Metaglossia: The Translation World

From Merriam-Webster to Oxford, explore how usage labels and notes help writers navigate language changes and context.

"Dictionary labels: What terms like ‘slang,’ ‘dated,’ and ‘regional’ tell us
By Susan HermanMay 13, 20256 Mins Read
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Dictionaries are one of the most important tools writers have at their fingertips, besides a good style guide. They not only tell us what words mean; they also tell us the history of those words, how to pronounce them, and how they are used in different contexts. Further, each dictionary uses its own set of labels that give specific information on how words are used, such as “informal” and “slang.” As Georgia Southern University professor, writer, and editor Richard Nordquist explained in an article for ThoughtCo, labels and usage notes indicate “… particular limitations on the use of a word, or particular contexts or registers [or how we use language differently in different circumstances, whether in speaking, writing, or even sign language].” Over the years, these labels have expanded in line with our changing language.

First, let’s touch briefly on the history of dictionaries and how labels came to be. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the earliest dictionaries were nothing more than “glossaries that translated Latin words into Old English, the form of English spoken before about 1100 AD.” The first monolingual dictionaries appeared in about 1600 and mostly defined the “hard words” in English. By the 1800s, dictionaries started to expand their entries to include pronunciation, word origin, and parts of speech. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they became more inclusive and began to cover “… types of language that had not previously been considered appropriate, for example slang, regional words, or technical jargon.”

Today, dictionaries focus on how words are used in the real world. Most modern dictionaries have moved away from being prescriptive – stating how words “should” be used – and are descriptive – meaning they simply describe current usage. Most dictionaries are now online, which means they can offer even more, like multimedia and interactive content. But their basic purpose is still the same: to tell us what words mean.

Of course, different dictionaries vary in the number and types of labels used. In his analysis of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 “Dictionary of the English Language” in the “English Diachronic Pragmatics” journal, University of Milan professor Giovanni Iamartino points out that usage labels and notes have been around almost as long as dictionaries have. But labels in Johnson’s and other early dictionaries were more pragmatic, meaning they were more about the word than the speaker and how they were using it. As Iamartino puts it, “… in the earlier phases such labels and notes played a stigmatizing role, or at least were monitors of correct usage, [while] in modern lexicography their function is simply descriptive.”

So now let’s look at some examples of dictionary labels and usage notes. For purposes of this discussion, we’ll focus mainly on two well-known dictionaries – Oxford and Merriam-Webster – but we’ll also touch on some others.

Merriam-Webster uses three types of status labels “… to signal that a word or a sense of a word is not part of the standard vocabulary of English”: temporal, regional, and stylistic. Its temporal labels include “obsolete” and “archaic.”

“Obsolete” means the word hasn’t been used in that sense since 1755, like “perdu,” meaning “a soldier assigned to extremely hazardous duty,” which carries the “obsolete” label in its entry. If the thing being described is obsolete, Merriam-Webster will note that in the definition itself, like one of the definitions of “catapult,” which reads “an ancient military device for hurling missiles.” And the entry for “catapult” also has different, non-obsolete definitions listed too.

“Archaic,” on the other hand, is used for “a word or sense once in common use [but] found today only sporadically or in special contexts,” like “goody,” meaning “a usually married woman of lowly station.”

Regional labels, as the name implies, indicate where a word or term is used. You may also see “chiefly” before some of these labels, to indicate that the word has limited usage outside of that region, And some words have double regional labels, meaning they are used in both areas. For example, “banquette,” when used to mean “sidewalk,” carries the label “Southern U.S.”; and “dinkum,” meaning “authentic” or “genuine,” includes the label “Australia and New Zealand.”

Merriam-Webster uses the stylistic labels “disparaging,” “offensive,” “obscene,” and “vulgar” for “… words or senses that in common use are intended to hurt or shock or that are likely to give offense even when they are used without such an intent.” For example, the entry for “lame,” in the sense of “unable or only partially able to use a body part and especially a limb,” includes the double label “dated, now usually offensive” and a whole usage paragraph to explain why it is problematic. And another stylistic label is “nonstandard” for “…words or senses that are disapproved by many but that have some currency in reputable contexts.” A great example of nonstandard usage is the word “irregardless,” which we discussed in Episode 954.

Besides these three main categories, Merriam-Webster sometimes uses a subject label or guide phrase to explain how and when a word is specifically used. For example, the entry for “antimagnetic,” meaning “having a balance unit composed of alloys that will not remain magnetized” includes the guide phrase “of a watch.” And this dictionary will also sometimes include a usage note for “function” words – like prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections – that are hard to define and carry little meaning in and of themselves. For example, the entry for “wow,” when used as an interjection, includes the note “used to express strong feeling, such as pleasure or surprise,” which is more of a description than a definition.

