ireland, he grappled with the complexities of expressing Irish experience through English, the language of imperial rule. His work repeatedly explores tensions between local identity and global influence, between inherited forms and new possibilities.

James Joyce for everyone
The concerns in Joyce’s fiction have become even more pertinent. Across many parts of the world, debates about belonging have become increasingly fraught. In both Ireland and South Africa, questions of migration, national identity and cultural inclusion have generated political tensions and, at times, hostility towards foreigners.

Joyce is often regarded as a writer for specialists and university students. His novels have a reputation for difficulty that makes them seem inaccessible. Yet events like the one in Johannesburg suggest a different story. Joyce survives because readers continue to reinvent him, finding new contexts, new languages and new communities in which his work can live.

Translation, in this sense, is more than a literary exercise. It is an act of imagination that allows readers to encounter familiar questions from a different vantage point. Rather than simply reproducing Ulysses, the translation creates a new reading experience that illuminates both Joyce’s novel and the expressive possibilities of isiZulu.

Read more: Wretched of the Earth has been translated into South Africa’s Zulu language – why Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary book still matters

By carrying Joyce into isiZulu, Ngidi expands not only the readership of Ulysses but also the range of perspectives through which the novel can be understood.

The translation demonstrates that African languages are not simply vehicles for local experience; they are capable of engaging the most complex works of world literature while bringing new meanings to them."
https://theconversation.com/ulysses-in-isizulu-why-an-african-translation-of-the-classic-irish-novel-matters-in-todays-world-285381
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Ismail Kadare was an incredibly important figure in modern Albanian literature whose work has been translated into 45 languages. To mark two years since his passing, this blog post digs into Kadare’s life, his role in Albanian literature, and his works in translation through an interview between Nevila Pahumi, the Reference Specialist for Albania, Cyprus, and Greece, and translator John Hodgson. This is another entry into the International Collections’ Conveyances blog series.

 

NP:  What steps do you take in representing Kadare’s style— carrying it over from the Albanian into English? Growing up in Albania, I read Kadare’s Kronikë në Gurrë (Chronicle in Stone). Reading your translations today, I was particularly struck by how easily I recognized Kadare’s style in your own representation of your work. It reads like him. How do you manage to bring as much of his language into your own translation?

 

JH: Well, I think as I’ve come to translate book after book by Kadare, I think there is an unconscious process whereby I have come to understand how his mind works. And if I’ve been successful, I think it is because I think he has his personal mannerisms and personal style. I’ve come to recognize this and gradually acquire a repertoire of ways of turning that into English. If we are talking about Ismail Kadare’s style, the first thing to say is that he is also someone who has shaped the modern Albanian literary language. He is really the first professional novelist to really use the modern Albanian language as a fluent literary idiom. He has also tried to introduce words he likes, over the years, tried to introduce…bring back old words into modern currency and to influence the shape of the language. Some of his innovations catch on, and some don’t. He is very much an agent in linguistic development.

 

NP: His work spans a variety of genres. … His most recent work, A Dictator Calls, is about the infamously brief but well-known phone call between Stalin and Boris Pasternak. What do you think Kadare, the writer, was trying to accomplish in this last novel?

 

JH: I’d like to say something about Kadare’s relationship with Russian, because he studied there during the Dr. Zhivago affair. And he loved Moscow… He found it a much wider world than Tirana. And this is perhaps somewhat surprising to a reader who grows up in the West. But the atmosphere in Khruschev’s Soviet Union was much more liberal and open than in Enver Hoxha’s Tirana. So, he has this deep rapport with Russian literature. But what I believe he’s doing in A Dictator Calls is that he is looking at the relationship between Stalin and Pasternak and the opposition between the two. There is by that view of things, Kadare’s own relationship to Hoxha; he is looking at the power of the artists… They have the ears of the public, the hearts of the public. They have their own stature, their own empires.

 

Gjirokastër’s Stone Houses. Photo by Nevila Pahumi

 

NP: To transition from him to you, you’ve also published your own work about your life there.

 

JH: During the pandemic, I wrote a short book about my life in Kosovo in the 1980s—A Future in the Past. It describes life in Kosovo in the 1980s. I thought it was worth describing. It is inevitably a book of limited nostalgia, because no one would want to see certain elements of Kosovo life revived. It was a poor society, a patriarchal society with limited opportunities… And of course, it was a tense time in Yugoslavia, more broadly. I moved away from Kosovo in 1989 and lived in Tirana for four years until 1992. Hope and democracy were in the air. Materially it was a difficult time, but people were very optimistic about the future. That was the best time to be in Tirana.

 

NP: I’ve lived through the same time period, as a seven-eight year old. I have fond memories of the hope and the sanguinity that my parents’ generation carried with them.

 

JH: You would have been as old as Kadare was when he describes the events of a Chronicle in Stone.

 

NP: In addition to Kadare, are there other authors whose work you enjoy and might recommend to American readers? As a reference librarian, this is the kind of thing that informs my work.

 

JH: I have also translated another prominent Albanian writer, Fatos Lubonja. He has written very movingly about his time in Enver Hoxha’s prisons and labor camps, and he also wrote a book which I translated as The False Apocalypse about the year 1997, when Albania almost totally collapsed into anarchy following the collapse of the pyramid schemes. He has been very much engaged with Albanian history. I have translated these two writers, who are famously not quite on good terms. This takes a bit of diplomacy on my part. Besides Kadare, readers should read Fatos Lubonja.

 

But I think your question really is about younger writers. Both these two are now quite advanced in age. It is true that the younger generation of Albanian writers are not interested in their topics. Their parents’ generation was effectively traumatized by communism, and the generation born after does not want to hear about it at all. There is a lot of experimental writing. There is a lot of fantasy writing, and experimentation going on… I think time will tell!

"The 2027 judging panel for the Bukhman International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, has been announced

Critically acclaimed and Booker Prize-shortlisted author Katie Kitamura chairs the judging panel and is joined by Booker Prize-longlisted writer, translator and Professor of French and Comparative Literature Patrick McGuinness; filmmaker and Sunday Times bestselling author Caleb Azumah Nelson; celebrated writer, translator and International Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Olga Ravn; and award-winning film, television and stage actor and producer Tessa Thompson.

This year’s judges are looking for the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2026 and 30 April 2027.

A longlist of 12 or 13 books will be announced on Tuesday, 16 March 2027 with a shortlist of six books to follow on Thursday, 15 April 2027. The winning book will be announced at a ceremony in May 2027.

Grant-giving organisation Bukhman Philanthropies has made a generous commitment to fund the next 10 years of the International Booker Prize, following its support of the prize in 2026. In recognition of the decade-long partnership, the prize will be named the Bukhman International Booker Prize. As part of Bukhman Philanthropies’ dedication to celebrating and rewarding the vital art of translation, the prize fund for the winning title will double in value from £50,000 to £100,000, to be split equally between the author and translator/s. Each shortlisted title will continue to be awarded a prize of £5,000: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator/s.

Katie Kitamura, Chair of the 2027 prize judges, comments: 
‘The International Booker Prize is a visionary prize, one that has consistently celebrated the best fiction from around the world. It has shaped me as a reader and a writer, introducing me to new books, authors, and schools of writing. As the prize marks its tenth anniversary and looks ahead to its next decade, I am honoured to be chairing this year’s panel of judges. 

‘Translation represents a dialogue between two minds. The Bukhman International Booker Prize offers readers the opportunity to experience the profound encounter between author and translator. As a prize, it is exemplary in the way it recognises the work of both participants. The celebration and support of this intrinsically human collaboration feels particularly vital right now.

‘I feel especially fortunate to embark on this year of reading in the company of my fellow judges, artists and thinkers I have admired for many years. I am looking forward to learning with and from them, to having my mind changed, and to sharing in the thrill of discovery.’

The Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judges: Caleb Azumah Nelson, Olga Ravn, Katie Kitamura, Patrick McGuinness, Tessa Thompson.
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds:
‘We are incredibly grateful to Bukhman Philanthropies for their extraordinary commitment in funding the next 10 years of the International Booker Prize, and to Daria Bukhman for her personal support for translated work. When we launched this incarnation of the prize a decade ago, we did so in the hope that more great work from other languages and cultures would reach anglophone readers. We hoped to join publishers, agents, scouts, booksellers and others in a global-thinking enterprise, and to become a collective force for good. 

‘The results after 10 years have been hugely gratifying: in the UK, sales of translated fiction have risen by 31 per cent – driven largely by readers under the age of 35. Beyond the UK, the rights to the original editions of International Booker-nominated books have been sold in dozens of other territories as a result of the light shone on them by the prize. And the knock-on effect of an International Booker Prize win in the author’s home country has been exponential, with, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original edition reprinted as a result. Though the prize is designed to reward an individual book, it often draws attention to an author more generally: we’re very proud that five International Booker Prize winners or nominees have gone on to win the Nobel Prize for their body of work.

‘As we look towards the next decade of the prize, we do so with a deep sense of responsibility and hope. Bukhman Philanthropies’ commitment has the power to reshape not only the future of the prize, but the landscape of literature itself—elevating writers and translators whose stories connect us more deeply to one another across cultures, borders, and experiences. At a time when the world feels increasingly divided, this gift represents something profoundly optimistic: an investment in understanding, in curiosity, and in the belief that great literature can help us imagine one another’s lives.

‘We could not have found a better group to lead the charge than this year’s judges. They are phenomenal: each of them has a rich background in collaboration, international enquiry and creative work, and they will, I’m sure, be all the more brilliant for thinking together under Katie’s aegis. I’m deeply excited to listen to their conversations.’ 

Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation © Neo Gilder for the Booker Prize Foundation
The 2027 judges

Katie Kitamura

Patrick McGuinness

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Olga Ravn

Tessa Thompson
About the judges
Katie Kitamura (Chair of the Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027)
Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels. Audition was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was one of President Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025. It was also a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Carol Shields Prize. It is being adapted for film by director Lulu Wang, with Lucy Liu and Charles Melton starring. 

Her novel Intimacies was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was one of President Obama’s Favourite Books of 2021. In France, it won the Prix Littéraire Lucien Barrière, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Héroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. A Separation (2017) was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and longlisted for the Prix Meilleur Roman Points; it was also a New York Times Notable Book. It is being adapted for film by director Jonas Carpignano.

Kitamura’s two previous novels, Gone to the Forest (2013) and The Longshot (2009), were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Kitamura is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. She was the 2025 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, and has received fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena and Jan Michalski Foundations.  Her work has been translated into 29 languages. She has written for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and Frieze, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Katie Kitamura, Chair of the Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judges © Clayton Cubitt
Translation represents a dialogue between two minds, at a moment when the celebration of human collaboration feels particularly vital

Katie Kitamura
Patrick McGuinness
Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia and brought up in the Belgian Ardennes. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days, about the fall of communism in Romania, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, was published in 2019 and won the Encore Prize. He is also the author of three books of poetry, the most recent being Blood Feather (2023); a memoir, Other People’s Countries; a book about Oxford, the city behind the university (Real Oxford, 2021); and several books on French literature, including works on modern French theatre and on politics and poetry in fin de siècle France. His most recent book is Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines (2025).

McGuinness has translated from French (Stéphane Mallarmé, Hélène Dorion, Guillaume Apollinaire), Spanish (Jorge Manrique) and Catalan (Andreu Vidal). His recent translation, with Stephen Romer, of Gilles Ortlieb’s Selected Poems, won the 2025 Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation.

McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Patrick McGuinness, Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judge
Literary translation allows languages to reach readers on equal terms – from those with a few thousand speakers to those with hundreds of millions – the translator’s art doesn’t just expand the world, it adds to it

Patrick McGuinness
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British-Ghanaian writer and filmmaker, living in South-East London. His debut novel, Open Water, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller, won the Costa First Novel Award 2021 and Debut Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2022. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year 2021 and selected as a Waterstones Paperback of the Month in 2022. Nelson’s second novel, Small Worlds, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the 2024 Dylan Thomas Prize. He was selected as a National Book Foundation ‘5 under 35’ honoree by Brit Bennett.

The TV adaption of Open Water, an eight-part series for which Nelson is the lead writer, director and executive producer, is currently in production and will air on BBC One in 2027. He is also working on an original feature, The Last Stop, with Heyday and Film4. His short film Pray, starring David Jonsson, premiered at Locarno Film Festival and has since been shown at numerous festivals, including London Film Festival.

Caleb Azumah Nelson, Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judge
Works in translation are a true gift: they allow us to put a careful ear to the music of other languages. The stories which emerge are vital to forging connections between cultures, between each other

Caleb Azumah Nelson
Olga Ravn
Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. In Danish, she has published four novels, two poetry collections and an artist’s book. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021 and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award and the Dublin Literary Award. It has been published in 26 territories.
 
Her novel My Work won the Politiken’s Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in Denmark’s maternity laws. It was published in English in September 2023 to great critical acclaim in a translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell.

Ravn’s most recent novel, The Wax Child, was published in English in 2025 in a translation by Martin Aitken. It was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. The novel prompted the Telegraph to call her ‘the strangest – and best – young novelist in Europe’ and is being published in 20 territories.

As a translator, Ravn has translated Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, among others, into Danish. As an editor she played a central role in the relaunch of Tove Ditlevesen’s work. In addition, she has written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, The Paris Review and Granta. She lives in Copenhagen.

Olga Ravn, Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judge © Nina Subin
By reading literature from outside of our respective home countries, our consciousness and understanding of not only the world but of language and literature itself is deepened

Olga Ravn
Tessa Thompson
Tessa Thompson is an award-winning actress with an extensive and diverse history of working across film, television and stage. In 2019, she featured on the cover of Time magazine as a ‘Next Generation Leader’. In 2020 she cemented her status as a formidable producer with the launch of her production company, Viva Maude. 

Thompson has starred in a number of films and TV series adapted by or inspired by literature, including His & Hers, released on Netflix earlier this year and adapted from Alice Feeney’s novel of the same name; Nia DaCosta’s film Hedda, inspired by Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress; and Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s classic novel, Passing. All three were produced or executive produced by Thompson.

In April this year Thompson made her Broadway debut opposite Adrien Brody in The Fear of 13, written by Lindsey Ferrentino and directed by David Cromer. The play, based on a 2015 documentary, had its world premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London and tells the true story of Nick Yarris, who spent more than two decades on death row before being exonerated by DNA evidence. 

In 2017 Thompson originated the role of Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok opposite Chris Hemsworth. The Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster, directed by Taika Waititi, grossed over $800 million worldwide. She reprised the role in the fourth Thor instalment five years later. She and Hemsworth collaborated again when she played Agent M in Men in Black: International. Thompson has also starred in all three instalments of the Creed trilogy, opposite Michael B Jordan, and as Charlotte Hale in the Emmy-nominated hit HBO drama series Westworld. Executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan, and inspired by writer-director Michael Crichton’s 1973 feature of the same name, the series garnered a total of 43 Emmy nominations from its first and second seasons combined.

Thompson’s numerous other notable performances include roles in Alex Garland’s Annihilation and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, the voicing of the titular character in Disney’s live-action re-imagining of Lady and the Tramp, and her portrait of civil rights activist Diane Nash in Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated film Selma, produced by Brad Pitt and Oprah Winfrey.

Thompson is set to star in the upcoming suburban thriller series Next Door, created by Sam Boyd and A24 and due to air on Netflix. Her production company, Viva Maude, currently boasts a wide-ranging slate of over twenty feature films and television projects in various genres, encompassing narrative, documentary, and unscripted content. She and Viva Maude have joined as executive producers on Brittany Shyne’s documentary, Seeds, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize in 2025. Seeds showcases a portrait of Black generational farmers in the American South, and has been selected for the shortlist for the 98th Annual Academy Awards.

Tessa Thompson, Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027 judge © Cibelle Levi
Translation gives us access to lives and histories we’d otherwise perhaps never reach, and counters a narrow worldview – building a broader, truer kind of empathy and curiosity

Tessa Thompson
Submissions for the prize

Enter the Bukhman International Booker Prize
On this page you’ll find the rules, eligibility criteria, deadlines and submissions process for entering the Bukhman International Booker Prize
Read more about translated fiction

Young, urban and male: who is reading translated fiction in the UK now?

‘Spinning an illusion’: what exactly do literary translators do?

How independent publishers have become the cornerstone of the International Booker Prize

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https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/international/2027
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"
CNSLT/O26/011 - Consultancy for Translation Messages
Organization
Plan International
Posted
2 Jul 2026
Closing date
9 Jul 2026
About Plan International

We strive to advance children’s rights and equality for girls all over the world. With a bold purpose of ensuring “All Girls Standing Strong Creating Global Change” and as an independent development and humanitarian organisation, we work alongside children, young people, our supporters, and partners to tackle the root causes of the challenges facing girls and all vulnerable children. We support children’s rights from birth until they reach adulthood and enable children to prepare for and respond to crises and adversity. We drive changes in practice and policy at local, national, and global levels using our reach, experience, and knowledge. For over 80 years, we have been building powerful partnerships for children, and we are active in over 75 countries.

Plan International Nigeria was registered as a National Organisation in 2014 in Nigeria, and since then, our intervention has been focused on basic education, Nutrition, Health services, and strengthening youth and citizens’ participation in governance, livelihood, and creating economic opportunities for vulnerable people and building resilient communities through our humanitarian and development response in Nigeria. Plan Nigeria works with communities, civil society organisations, development partners, government at all levels, and the private sector. With its country strategy, “Girls are empowered to take action and drive change,” Plan International Nigeria is committed to reaching 20 million girls during the strategy period of 2023 to 2028, covering all 36 states of Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

Project Background

In Nigeria’s Northeast region, specifically across Yobe and Adamawa States, the intersection of climate change and protracted humanitarian needs has left thousands of households increasingly vulnerable to devastating seasonal flooding. Despite the availability of technical meteorological data, a significant information gap persists. Vulnerable communities often lack access to reliable communication platforms, and where information does exist, it is frequently too technical or linguistically inaccessible to trigger life-saving anticipatory action. This "vagueness" in early warnings often results in community paralysis rather than proactive preparation.

Plan International maintains a robust presence in these states, committed to enhancing community resilience through the ZCRA Project. Recognizing that technical forecasts alone do not save lives, Plan International is bridging the gap between data and action. By partnering with major telecommunications providers, MTN, Airtel, and Glo, the project ensures that localized, trusted risk information reaches at-risk populations directly on their mobile devices.

The transition from a technical forecast to a community-led response requires a deliberate, nuanced approach to communication. A message development will be contracted for;

- Translation and Localization: By engaging a consultant, the project ensures that messages are not merely translated but are culturally adapted into local languages that resonate with the residents' daily realities.

- Action-Oriented Design: message focuses on converting "vague" warnings into clear, actionable guidance. This ensures residents know exactly what steps to take before, during, and after a flood event.

- Validation: the messages developed will be tested by Plan staff in various communities. Feedback will be shared with the consultant so it can be integrated into the final draft of the messages.

Overview

To identify a consultancy firm or a consultant that will review flood messages on flood early warning, preparedness, adaptation, resilience, and post-flood occurrences, which will be used on different platforms (sms, jingles, posters), for the Climate Resilience ZCRA Project.

Deliverables

In Nigeria’s Northeast region, specifically across Yobe and Adamawa States, the intersection of climate change and protracted humanitarian needs has left thousands of households increasingly vulnerable to devastating seasonal flooding. Despite the availability of technical meteorological data, a significant information gap persists. Vulnerable communities often lack access to reliable communication platforms, and where information does exist, it is frequently too technical or linguistically inaccessible to trigger life-saving anticipatory action. This "vagueness" in early warnings often results in community paralysis rather than proactive preparation.

Plan International maintains a robust presence in these states, committed to enhancing community resilience through the ZCRA Project. Recognizing that technical forecasts alone do not save lives, Plan International is bridging the gap between data and action. By partnering with major telecommunications providers, MTN, Airtel, and Glo, the project ensures that localized, trusted risk information reaches at-risk populations directly on their mobile devices.

The transition from a technical forecast to a community-led response requires a deliberate, nuanced approach to communication. A message development will be contracted for;

- Translation and Localization: By engaging a consultant, the project ensures that messages are not merely translated but are culturally adapted into local languages that resonate with the residents' daily realities.

- Action-Oriented Design: message focuses on converting "vague" warnings into clear, actionable guidance. This ensures residents know exactly what steps to take before, during, and after a flood event.

- Validation: the messages developed will be tested by Plan staff in various communities. Feedback will be shared with the consultant so it can be integrated into the final draft of the messages.

Objectives:

1. Localized Alert Design: Generic warnings often fail to trigger a sense of personal risk. By aligning NiMET (Nigerian Meteorological Agency) predictions with specific local landmarks and historical flood levels, alerts become tangible. Tailor messaging to local livelihoods, such as providing specific advice for farmers regarding livestock or fishermen regarding vessel safety.

2. Information Integrity & Verification: In the vacuum of official communication, rumors thrive. Establishing a "Single Source of Truth" is critical to preventing panic and ensuring trust. The messages designed will utilize a multi-channel approach, including SMS, verified WhatsApp groups, posters, and jingles, to bridge the gap in accessing reliable information. Additionally, this will create a rapid-response system to debunk misinformation before it scales, ensuring that community members know exactly where to look for reliable information.

3. Linguistic Accessibility: Science is only useful if it is understood. To move from awareness to action, alerts must be stripped of technical jargon and delivered in the heart language of the community. Translate NiMET forecasts into local languages (e.g., Hausa, Fulfulde) to ensure zero ambiguity. Also, text will be supplemented with culturally appropriate icons or color-coded flags (Green/Yellow/Red) for those with varying literacy levels.

4. SOP Integration: messages will move from providing just a warning to prompting actions. General warnings cause indecision, but having a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) drives results. By providing a clear checklist, the community transitions from "knowing" to "doing." This will help households to clearly define roles so that every household knows its immediate task once an alert is triggered.

6. Feedback mechanism: a top-down communication often ignores cultural nuances that can make or break compliance. A participatory approach ensures the system is built with the community, not just for them. After the message testing exercise, feedback from community members will be integrated into the final draft.

Safeguarding and PSHEA

In Plan International, one of our priorities is to keep the children and programme participants we work with safe and protected (‘Safeguarding’) from all forms of abuse, including sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, and sexual abuse as described in our Safeguarding Children and Programme Participants and PSHEA Policies.

These policies demonstrate our commitment to holding ourselves accountable for ensuring that no child, young person, programme participant, community member, or staff member is subjected to harm or placed at risk as a result of their association with us. These policies govern the behaviours of Plan International staff, associates, and visitors who are obliged through Plan International’s staff and non-staff Codes of Conduct to behave appropriately with all people.

Safeguarding and PSHEA are quality requirements for all of our Programmes, Influencing and Communication work. The outcome of this message development workshop will therefore be designed and delivered in a manner that is safe for children and programme participants in all their diversities, which will require an in-depth Safeguarding and SHEA risk assessment, with the necessary level of resources and the flexibility to implement mitigation measures safely and adhere to safeguarding standards throughout and after the assessment.