The other “Big Daddy” of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, sorts its usage labels into three categories: register, region, and subject. Its register labels are extensive and more detailed than in other dictionaries. The temporal labels “archaic” – “used in old-fashioned or historical contexts” – and “dated” – “old-fashioned, but used within the last 100 years” – fall into this category. Like Merriam-Webster, Oxford’s register labels include “derogatory” and “offensive.” But also on the list are several types of slang – “vulgar,” “military,” “nautical,” and even “rhyming” and “theatrical” – and some that are more culturally based, like “dialect,” “euphemistic,” “humorous,” “rare,” and “ironic,” among others.

Oxford uses region labels similarly to Merriam-Webster but does not call out words used in two different regions. Its subject labels – such as “art,” “ecology,” “finance,” “medicine,” are very specific and can help dictionary users figure out jargon and context. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English includes a long list of labels that indicate academic subject areas, including “anatomy,” “biology,” “economics,” “engineering,” “finance,” “mathematics,” and my favorite – “linguistics.”

In contrast to Merriam-Webster and Oxford, the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionaryopens pdf file has a shorter list of labels but does include some interesting ones not found in other dictionaries, like “child’s word/expression,” “female” and “male” (for words like “starlet” and “effeminate”), “polite usage,” and “approving” and “disapproving” (for words like “feisty” and “newfangled”).

So next time you crack open – or more likely, click on – a dictionary, pay attention to any labels and how they can help guide your usage. You might learn something new!

Susan Herman
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Susan Herman is a retired U.S. government analytic editor, language analyst, and language instructor"
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/articles/dictionary-labels/

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Le défi d'une intelligence artificielle pour et par l'Afrique

 

Lors de sa première audience officielle, le 10 mai dernier, Léon XIV a clairement mis en évidence les opportunités et les dangers de l’intelligence artificielle pour l’humanité. En Afrique, le développement de cette nouvelle technologie peut aggraver les inégalités, et il est urgent de penser à une intelligence artificielle «conçue par les Africains et pour les Africains» selon Carmel Bissoué, spécialiste en transformation numérique.

 

Entretien mené par Augustine Asta – Cité du Vatican

 

 

 

 

«L'intelligence artificielle requiert une certaine responsabilité pour qu'elle soit réellement au service de l'humanité tout entière», a souligné le Pape Léon XIV ce lundi 12 mai devant 3000 journalistes et représentants des médias en salle Paul VI. Bien avant, au troisième jour de son pontificat, le 10 mai dernier, le Souverain pontife avait prononcé son tout premier discours devant le collège des cardinaux dans la salle du Synode au Vatican. L’occasion était donnée au Pape américain de rappeler l’héritage de Léon XIII, expliquant qu’avec l'encyclique historique Rerum novarum, Léon XIII le 256e évêque de Rome (1878-1903), avait abordé la question sociale dans le contexte de la première grande révolution industrielle. C’est pourquoi aujourd'hui, a estimé le nouvel évêque de Rome, «l'Église offre à tous son héritage de doctrine sociale, pour répondre à une autre révolution industrielle et aux développements de l'intelligence artificielle, qui posent de nouveaux défis pour la défense de la dignité humaine, de la justice et du travail».

 

 

 

 

Ces nouveaux défis sont palpables sur le continent africain. Au cours d'un récent sommet sur l'intelligence artificielle au Rwanda, les experts ont fait savoir qu'il existe de profondes fractures en Afrique dans le domaine de l'IA, aussi bien entre les générations qu’entre les hommes et les femmes. Avec plus de 2 000 langues parlées sur le continent, l’enjeu de l’intégration culturelle est de taille. Il est nécessaire explique Carmel Bissoué, spécialiste en transformation numérique, de mettre en place «une IA adaptée au continent», mais surtout «conçue par les Africains et pour les Africains». Entretien.

 

 

 

 

Quel peut être le meilleur modèle d’intelligence artificielle pour le continent africain? Comment se positionne en effet le continent face à cette avancée technologique majeure?