Requirements for an M&E Consultant

Consultant(s) should submit a competitive itemized budget, covering the following aspects:

Consultant Fees: Including daily rates, number of working days, and expected costs for team members.
Social and Medical Insurance: Coverage for consultants and enumerators working in remote or high-risk areas.
Translation and Interpretation Costs: If applicable, for any multilingual data collection or reporting.
Miscellaneous Operational Costs: Any other costs related to the successful delivery of the assignment.
The payment will be made in instalments and subject to the delivery of the agreed outputs, as detailed in the Deliverables section.

Further information on the advert, including all referenced annexes, can be accessed via the link below: https://tinyurl.com/4dteemxn

How to apply
Interested Consultants are to send all requested documents in Annex A to this email - Nigeria.procurement@plan-international.org no later than 9th July, 2026 with the email subject title-

CNSLT/O26/011 - Consultancy for Translation Messages

Female Consultants are strongly encouraged to apply.

Job details
Country
Nigeria
Source
Plan International
Type
Consultancy
Career category
Advocacy/Communications
Years of experience
5-9 years
Theme
Disaster Management"
https://reliefweb.int/job/4218880/cnslto26011-consultancy-translation-messages

"“Images of Estonia(nness) in Estonian-Russian Literary Translation Flows Since 1991”

24 Aug 2026
10:15–12:15
Lossi 3–328
Doctoral defence

On 24 August 2026 at 10:15, Irina Siseykina will defend her doctoral thesis “Images of Estonia(nness) in Estonian-Russian Literary Translation Flows Since 1991” for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature.

Supervisors:
Luc van Doorslaer, University of Tartu
Sirje Kupp-Sazonov, University of Tartu

Opponent:
Philipp Hofeneder, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Summary
The Ph.D. thesis “Images of Estonia(nness) in Estonian-Russian literary translation flows since 1991” encompasses the publications from 1991 to 2023 and focuses on sociological and imagological aspects of the flow. The sociological approaches to translation flows draw on the ideas of Bourdieu, Latour, and Luhmann, and help to trace the nature and structure of the flow, the form of capital transferred through translation, the translation policies applied, and the translation network involved, as well as identify the main actors, i.e., publishers, authors, translators, and editors, and their functions. The imagological approaches required the analysis of metatexts associated with imagologically relevant titles to detect the recurring images and narratives of the flow.

The study is based on two corpora gathered from four translation databases: the Estonian Literature Center (ELIC), the Estonian National Library, Index Translationum, and the Estonian electronic bibliography. The two corpora are Estonian-Russian translations (426 titles) and Russian original titles (117 titles), which were analyzed to identify the most active publishers (KPD, Aleksandra, Avenarius, Kite, and others), translated authors (Eno Raud, Andrus Kivirähk, Leelo Tungal, Arvo Valton, Edgar Valter, and others), and translators (Vera Prohorova, Marina Tervonen, Maia Melts, and others). Selected actors were interviewed to obtain detailed information on the dynamics of the translation flow and the roles and functions of various actors, including periodicals.

The majority of Estonian-Russian translations are published in Estonia, and the majority of actors are Russian-speaking residents of Estonia, including Russian authors, who have integrated into Estonian culture and have made significant efforts to promote Estonian cultural capital among Russian readers in Estonia, Russia, and worldwide. The Estonian-Russian literary translation flow from 1991 to 2023 was the largest among translations to other languages.

A core image of the Estonian peasant, a sacred spiritual connection between Estonians and Estonian nature, the national traumas of German dominance and Soviet occupation, and the discussion of Estonia's self-identification are the tropes and narratives that are transferred through these translations."
https://ut.ee/en/event/doctoral-defence-irina-siseykina-images-estonianness-estonian-russian-literary-translation
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"This study conducts a systematic stylistic investigation of three seminal English translations of Han Feizi, an important work of Chinese Legalist philosophy. Employing Douglas Biber’s multidimensional analysis (MDA), the research compares the stylistic profiles of W. K. Liao (1939, 1959), Burton Watson (1964), and Joel Sahleen (2003). Results reveal particularly striking differences across four key dimensions: Liao’s translation exhibits high informational density and extreme abstraction, Watson’s version balances narrative clarity with accessibility, while Sahleen’s rendering demonstrates an involved, overtly persuasive, yet rigorously abstract style. These divergences are most salient in the dimensions of Informational vs. Involved Production, Narrative vs. Non-narrative Discourse, Overt Persuasion, and Abstract vs. Non-abstract Information, highlighting how micro-level linguistic choices generate distinct macro-level rhetorical effects that transcend the source text’s inherent heterogeneity. By demonstrating that translators function as visible agents who reframe the source text in ways shaped by specific institutional and pedagogical norms, this study contributes quantitative empirical evidence to debates on translator visibility. It also validates MDA as a robust methodology for comparative translation studies, offering insights into how evolving translational norms reshape the stylistic re-presentation and transmission of Chinese classics in the Anglophone world."
Published: 02 July 2026
Investigating translator’s style in English translations of Han Feizi: a multidimensional analysis
Chang Yin, Chunyang Cao & Guangyuan Yao
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026) Cite this article
Abstract
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-08122-x
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

“AI seems to struggle in three main areas: rendering metaphor, decoding complex sentence structure and creatively conveying mood or emotion,” writes Shandilya

"The Art of Literary Translation Exposes the Limits of AI, Says Professor Krupa Shandilya
The Conversation – “AI seems to struggle in three main areas: rendering metaphor, decoding complex sentence structure and creatively conveying mood or emotion,” writes Shandilya, a professor of sexuality, women’s and gender studies at Amherst. She uses a work by 20th-century Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz as an illustrative example.

“I worked closely with Adeeba Shahid Talukder, an award-winning poet and translator, to write this piece and to translate the 1953 poem ‘Mulāqāt,’ or ‘Meeting,’” Shandilya continues. She contrasts their translation against one generated by ChatGPT, pointing out where the chatbot fails to capture nuances, to parse intricate grammatical constructions, and to take into account relevant information about Faiz’s life and Urdu poetic traditions.

“A machine with no bodily experience of being human cannot meaningfully perceive a poem so enmeshed in human experience,” the professor writes. “Chatbots, in other words, are a poor substitute for the literary translator, and they bolster the assertion of the late Indian poet, scholar and translator A.K. Ramanujan that ‘only poems can translate poems.’”

Amherst College
Amherst, MA 01002

Contact Info
(413) 542-2000
Contact Info
Map & Directions"
https://www.amherst.edu/news/amherstinthenews/node/945118
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

On Preserving and Protecting the Original Translation of the Novel

"Why Soledad Acosta de Samper’s Dolores is a Unicorn in the Practice of Translation
Soledad Acosta de Samper spoke English, traveled the world, wrote every day, and saved the newspaper clippings in which her novels appeared to turn them into albums. She married for love, had four daughters—one of them, a nun and a poet, published the version of the Novena de Aguinaldos that is sung during the nine days leading up to Christmas in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador—founded five magazines, established herself as a journalist and historian, fought for women’s place in society, and resisted the censorship imposed on her most renowned female protagonist today in Latin America: Dolores.

Acosta was one of the most prolific writers of her time among both male and female writers. She wrote “twenty-one novels, forty-eight short stories, four plays, forty-three social and literary studies, twenty-one historical treatises, and founded and directed five newspapers (in which she herself contributed the majority of the fiction and nonfiction texts); she also produced numerous translations.” Like many women writers of the nineteenth century, she was censored and later forgotten. Her generation was one of thinkers, politically committed to defining how individuals were to be shaped as citizens of a civilized nation. This included, of course, the place of women, who were constantly relegated to silence and submission and assigned responsibility for the home and children. Acosta’s writing was politically engaged and openly opinionated.

Dolores is something of a unicorn in the practice of translation for several reasons.

The 1980s, fortunately, brought with them a feminism committed to revisiting and recovering the literary canon of women writers. Acosta was recovered during that decade by pioneering scholars such as Monserrat Ordóñez and Carolina Alzate, whose teachings paved the way for this translation project, through which I hope to continue filling the gaps in literary production and scholarship surrounding the author. It must have been difficult to situate her within a tradition in her own time, but, like so many others, she was writing—as the reader can now see in this book—for the future. Her portrayal of social customs appears almost fantastical in light of the transformation undergone by her protagonist.

Dolores, titled after its heroine, was written in 1847. It tells the story of a young woman from nineteenth-century Bogotá who discovers a family secret that gradually leads to her decline. Through her letters and diary we enter her inner world, full of reflections on the meaning of death and love, religion and nature, illness and youth. The book was published in the same year as María by Jorge Isaacs, a novel that has since been recognized as Colombia’s foundational novel and has appeared in more than 150 editions (while Dolores has had only four over the past 150 years). Although it was perhaps not recognized for its brilliance at the time of publication, Dolores is today the most studied and critically reviewed of Acosta’s works.

Dolores is something of a unicorn in the practice of translation for several reasons. To start with, there exists an English translation produced in New York in the late nineteenth century. We do not know the translator’s name or the exact date of their work, since neither appears in the printed version. It is rare for a modern translator to have access to a version produced in the same period as the original work, and this access  offers  unique opportunities. On the one hand, the translation serves as a source for the idioms of nineteenth-century English; on the other, as evidence of the ideas that the translator held about a Colombian woman writer.

For instance, there are passages in the English version in which Dolores’s complexion is described as “pure” or “white,” words that do not appear in the Spanish manuscript, although the latter does portray her with rosy cheeks and beautiful skin. In other moments, when Acosta devotes several sentences to describing the customs of Bogotá at the time—many of them employing words now obsolete—the nineteenth-century translator opts for a mixture of approximate equivalents and Spanish words explained (sometimes, though not always) through footnotes.

I decided to preserve the anglicisms and nineteenth-century syntactic structures used by the original translator whenever they did not alter the meaning of the source text.

Yet this is not the most interesting feature. In the original English translation of Dolores, the entire third part of the novel is omitted. The book is a framed narrative: although Dolores is the protagonist, she is not the narrator; her story is told by her cousin Pedro. In the first part, his voice predominates; the second combines his words with the letters Dolores sends him. The third section—the one eliminated in the nineteenth-century translation—consists entirely of the protagonist’s diaries, in which her voice, previously mediated through letters and recounted conversations, comes through directly, with marked intensity. This structure is a way of circumventing the public’s preference for a male narrator and allowing Dolores to have the final word in her own story, without Pedro having to speak for her, as Alzate notes—a reading I share.

Though the absence of the third part of the book is striking, the most fascinating aspect of the manuscript comes from an act of coauthorship that corrects it: Acosta de Samper herself translated, by hand, the omitted third part. Or rather, she revisited it (not to say rewrote it). Every writer knows the temptation to keep revising a text indefinitely, as well as the experience of rereading a book long after it has been published. Time, distance, and experience turn us into editors and expanders. Translation, moreover, offers the possibility of giving a text something like a parallel life, in which it can exist in another register. That is precisely what Acosta de Samper did upon returning to her novel Dolores. In her English version, the final section abounds in paraphrases and in beautiful added passages that do not appear in the original Spanish text.

All of these reasons make Dolores a particularly fascinating challenge for a contemporary translator. This is how I chose to approach the text: I decided to preserve the anglicisms and nineteenth-century syntactic structures used by the original translator whenever they did not alter the meaning of the source text. Naturally, I did not include explanations unnecessary for a modern reader, nor did I add comments regarding race or femininity that are absent from the original.

Whenever possible, I kept Spanish words that have no direct translation and included their meanings in the glossary, following Alzate’s definitions in the 2021 edition published by the Universidad de los Andes, which presents the authorized text. As for the stimulating—yet challenging—third part, in which Acosta de Samper restores what is missing, but also resorts to paraphrasing in order to adapt the long sentences of Spanish syntax to the English version, I left them almost intact. Where I encountered passages of particular beauty and poetic force, which also add a layer of complexity to the story and to the psychology of the character, I retained them, while carefully marking the beginning and end of these additions in the footnotes for curious readers who may wish to trace the transformations of the text.

Finally, I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Jessi Haley and Juliana Castro Varón  for making Cita Press possible and for giving a home to thousands of women writers who, like Soledad, do not always find a place in truly feminist and democratic publishing circuits. I dare say the author would be delighted to see Dolores reach so many readers around the world. Thank you, thank you.
_________________________________
From Dolores by Soledad Acosta de Samper, published by Cita Press."
Via Cita Press
Sara Abadía Alvarado
July 1, 2026
https://lithub.com/why-soledad-acosta-de-sampers-dolores-is-a-unicorn-in-the-practice-of-translation/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Google Translate is attacking Duolingo. A feature you all know is coming to the app
Applications and games  J. Skálová  30. 6. 2026
Google continues to transform its Translate app from a simple dictionary to a more comprehensive language learning tool. The latest findings from Android Authority suggest that the company is preparing a new minia home screen app that shows users their current series of days during which they are regularly practicing the language.Search Engines

If this sounds familiar, you're right. It's a concept made famous by the app Duolingo . And now it seems that Google translator is betting on the same strategy.

Upcoming widget with name Practice streak should display the number of consecutive days the user completed at least one exercise in the mode PracticeTapping the widget will instantly open the Translator app directly in this mode, so continuing your lessons will be a matter of a single tap.Mobile Apps & Add-Ons

Google can now remind you to exercise via notifications. However, these easily blend in among dozens of other notifications. A widget on the home screen is much more visible and acts as a constant motivation to get back to studying.

According to available information, the widget will also be able to resize. Larger variaHowever, the nta does not offer more information yet, so it seems rather empty. It can be expected that Google will edit its appearance before publication.

The change fits well with Google's long-term strategy. The Practice mode, which the company introduced last year, uses artificial intelligence to practice conversation, listening and pronunciationInstead of simply translating words, it offers interactive lessons that are meant to resemble communication with a real teacher.Foreign Language Study

This gradually makes Google Translate a direct competitor to language learning applications. The main advantage is that the user does not have to install additional software - the translator and language training are combined into a single application.

Duolingo has shown that series work
The so-called series system is nothing new. Duolingo has built a significant part of its popularity on it. Users are watching out for an uninterrupted series of days, which creates a strong motivation to open the app every day, even if just for a few minutes.Web Apps & Online Tools

Google apparently believes that the same principle can increase activity in the Translate app. The widget also brings one practical advantage - the current progress is visible without having to launch the app at all.

When will the new product appear?
Widget discovered in the test version of the Google Translate app for Android, but it is not yet publicly available. This means that it is still in development and it is not certain when it will reach regular users. It is also possible that Google will change its appearance or functions.

It's clear that Google wants to make Translate much more than just a text translation tool. The integration of elements that support daily habits and long-term learning shows that the application is heading into a segment that has been dominated by the aforementioned Duolingo. If development continues in the same direction, the difference between a translator and a language learning platform will continue to blur.
https://samsungmagazine.eu/en/2026/06/30/google-prekladac-utoci-na-duolingo-do-aplikace-miri-funkce-kterou-vsichni-dobre-znate/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"unfoldingWord builds hub for Bible translators working in unreached communities

International (MNN) — Believers around the world are striving to reach the lost for Christ. Sometimes, that means introducing entire people groups to Jesus for the very first time.

However, growth remains limited without God’s Word.

“What happens in some of these disciple-making movements and church-planting movement networks is that the expansion is quite rapid, but where the Scriptures are not available, some of the strength of that development can be compromised,” Mark Flood of unfoldingWord says.