 

La première réponse serait de dire qu’on ne pourrait pas avoir un seul modèle pour l'Afrique. Nous parlons près de 2000 langues sur le continent. Donc avoir un seul modèle qui serait propre à l'Afrique serait pour moi, un peu utopique. L'idée serait de partir vraiment sur des intelligences artificielles sous-régionales où les États se mettront ensemble pour mutualiser leurs efforts afin de bâtir une infrastructure IA adapté pour les populations du continent africain. Et il faudra intégrer à cette IA les différentes langues nationales qui sont parlées dans cette aire géographique pour résoudre les problèmes d'inégalités, et l’accès équitable à l'énergie électrique et à Internet par exemple. L'intelligence artificielle doit être construite pour l'Afrique et doit pouvoir répondre à ces problématiques d'énergie, de connectivité et de langue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13/02/2019

 

Le Vatican et Microsoft lancent un prix sur l’éthique dans l’intelligence artificielleLe président de Microsoft, Brad Smith, a été reçu par le Pape François mercredi 13 février en audience privée au Vatican.

 

D'après certaines estimations, l'intelligence artificielle pourrait rapporter 2 900 milliards de dollars à l'économie africaine d'ici 2030…L'Afrique peut-elle tirer son épingle du jeu en matière d'IA et rester souveraine face aux géants mondiaux?

 

Le récent sommet sur l'IA au Rwanda a montré l'effervescence qu'il y a autour de l'intelligence artificielle sur le continent. Une véritable économie pourrait se mettre en place autour de cette intelligence artificielle et plusieurs pays, mais aussi des particuliers sont en train de vouloir saisir cette perche pour pouvoir bâtir cette économie de l'intelligence artificielle en Afrique. Il y a plusieurs acteurs qui proposent déjà des solutions sur la base de l'intelligence artificielle. Il y a par exemple ce projet de traitement automatique qui a déjà entraîné des modèles d'intelligence artificielle sur près de 50 langues africaines, dont le wolof (langue parlée au Sénégal et en Mauritanie) et le yoruba (parlée sur la rive droite du fleuve Niger). L’objectif est d’avoir une intelligence artificielle proche des réalités des populations, et qui pourra résoudre le problème de la fracture numérique et de l'adoption.

 

 

 

 

Il faut aussi dire que l'intelligence artificielle, ce n'est pas que de l’IA générative. Elle englobe plein d'autres aspects, notamment la robotique, l'apprentissage automatique comme le ‘‘deep learning’’, ou encore du traitement de langage naturel. Donc un algorithme qui est développé par un humain, renvoie à la réalité, à la philosophie de la personne qui développe cette intelligence artificielle. Toutes les intelligences artificielles actuelles ne prennent pas en compte les spécificités africaines. L’IA développée par les États-Unis, prend en compte la manière dont les États-Unis voient le monde et les réalités américaines. Il faudrait aujourd'hui que l'Afrique se positionne également sur ces sujets-là pour pouvoir dire également comment elle voit le monde, comment est-ce qu'elle l'appréhende, comment elle le comprend. D'arrêter de subir ce que les autres font et de pouvoir proposer également des solutions d'intelligence artificielle qui viendrait résoudre les problèmes propres des Africains que seuls les Africains maîtrisent et non pas les Européens, les Américains ou les Chinois. 

 

 

 

 

“Aujourd'hui l'Afrique doit pouvoir également raconter à travers ses outils, à travers sa technologie, sa vision des choses. Et cela passe également par une IA qui intègre ses langues nationales”

 

 

 

 

Aussi il faut définir un cadre juridique de l'intelligence artificielle. Voir comment est-ce qu'on encadre ces données, pour permettre à ce que l'intelligence artificielle puisse se développer dans des conditions plutôt sereines, pour attirer des investissements, des talents et aussi développer une intelligence artificielle ou des intelligences artificielles propres au contexte africain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

27/02/2025

 

Saint-Siège: l'IA est une ressource pour la «paix», mais aussi une menace «existentielle»Au Forum de l'OSCE pour la sécurité et la coopération, Mgr Richard Gyhra, représentant permanent auprès de l'Organisation pour la sécurité et la coopération en Europe, met en garde ...

 

Que faire pour que l’IA ne puisse pas creuser les inégalités entre les populations?

 

C'est déjà d'avoir une IA au service des populations qu'elle va servir. Une IA, développée par des Africains pour des Africains. Si la personne qui développe l'intelligence artificielle a en tête le public qu'elle va servir, elle va tenir compte des réalités de sa cible. Ainsi, cette IA pourrait très bien permettre de réduire des inégalités, permettre à des gens qui sont dans des zones reculées d'apprendre, de se former dans leur langue nationale, sans pouvoir apprendre une autre langue. Cela serait un gros apport que l'intelligence artificielle apportera pour le développement de l'Afrique.