Equipping church planters for Bible translation
People groups often remain unreached because they’re in some of the world’s hardest-to-reach places. When Bible translators are unavailable, church planters take on the task themselves.

“Due to the need, they were endeavoring to do Bible translation with little or no resources,” Flood explains.

unfoldingWord began creating tools for these church planters turned Bible translators in 2018.

“Because we’ve always had a heart to serve and equip the Church wherever it is, we began to look at how we could provide basic-level training to people across the globe who would never have the opportunity to attend a training event,” Flood says.

Now, unfoldingWord is building a central hub to make access easier: FoundationsBT.com, which offers a suite of resources for Bible translators working among unreached people groups.

“We created the video series, then this coaching and equipping framework, and then the third component is the BT Servant, which is an AI-assisted chat that helps individuals to access the higher-level content that we have created,” Flood says.

Early results point to stronger discipleship
The work isn’t finished yet, but Gospel workers are already seeing results. “We’re early in the process, but we’re quite encouraged by some of the early impacts and stories,” Flood says.

“Where these translations can happen, you have this strengthening, equipping, bolstering effect. They’ve seen that fuel the disciple-making process and strengthen those disciples that are being made.”

Pray the unfoldingWord team will have wisdom as it completes work on FoundationsBT.com. Ask the Lord to guide and protect believers as they seek to share the Gospel with unreached people groups.

“This work of advancing the Gospel, strengthening the Church, translating Scripture, it’s a difficult one, fraught with a lot of barriers, and there certainly is spiritual opposition as well,” Flood says."
By Katey HearthJune 30, 2026
https://www.mnnonline.org/news/unfoldingword-builds-hub-for-bible-translators-working-in-unreached-communities/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Anne Millet revient sur le rôle du livre, de la traduction et des échanges artistiques dans la création de nouveaux ponts culturels entre les deux rives

 

De Tanger jusqu’à Beyrouth, en passant par Tunis et Le Caire, les voix de la Méditerranée ont convergé vers Marseille, qui a accueilli du 9 au 14 juin 2026 une nouvelle édition du festival Karkadé. Une rencontre où la région se raconte à travers une multitude de langues, de récits et d’imaginaires. Dans cet espace marqué à la fois par des héritages communs et des fractures contemporaines, la littérature s’impose comme un lieu de dialogue et de circulation. À travers l’Agence Karkadé et son festival, Anne Millet (co-fondatrice)  revient sur le rôle du livre, de la traduction et des échanges artistiques dans la création de nouveaux ponts culturels entre les deux rives...

 

Chez Karkadé, la traduction est au cœur de nos trajectoires professionnelles et de nos convictions. Bien plus qu’un simple exercice de transposition linguistique, elle constitue le vecteur par excellence des idées, des imaginaires et des mémoires entre les deux rives de la Méditerranée. Les traducteurs en sont les premiers passeurs : ce sont eux qui provoquent la rencontre entre des auteurs, des éditeurs et des lecteurs qui, autrement, s'ignoreraient. Face aux fractures géopolitiques contemporaines et aux pesanteurs de l'histoire coloniale, traduire devient un acte de diplomatie culturelle. C’est un levier indispensable pour déconstruire les clichés, faire résonner la pluralité des voix et fonder un dialogue authentique, basé sur la réciprocité.

 

5-À moyen terme, envisagez-vous d’élargir le festival karkadé à d’autres villes ou pays de la Méditerranée ?

 

Lancer un nouvel événement littéraire en 2026, au vu de la conjoncture politique et économique, relève du défi. Si l'ambition à long terme est d'essaimer et de bâtir des ponts avec des capitales culturelles familières comme Beyrouth ou Le Caire, la priorité absolue reste l'ancrage à Marseille. Il s'agit de pérenniser la manifestation au-delà de la Saison Méditerranée de l’Institut français, dont le soutien financier a rendu possible cette première édition. En parallèle, l'association déploie ses ailes à l'échelle continentale grâce au projet TALE (Translating Arabic Literature in Europe). Financé par l’Union européenne, ce programme associe quatre maisons d'édition — Armida Books (Chypre), Mercier Press (Irlande), Tangerine (Italie) et Cambourakis (France) — pour traduire et diffuser les œuvres d'auteurs arabophones résidant dans l'UE lors de prochains rendez-vous littéraires européens.

 

6-Si vous deviez résumer en une idée le message que Karkadé souhaite transmettre à travers cette édition, quelle serait-elle ?

 

À travers cette édition 2026, le festival Karkadé souhaite rappeler que les littératures arabes sont des espaces vivants de création, de dialogue et de circulation des idées..."

 

Youssef BENKIRANE

https://lopinion.ma/fr/

#metaglossia

#metaglossia_mundus

"On Translating Daniel Durand

I am transported to his wry and melancholy Buenos Aires.

 

On Sunday, September 14, 2025, I sent my friend Santiago Sorter a message on WhatsApp asking if he could recommend any humorous Argentine poets. (In another life, I used to write and perform stand up comedy in Buenos Aires, and Santi would help me sharpen my jokes.) Santi, who is himself an artist, writer, and translator, replied with a voice note, which I will translate from the Spanish: “I have several ideas for you, but it’s Sunday, and we Argentines are actually quite fond of our Sundays. So, I really think it’s out of line for you to even ask me such a thing, but it’s fine, it’s not the first or last time you disappoint me. I’ll answer tomorrow, when it’s appropriate. I hope you’re doing well, kisses.” I wrote back saying that in the United States, we never stop working. Santi replied that I was a liar, and that what we never stop doing is exploiting the global south and complaining about how stressed we are. Nevertheless, that same Sunday, Santi recommended I read Daniel Durand.

 

The first poem of Durand’s that I read online, “Luz y oscuridad” (“Light and Darkness”), endeared him to me immediately. In it, he sends a “mental” warning to the ants living in his apartment, reminding them that it is his own poverty that keeps them “delicately united.” (During my stand-up days, I used to do an entirely unprintable routine about the ants with whom I shared a bedroom.)

 

In the prologue to his 2024 collection, Lupa de la inmersión, which includes the poem “January Afternoon” (“Atardecer en enero”), Durand cites Du Fu and William Carlos Williams as his great teachers, and then, with a nod to Borges, insists that readers will easily detect which of his poems are “dufunian,” and which are “williamsian.” Sadly, and perhaps to the detriment of these translations, I must confess that I have not read enough Du Fu or Williams to make the distinction myself. In my ignorance, Durand’s poems remain strikingly “durandian.” Reading (and translating) them, I am transported to his wry and melancholy Buenos Aires, where Durand has lived most of his life since 1983.

 

In addition to being a writer and teacher, Durand has also translated work by Han Dong, Alice Notley, and Valzhyna Mort. When I sent Durand my versions of his poems, he graciously informed me that he did not wish to correct them, and that he subscribed to Dong’s philosophy that “translations are authentic creations in their own right; the original is only the spiritual source and the basis for the translation.” 

 

In translating Durand’s poetry, I have only tried to reproduce the delight I feel in reading it. I am grateful to Santi for introducing me to such a rich “spiritual source,” and to Daniel, for trusting me with his work."

Jordan Landsman

Writer and translator based in the Catskills. He is the translator of The Novices of Lerna (Transit Books, 2024) by Ángel Bonomini

July 1, 2026

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/1803700/on-translating-daniel-durand

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Greeting and closing formulae are interactional routines that play a central role in intercultural communication and raise specific challenges for translation between French and Spanish. Although these units have been widely studied from pragmatic, sociolinguistic and conversational perspectives, their treatment by current AI-based translation systems remains insufficiently explored from a translation-studies approach. Methods: This article analyses a bilingual corpus of 361 occurrences extracted from digitised textual and oral corpora, accessible through databases such as Frantext, CREA, and CORDE. The study first classifies the formulae according to their global position in the interaction, their degree of pragmatic fixation, and their local conversational position. It then compares the translations produced by DeepL Pro, a neural machine translation system, and ChatGPT-4o, a generative artificial intelligence system capable of performing translation tasks. Results: The findings show that both systems encounter difficulties when the pragmatic value of a formula depends on context, register, sociocultural convention, or sequential position. The most recurrent problems include errors of interpretation, such as counter-sense, false sense, and loss, as well as errors of reformulation, including omissions, barbarisms, and improprieties. These errors are particularly visible in polyfunctional formulae, whose translation requires the identification of whether the expression opens, maintains, or closes an interaction. The study demonstrates that translating pragmatic phraseological units requires more than lexical equivalence; it also demands contextual, interactional, and intercultural competence. The proposed error typology contributes to the evaluation of AI-assisted translation and highlights the need to integrate pragmatic and discourse-based data more effectively into neural and generative translation models."
Auteurs : López-simó Mireia .
Résumé
https://asjp.cerist.dz/en/article/298710
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Multilingualism in Belgium: What happens in our brains when we switch languages?

Brussels is full of multilingual residents. Credit: Belga
Ordering your coffee in French, answering an email in English, and speaking another language at home – this is the reality for many people in Brussels.

As one of the world’s most diverse and multilingual cities, the Belgian capital is home to people who often speak two or three, and sometimes even four languages. For many residents, switching between French, Dutch, English, and another language is part of everyday life.

According to data from BRIO Brussel, the Brussels-Capital Region was home to more than 180 nationalities in 2024, with residents speaking 104 different languages. The most widely spoken languages are French (81%), English (46.9%), Dutch (22.3%), Spanish (14.5%), Arabic (11.5%), Italian (6.1%), German (6.1%), Portuguese (2.8%), Turkish (2.8%), and Romanian (2.1%).

Speaking more than one language has obvious advantages, allowing people to communicate across different communities. Multilinguals may make it look easy, but in reality, things are not so simple. Scientists say those benefits also come with hidden cognitive costs.

What happens in the brain?
When multilingual people speak, they often activate words from other languages they know, explained Professor Mathieu Declerck, senior researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB). His research focuses on multilingual language processing.

"Dutch and English are the languages I know best, so whenever I want to say something in English, I'm also activating words in Dutch," he told The Brussels Times. "For example, when I want to say the word 'dog', the Dutch word 'hond' is also activated in my brain and they are both competing to be selected."

According to Declerck, this constant competition has to be resolved in some way, which he says is done through language control. The mechanism allows people to select, switch between, or suppress languages as needed. This process is explained through the concept of inhibition – suppressing the language that isn’t relevant at a given moment.

When switching, “your brain assumes that there’s a higher possibility of making an error because of the competition between languages,” says Declerck. He believes this happens because our brains are more alert to potential mistakes.

Cognitive effort
Language inhibition requires considerable cognitive resources. Suppressing one language leaves fewer mental resources for producing the one that we are trying to speak.

This often happens when people move between conversations with family members, with whom they speak one language, and interactions with people who speak another.

Another theory, according to Declerck, focuses on overcoming the inhibition of a language. “It takes a lot of time, and it causes a lot of errors,” he says.

While these two theories differ, they are not, as the scientist pointed out, “mutually exclusive”. These notions can exist simultaneously but they both support the idea that the language that is no longer needed has to be suppressed to some degree.

Another characteristic of life in Brussels is having to speak a language we are not fully fluent in. If you have to speak French, Dutch or English and you don’t feel 100% comfortable, then your brain will often translate from the language you feel most confident speaking.

“This is a huge mental effort,” says Declerck, and it also one of the reasons why we get so tired after speaking that language. “It’s obviously not the most economical way but that’s how the brain works."

The cost we pay
Shifting between different languages comes at a cost that “appears in many different shapes and forms,” according to Declerck.

One of the most common consequences is making semantic errors. For example, if you want to say “horse,” you accidentally say “cow,” he explains. “The most common error from switching between languages is actually using the wrong language."

Another concept Declerck explains is "language intrusion", which is the involuntary mixing of words and grammar from one language to another. It can be as subtle as accidentally replying in the wrong language or struggling to form a sentence.

Other issues include pauses, stutters or failing to switch languages altogether. “Sometimes people don’t transition to another language, even when you ask them to and they stay in the language they are currently speaking,” he says.

However, Declerck highlighted that when we switch voluntarily, the cognitive costs are much smaller. “If you’re speaking your native language to somebody, you might switch sometimes to English because it feels more appropriate,” he adds, arguing that one of the biggest misconceptions is the belief that language switching happens automatically. “You don’t have to make a huge conscious effort, but people assume this is super easy and requires no cognitive effort at all."

Moreover, it is more common for people to be more emotional in their mother tongue than a language they have learned in a more “clinical environment,” says Declerck. This is because you tend to learn your native language in an emotional environment – at home with your parents – while other languages you learn through TV or school."
Tuesday, 30 June 2026
By  Polya Pencheva
https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/2209026/what-happens-in-our-brains-when-we-switch-languages
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Bilingual brains use a shared neural map to translate meaning across languages

A recent study published in the journal Cell provides evidence that the human brain uses a shared organizational map, or geometry, to represent word meanings across different languages. By recording individual brain cells in bilingual individuals, scientists found that while each language relies on distinct cellular activity patterns, the overall structural relationship between word meanings remains consistent. This suggests that the brain maintains a universal, language-independent internal model for meaning.

Human beings possess the unique ability to comprehend and express identical thoughts in multiple languages without confusing them. Previous brain imaging research indicates that bilingual speakers rely on overlapping brain regions when processing their different languages. Regions traditionally associated with language, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and posterior temporal cortex, show similar activation patterns whether a person is speaking English or Spanish.

However, these broad brain scans do not capture how the brain matches equivalent concepts across languages while keeping the languages functionally separate. A collaborative research team from Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, and Sungkyunkwan University sought to understand this phenomenon at the level of individual brain cells.

The research team proposed that the bilingual brain might organize meaning by using a shared neural geometry. In this context, neural geometry refers to the mathematical distances and relationships between words represented in a high-dimensional space within the brain.

“Our findings suggest that the brain may store meaning in a language-independent format,” said Dr. Sameer Sheth, a professor of neurosurgery, McNair Scholar, and Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-senior author of the study. “Different languages appear to access a shared conceptual map rather than creating entirely separate representations of the world.”

The research team specifically focused on the hippocampus, a brain region known to play a central role in memory and the linking of concepts. Because the hippocampus is buried deep within the brain, it is typically difficult to study during active language processing.

To observe these deep brain structures, the scientists recruited four fully balanced bilingual patients who spoke both English and Spanish. These patients were already undergoing surgical procedures for treatment-resistant epilepsy. This medical situation provided a rare opportunity to implant high-density microelectrodes directly into the hippocampus. Three patients received standard microelectrodes, while one patient received a highly advanced Neuropixels probe, allowing the scientists to record the electrical spikes of individual neurons.

The scientists designed three distinct tasks for the participants to perform. In the first task, all four patients spent about 120 minutes passively listening to matched stories and podcasts in both English and Spanish. The audio content included educational science podcasts from a creator called Kurzgesagt and excerpts from the audiobook “Eat, Pray, Love.” This provided thousands of spoken words for the researchers to analyze across multiple sessions.

In the second task, two of the patients read 99 matched short phrases on a computer screen and spoke them out loud. Finally, these same two patients participated in unstructured, naturalistic conversations. They spoke with native speakers of each language for periods ranging from 32 to 99 minutes. The scientists then aligned the spoken audio with the recorded neural activity to track how the brain responded to specific words.