 

 

 

 

Il faut donc une IA inclusive, éthique, qui serait multilingue, qui pourrait vraiment permettre à des Africains d'apprendre de nouvelles choses qui sont faites ailleurs. Et il y a de la place pour pouvoir avoir une intelligence artificielle qui n'aggrave pas les inégalités, qui est proche des personnes, des populations, qui comprend les besoins des populations et qui serait adoptée par les populations. Avec le mobile money (ndlr, paiement par mobile), on a vu une solution qui a été pensée pour les Africains, qui a été adopté et qui a permis de réduire, par exemple, l'inclusion financière en Afrique.

 

 

 

 

Quels sont les autres défis de la mise en place de l’IA éthique en Afrique?

 

Le premier défi, c’est qu’il faut que les États africains se saisissent de la question. Il faut fixer un cadre dans lequel les acteurs qui veulent évoluer dans le marché de l'intelligence artificielle puissent savoir exactement ce que l'État prévoit de faire ou prévoit de ne pas faire avec les données collectées. Une intelligence artificielle in fine, ce sont des données qu'elle manipule pour pouvoir apporter des réponses à vos questions. Le premier niveau pour moi de responsabilité se trouve au niveau de nos États. Il faut donner un cadre juridique à l'intelligence artificielle. Il y a déjà plusieurs pays qui sont en train de légiférer sur cette question. La Côte d'Ivoire a légiféré autour d'un document-cadre sur l'adoption et l'utilisation de l'intelligence artificielle dans le pays. Donc lorsque ce cadre est défini, il serait bon de pouvoir attirer des investisseurs qui viendraient investir dans des data centers (ndlr, centres de données). Pour cela, il faut des infrastructures robustes, il faut une connectivité robuste également pour pouvoir avoir déjà l'infrastructure qui nous permet de prétendre avoir cette intelligence artificielle "Made in Africa". Aujourd'hui l'Afrique n'a pas toujours les talents en mesure de développer l'intelligence artificielle de bout en bout. C’est pourquoi il faut attirer des talents, assainir le cadre juridique, assainir le cadre socio-économique autour de cette technologie.  

 

 

 

 

Aujourd'hui, nous utilisons tous à peu près le cloud sur nos téléphones, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc... Et nous produisons énormément de données mais nous ne sommes pas maître de la donnée que nous produisons. L'idée, c'est de reprendre la main sur cette donnée-là, d'avoir des infrastructures locales qui puissent pouvoir garantir la souveraineté de nos données, de pouvoir répondre à cette question de savoir où est-ce que mes données se trouvent? Comment est-ce qu'elles sont traitées? Qui les traitent? Il faut vraiment mettre un visage, un peu d'humanisme dans nos données et faire confiance à des acteurs locaux qui proposent déjà des solutions cloud en Afrique qui ne sont pas différentes des solutions qu'on verra ailleurs. Sur le continent, ST Digital propose un cloud souverain, 100% africain. Il y a d’autres acteurs locaux qui proposent ce même niveau de service, ce même niveau de standard que proposerait un géant comme Amazon, Microsoft ou OVH par exemple.

 

https://www.vaticannews.va/fr/vatican/news/2025-05/leon-xiv-defi-intelligence-artificielle-afrique-continent-danger.html

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

The designation of English as an official language by President Donald Trump could infringe on First Amendment speech and press rights, depending on how it's implemented.

Written by 

John R. Vile

, published on May 13, 2025 last updated on May 13, 2025 

 

President Donald Trump captured the sentiment of some Americans with his executive order designating English as the official U.S. language in March 2025, but the presidential order could violate the First Amendment if the government uses it to control how people speak or in what language they publish. In this photo from 2007, Joseph Vento, owner of Geno's Steaks in Philadelphia, displays a sign that was at his restaurant during a recess of a hearing over the sign. Vento had said he posted it because of concerns over immigration reform and the increasing number of people who couldn't order in English. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

Among the many orders President Donald Trump issued during the first 100 days of his second term was an order on March 1, 2025, that designated English as the official language of the United States.

Although many states, especially those in the South and the Great Plains, have already declared English the official language, prior legislative attempts by Congress to do so have failed. So have attempts to adopt a national constitutional amendment on the subject (Vile 2023, I: 192-93).

Opposition to such attempts stems from concerns that English-only laws could violate First Amendment protections for freedoms of speech and press and equal protection and due process provisions in the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

Trump says one language is needed for national unity

In Section 1 of Trump’s Executive Order 14224, he indicated that “From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language.” Noting that both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written in English, Trump’s order said,  “A nationally designated language is the core of a unified and cohesive society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language.”

The order posited that “a policy of encouraging the learning and adoption of our national language will make the United States a shared home and empower new citizens to achieve the American dream.” Trump described the order as recognizing and celebrating “the long tradition of multilingual American citizens who have learned English and passed it to their children for generations to come.”

Citing how one language promotes unity, Trump concluded, “It is in America’s best interest for the Federal Government to designate one – and only one – official language.” He touted this as streamlining communication, reinforcing “shared national values,” and creating “a more cohesive and efficient society.”

One issue is printing government information in other languages

The implications of the order remain to be worked out in practice. Section 3 specifically revokes Executive Order 13166 of August 11, 2000, which President Bill Clinton issued providing for “Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency. Although revoking Clinton’s order, Trump indicated that his order neither “requires or directs any change in the services provided by any agency.”

“Agency heads are not required to amend, remove, or otherwise stop production of documents, products, or other services prepared or offered in languages other than English,” the order says. However, it also provided that “(t)he Attorney General shall rescind any policy guidance documents issued pursuant to Executive Order 13166 and provide updated guidance, consistent with applicable law.”

Taken in conjunction with Trump’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants and his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, his order may well send “an unprecedented official signal” that those who speak other languages, like Spanish, are not welcome (Perlin 2025). One commentator noted that “freedom of speech means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to speak any of the world’s 7,000-plus languages” (Perlin 2015).

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and court decisions continue to require federal funding recipients to have access to services in their own language. Still, Trump’s order will undoubtedly add uncertainty to state and local governments receiving federal support for such services. (Hofstetter 2025).

John R. Vile is a political science professor and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University.

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/executive-order-designating-english-as-official-u-s-language/

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Language barriers in medical education, particularly in countries where foreign languages are used as the medium of instruction, pose significant challenges for domestic medical students. These barriers hinder academic performance, comprehension, and communication with patients, ultimately impacting the quality of healthcare delivery. Despite the prevalence of this issue, a comprehensive understanding of its effects remains underexplored. This systematic review aims to synthesize evidence on language barriers in medical education and propose strategies to address them.

 

Methods

Following PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic review of studies published up to March 21, 2024, using PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. Eligible studies focused on language barriers faced by medical, pharmacy, nursing, dental, or veterinary students in countries relying on foreign-language-based medical education. Data extraction included study characteristics, reported language barriers, and their impact on education and patient communication. Quality assessment was performed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool.

 

Results

From 5,410 citations, 49 studies involving over 14,500 students met the inclusion criteria. Most studies (n = 32) were conducted in Arab countries, with 15 in Saudi Arabia. Two key themes emerged: (1) Education and Academic Performance: Students frequently reported difficulties comprehending foreign-language textbooks, lectures, and assessments, leading to poor academic outcomes, increased stress, and higher dropout rates. (2) Communication Skills with Patients: Studying and training in a foreign language hindered students’ ability to communicate effectively with patients in their native language, impacting empathy, medical history collection, and overall patient care. Many studies highlighted students felt more confident and effective when using their native language during clinical interactions.

 

Conclusion

Language barriers in foreign-language-based medical education significantly impede students’ academic performance and patient communication skills. Addressing these challenges through reforms, such as integrating native language instruction and supplemental language training, is crucial to enhancing medical education quality and ensuring effective healthcare delivery. Future research should explore innovative solutions, including bilingual education and AI-driven translation tools, to bridge these gaps..."

By Abdullah Ashraf Hamad, Doaa B. Mustaffa, …Ibraheem M. Alkhawaldeh and others 

BMC Medical Education volume 25, Article number: 701 (2025)

https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-025-07251-2

#metaglossia_mundus 

Life change, if it happens, usually occurs when we’re lost or disoriented or sick or somehow dependent on the kindness of people who don’t look or talk like we do.

Between the Lines and Beyond

Doug Brouwer

May 13, 2025

 

 

Since the publication a few weeks ago of my new book, The Traveler’s Path, I have had a few unexpected but revealing conversations with both friends and family. I’ll get to the family member in a minute.

 

One person, someone I’ve known for years, read my chapter on the importance of language learning and learning from the stranger and felt convicted by it. She told me, almost as a confession, that though she had spent most of her childhood with missionary parents in Korea, she had learned only one or two Korean words and had never made any Korean friends. She attended a school, she said, with other missionary kids, and everyone she knew spoke only English. She now feels regret over a lost opportunity.

 

And then, similarly, a career military officer felt compelled to tell me that, though he had been posted abroad several times, he seldom left the bases where he was posted, never learned the local languages, and made no friends within the host cultures. He has strong memories of military life, and is grateful for the opportunities it provided. Still, he has few if any memories of the places where he lived. He seemed to suggest that this was the norm, but that it needed to change.

 

These responses mostly aligned with my own observation of living and working in Zürich, Switzerland. The few American expats I knew tended to keep to themselves. They lived in the same neighborhood with other expats, sent their children to American schools, and seldom learned the local language, preferring to spend their time (and especially their weekends) traveling and sightseeing and taking advantage of their unique opportunity. As a result, I seldom saw them at the English-speaking church where I served as pastor. Most of my church members came from countries other than the U.S. and were not native English speakers.

 

I know there are happy exceptions to the rule, but these early conversations confirmed my experience that Americans, generally speaking, do not engage much with other cultures, at least not very often in meaningful ways. And it’s one reason I wrote my book.

 

It’s an exaggeration, I know, and I’ll probably hear about it for saying so, but in my experience Americans seem more interested in taking a selfie in front of a famous landmark than in meeting and getting to know the people who live and work in other parts of the world. That takes time, which there never seems to be enough of when traveling, and beyond that it’s not something you can post to Facebook or Instagram. When I lived in Zürich and walked the streets near my church in the old city, I would see buses filled with American tourists, faces pressed against windows, and I found myself wanting to shout, “Get off the bus! Talk to somebody!”

 

Of course, we all want Mark Twain’s famous words — “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” —to be true. Those words, found toward the end of his book Innocents Abroad, don’t seem to have been true for him. His travel, mainly to Europe and what he called “the holy land,” seems mainly to have confirmed his previous (and cringeworthy) views of the world.

 

The truth is, our behavior seldom matches our rhetoric. Which is a criticism, I suppose, that could be made about many parts of our lives, but in my experience it’s especially true about our travel. We’re proud of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen, but too often we miss the richness of the experience by not engaging other cultures, by not trying to understand them, and by not being all that curious.

 

Life change, if it happens, usually occurs when we’re lost or disoriented or sick or somehow dependent on the kindness of people who don’t look or talk like we do. Life change usually occurs when we meet someone who has a point of view different from the one we’ve always held. Life change, if that’s what we’re looking for, usually occurs when we’re humble and curious enough to wonder how someone else thinks about things, instead of assuming that we’re always right about most things.

 

The other conversation prompted by my new book was with one of my nieces. This particular niece recently put all her belongings in a storage unit and, at the age of 49, moved to Madrid, Spain, in order to accept a teaching job at a university there.

 

It’s not her first time to live abroad. In her 20s she did graduate work at the University of Edinburgh and then stayed in Europe for post-doctoral work and a few other opportunities. She even lived in Baghdad for seven months, helping to develop democratic institutions for Iraq in the post-Saddam years. Since then, she has traveled the world more than most. During the Obama presidency, for example, she worked in the State Department, and during the Biden presidency she worked in the White House as Senior Director for Europe in the National Security Council. There was always lots of foreign travel.

 

When we talked, I asked how she was settling in, and almost immediately she mentioned that she had signed up for Spanish language classes at her university. There are no language requirements for her residency permit (as there were for mine in Switzerland), but she understands the need to engage the people she meets in their own language, not expecting (as Americans and Brits often do) the rest of the world to speak English to us. The classes she teaches at the university will all be taught in English, which is true for most classes at her university (as it is for many universities in Europe.) But learning to speak the language that she hears every day in the grocery store and pharmacy and coffee shop is important to her. It’s one way she plans to get to know and understand and appreciate a brand-new culture.

 

She also acknowledges that travel and living abroad have significant downsides. Americans who move abroad can create housing shortages and contribute to rent inflation. Spanish landlords are happy to receive her money, but locals as a result find it harder (and more expensive) to find places of their own.

 

Even before the pandemic, some countries like Spain (as well as the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and others) adopted “digital nomad visas,” designed to encourage workers who could work remotely to relocate to their countries. Even with relatively high income requirements, these countries were able to lure many Americans to move abroad. But now, according to my niece, these same countries are having second thoughts. Not only are rents rising, but the cost of other goods and services are too.

 

Will this experience be life changing for my niece, as my own travels have been for me? I suspect so. But mostly because she’s planning for it and looking for ways to make it happen. I wish more people would get off the bus, learn a language, express curiosity, read widely about the culture they’re visiting, and assume that there is something the culture can teach them.Even with its many downsides, I continue to believe that travel presents us with opportunities to grow, change, and learn.

 

My faith compels me to at least try to understand and connect with those who are different from me. I am thankful for all the strangers in my life who, with some effort, became friends. And I am glad that The Traveler’s Path has already started some important conversations and personal reflections. For an author, that’s about as good as it gets.

 

https://reformedjournal.com/2025/05/13/between-the-lines-and-beyond/

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Addis-Abeba, le 11 mai 2025 (ENA) : - Catherine Muraga, directrice générale du Centre de développement de Microsoft pour l'Afrique, a encouragé les innovateurs africains à créer des solutions d'IA locales plutôt que de dépendre de technologies importées, notamment en développant l'IA dans des langues comme le kiswahili, l'amharique et le luganda.

 

Elle a partagé ces idées lors de son discours d'ouverture au Sommet africain sur l'intelligence artificielle (IA) en Ouganda, selon l'Uganda Times.

 

Muraga a noté que l'IA peut stimuler la croissance de l'Afrique en s'appuyant sur sa population jeune et technophile et sur son écosystème numérique émergent.

 

La directrice générale a expliqué que la jeunesse africaine est bien placée pour tirer parti de la révolution de l'IA. D'ici 2030, le continent accueillera une part importante de la main-d'œuvre mondiale. 

 

Nombre de ces personnes sont des natifs du numérique, des jeunes qui ont grandi avec la technologie. Dotés des compétences adéquates, ils peuvent concevoir et gérer des systèmes d'IA adaptés aux besoins de l'Afrique.

 

Muraga a souligné que les entreprises et les gouvernements du continent utilisent l'IA pour résoudre des problèmes persistants et accroître la productivité. Elle a souligné que cet avantage démographique rend l'Afrique particulièrement apte à un développement axé sur l'IA.

 

Muraga a mis en avant d'autres applications où l'IA peut stimuler la croissance de l'Afrique. Au Ghana, l'IA facilite les diagnostics médicaux à distance. 

 

Les outils de tarification prédictive relient plus efficacement les agriculteurs aux marchés. Ces solutions s'appuient fortement sur des données locales fiables. Elle a souligné l'importance d'inclure les accents régionaux, les images locales et la diversité linguistique pour garantir l'exactitude et l'inclusion.

 

Elle a encouragé les innovateurs locaux à créer des solutions d'IA locales plutôt que de dépendre de technologies importées. Cela inclut le développement de l'IA dans des langues comme le kiswahili, l'amharique et le luganda. La localisation garantit la pertinence et favorise l'adoption au sein des différentes communautés.

 

Muraga a également abordé les craintes de voir l'IA remplacer les emplois. Elle a exhorté les dirigeants à privilégier l'IA comme outil d'augmentation, et non de remplacement. Présentée comme un outil de stimulation de la productivité ou de « copilotage », l'IA est plus susceptible d'être adoptée par les employés. 

 

Elle améliore le travail humain au lieu de le remplacer présentant l'approche de Microsoft en matière d'adoption de l'IA. 

 

Plutôt que de lancer de grands projets d'un coup, l'entreprise commence par la planification, puis mène des projets pilotes à petite échelle. 

 

Les équipes s'inspirent de ce qui fonctionne, s'adaptent si nécessaire et déploient les initiatives réussies à grande échelle. Cette méthode progressive permet une intégration durable."

https://www.ena.et/web/fre/w/fre_6571860

#metaglossia_mundus 

 

L'Université de Namur (UNamur) et le l'association Langue des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB) ont lancé mardi la plateforme MOSI ("Du mot au signe"). Ce nouvel outil permet déjà de relier quelque 7.000 signes à des mots en quelques clics. MOSI s'appuie sur un dictionnaire enrichi depuis 2010 par l'association LSFB et un autre dictionnaire bilingue contextuel accessible en ligne depuis 2022 grâce au Laboratoire de langue des signes francophone de Belgique de l'UNamur (LSFB-Lab). Sur base de ces données, ce sont des milliers de mots qui peuvent être traduits et bientôt davantage encore grâce à la contribution de la communauté des signeurs.

 

"L'UNamur et l'ASBL LSFB mettent en ligne un outil de traduction de la langue des signes

L'Université de Namur (UNamur) et le l'association Langue des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB) ont lancé mardi la plateforme MOSI ("Du mot au signe"). Ce nouvel outil permet déjà de relier quelque 7.000 signes à des mots en quelques clics. MOSI s'appuie sur un dictionnaire enrichi depuis 2010 par l'association LSFB et un autre dictionnaire bilingue contextuel accessible en ligne depuis 2022 grâce au Laboratoire de langue des signes francophone de Belgique de l'UNamur (LSFB-Lab). Sur base de ces données, ce sont des milliers de mots qui peuvent être traduits et bientôt davantage encore grâce à la contribution de la communauté des signeurs.

 

Publié le 13-05-2025 à 15h24

à Namur, Belgique

 

Concrètement, la première étape consiste à télécharger l'extension liée à son navigateur web sur le site www.mot-signe.be. Ensuite, lorsqu'on consulte une page web, il suffit de mettre un mot en surbrillance, puis de faire un clic droit pour le traduire. On voit alors apparaitre une vidéo avec le signe correspondant. Si un mot n'est pas encore traduit, l'utilisateur peut également enregistrer une vidéo et la publier pour enrichir la base de données.

 

MOSI a été développé en étroite collaboration avec l'ASBL Ecole&Surdité, fondée par des enseignants des classes bilingues inclusives de l'école Sainte-Marie, située à Namur. L'outil se destine en particulier aux élèves sourds qui apprennent le français, mais il s'adresse aussi à toute personne qui a besoin de traduire le français écrit en LSFB. Sur le plan professionnel, cela concerne notamment les enseignants, les logopèdes, les interprètes et toutes les personnes œuvrant dans le domaine de la surdité."

https://www.lalibre.be/dernieres-depeches/2025/05/13/lunamur-et-lasbl-lsfb-mettent-en-ligne-un-outil-de-traduction-de-la-langue-des-signes-AUSM4P4NE5CLLCNE27LB4674EE/

#metaglossia_mundus

Graduate Teaching Assistant (Translation Studies Glasgow)

Job details

Posted12 May 2025

Job TypeGTA and Demonstrator

Reference173877

Expiry01 June 2025 at 23:45

Job description

Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA)

 

COLLEGE OF ARTS

SCHOOL OF MODERN LANGUAGES & CULTURES

 

GRADE 6

 

Job Purpose

Within a clear and established teaching programme, contribute to the delivery of an excellent student experience by undertaking a range of teaching, assessment and administrative duties, principally at undergraduate level, to further the understanding of key course topics and assist students in drawing out key learning points from course materials.

 

Main Duties and Responsibilities

1.    Contribute to the planning, organisation and delivery of undergraduate teaching.

2.    Deliver a range of teaching and assessment activities directed towards the delivery of subjects at undergraduate level.

3.    Participate in a range of course administration duties, within required timescales, including effective communication of information, marking, assessment and timeous constructive feedback.

4.    Assist with the development of appropriate teaching materials ensuring content and methods of delivery meet determined learning objectives.

5.    Contribute to the effective use of learning technologies to support and enhance course delivery, course organisation, feedback and assessment. This may involve blended and/or online provision including the use of Moodle and other IT materials.

6.    Apply specialist knowledge to teaching that best meet the needs of individuals and groups of learners, ensuring an inclusive and evidence-based approach that promotes student participation and learning outcome attainment.

7.    Participate in the full assessment process using a variety of methods and techniques, including oral assessment, and provide effective, timely and appropriate feedback to students that supports their learning.

8.    Assist with the supervision of student projects, dissertations, and any practical work, advising on skills, methods and techniques to assist the transfer of knowledge, and respond appropriately to the diverse range of learner support/ needs.

9.      Engage in continuing professional development activities as appropriate.

10.   Undertake any other reasonable duties as required by the Head of School.

11.   To contribute to the enhancement of the University’s international profile in line with the University’s Strategic Plan.

 

Qualifications

A1.   Honours degree (SCQF Level 10) relevant to the teaching area or have expertise in a relevant field, together with an understanding of the principles of teaching, learning and assessment.

A2.   Registered for and working towards the achievement of a PhD (MPhil/PhD) or PGT qualification in a relevant subject.

 

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

C1.   Expert knowledge of the subject area.

C2.   Experience of delivering and supporting undergraduate or postgraduate students either in an online, distance learning or face to face environment.

C3.   Experience of supervising, mentoring or teaching students in practical and active learning environments.

C4.   Relevant administrative experience (e.g. student support, course administration etc.)

C5.   Excellent communication and presentation skills.

C6.   Ability to use IT and relevant software packages to support teaching and learning.

C7.   Proven ability to work independently and as part of a team.

C8.   Ability to work to deadlines.

C9.   Commitment to the University’s published values and professional behaviours.

 

Closing Date