The scientists closely analyzed the firing rates of the recorded neurons in response to equivalent words across languages. They first looked for cross-language neurons, which are individual brain cells that respond identically to translated pairs like “earth” and “tierra.” They identified a small subset of these neurons, providing evidence that a few isolated cells do handle direct translation.

However, these specific cells were rare, meaning they could not entirely explain how the brain processes two languages seamlessly. The findings suggest that translation is not driven primarily by specialized dictionary neurons, but instead emerges from coordinated activity across large neural populations.

“Our results show that bilingual meaning is an emergent property of neural populations,” said Xinyuan Yan, a postdoctoral scholar at Baylor College of Medicine and lead author of the study. “The brain does not appear to rely on one-to-one translation cells. Instead, it preserves patterns of relationships among concepts across languages.”

To understand the bigger picture, the authors compared the patients’ neural activity to an artificial intelligence tool called multilingual BERT. BERT is a large language model that learns cross-linguistic representations by processing massive amounts of text. The scientists extracted contextual word embeddings from the artificial intelligence model.

Contextual word embeddings are mathematical representations of words that capture their meaning based on surrounding text. The scientists then mapped these artificial representations alongside the actual firing rates of the human hippocampal neurons. They found notable similarities between the geometry of semantic representations in the hippocampus and the internal organization of modern artificial intelligence systems trained on multiple languages.

“Large language models and the human brain may be converging on similar computational solutions for representing meaning,” said Benjamin Hayden, an adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering and linguistics at Rice University, professor of neurosurgery and McNair Scholar at Baylor, and co-senior author of the study. “That does not mean AI works exactly like the brain, but it suggests there may be universal principles for organizing knowledge.”

The findings revealed that the specific semantic tuning curves of most individual neurons differed substantially between English and Spanish. A semantic tuning curve is essentially a profile of how a specific neuron responds to different word meanings across a wide variety of topics. Because these profiles did not match, it indicated that the brain uses language-specific recipes to process words. An individual neuron might fire strongly for the English word “dog” but remain completely quiet for the Spanish word “perro.”

Despite this difference at the cellular level, the overall population of neurons maintained a preserved geometric organization across both languages. The researchers measured the mathematical distances between the neural responses for different words. They found that the overarching map of word meanings in English tends to mirror the map in Spanish perfectly.

The brain achieves this by using the same population of neurons but reading their activity from different angles, or axes, depending on the language being spoken. This phenomenon is similar to looking at a three-dimensional object from two different viewpoints. The object’s shape remains identical, but the visible profile changes based on your perspective.

“This helps explain how bilingual people can switch between languages so fluidly,” Hayden said. “The brain seems to maintain a common internal structure for meaning while simultaneously keeping languages distinct enough to avoid interference.”

The shared semantic structure was so robust that the researchers could use it to predict neural responses. By looking at a cluster of related words in English, the scientists could mathematically rotate the data to accurately predict how the brain would respond to a held-out Spanish word. This form of zero-shot learning demonstrates that the overall geometry provides enough information for translation, even without a direct word-to-word mapping at the individual neuron level.

Beyond the scientific arena, this discovery may be of broader interest in the humanities and social sciences. The concept of a stable, shared geometric neural map provides evidence for a structuralist view of language, an intellectual current often traced back to Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Structuralism holds that meaning transcends individual cultural expressions and instead relies on an underlying universal structure or system.

In addition to advancing basic neuroscience, the authors note that these findings could influence the development of brain-computer interfaces. They may also inform language rehabilitation therapies and future artificial intelligence systems designed to communicate more naturally with humans.

While these findings offer deep insights into bilingualism, readers should be aware of a few limitations. One potential misinterpretation is that these results apply to all language learners. The patients in this study were all highly proficient, early-acquired bilinguals, meaning they learned both languages around age four or five. It remains unknown if individuals who learn a second language later in life share this identical neural geometry.

Additionally, the researchers caution that the study features a very small sample size of only four participants. This is due to the extreme rarity of finding balanced bilingual patients who require deep brain electrode implants for medical reasons. The authors point out that the study only examined English and Spanish. These two languages share many linguistic roots and structural similarities.

Another limitation involves the medical status of the participants. One of the patients was recorded under general anesthesia after a portion of their temporal lobe had been removed. While the data from this patient largely matched the others, the anesthesia and surgery could have altered normal brain activity patterns.

Future research could expand on these findings by testing unrelated language pairs, such as English and Mandarin, and by observing larger populations. Scientists also hope to study participants as they actively learn a new language. Tracking the brain during the learning process could reveal exactly how this shared semantic geometry forms and aligns over time.

The study, “Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons,” was authored by Xinyuan Yan, Ana G. Chavez, Melissa Franch, Kalman A. Katlowitz, Ivy Gautam, Brian Kim, Aaditya Krishna, Aadit Shrivastava, Katie Van Arsdel, James Belanger, Assia Chericoni, Taha Ismail, Elizabeth A. Mickiewicz, Danika Paulo, Hanlin Zhu, Alica M. Goldman, Vaishnav Krishnan, Atul Maheshwari, Eleonora Bartoli, Nicole R. Provenza, Seng Bum Michael Yoo, Benjamin Y. Hayden, and Sameer A. Sheth."
Eric W. Dolan
June 30, 2026
https://www.psypost.org/bilingual-brains-use-a-shared-neural-map-to-translate-meaning-across-languages/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Esperanto was created in 1887, with the intention of being a language that's easy to learn and speak. It's widely spoken, but some say hasn't caught on as much as it could.

"The 'constructed language' Esperanto holds annual conference in Cleveland

 

Esperanto is designed to be a universal language.

"The Big Shrink"

Cleveland's population was 930,000 at its height in 1950. Now, it's a little more than a third of that.

 

With that population loss, comes fewer students enrolled in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. And those dropping enrollment numbers has led to the district needing to closure buildings and lay off hundreds of employees.

 

Cleveland is far from the only district experiencing this issue, which one education researcher has called "the big shrink."

 

Tuesday on the "Sound of Ideas" we'll learn more about what's happening with CMSD, and other districts across the state. You can read Ideastream Education Reporter Conor Morris's reporting on the issue here.

 

Guests:

- Conor Morris, Education Reporter, Ideastream Public Media

- Meryl Johnson, Former Educator and State Board of Education Representative

- Vladimir Kogan, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, The Ohio State University

 

 

U.S. Annual Esperanto Conference

 

Vi aŭskultas la radioprogramon "Sono de Ideoj" de Ideastream Public Media. Mi estas Stephanie Haney, dankon pro via restado kun ni.

 

What you just read translated to English reads, "You're with the 'Sound of Ideas' from Ideastream Public Media. I'm Stephanie Haney, thanks for staying with us."

 

But you may not have understood it, because that first line was written in Esperanto.

 

Esperanto was created in the late 1800s, meant to be a universal secondary language. It's not tied to any particular region in the world so it has no native speakers, and it's not intended to be anyone's first language. It's meant to be easy to learn, no matter what your background, and its goal is to promote international communication and even world peace.

 

The language of Esperanto is encouraged here in the United States by a non-profit organization called Esperanto-USA, which is hosting a weeklong course and its national conference at Cleveland State University, now through July 6th.

 

Tuesday on the "Sound of Ideas," we have leaders of Esperanto-USA and a Cleveland member joining us to teach us about the language and its Northeast Ohio connection dating back to the 1930s, and hopefully help us walk away knowing a few key phrases.

 

Guests:

- Brandon Sowers, President, Esperanto-USA

- Amanda Schmidt, Executive Director, Esperanto-USA

- Jeremy Genovese, Member, Esperanto-USA"

By Stephanie Haney, Drew Maziasz

Published June 30, 2026 at 5:00 AM

https://www.ideastream.org/show/sound-of-ideas/2026-06-30/the-constructed-language-esperanto-holds-annual-conference-in-cleveland

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus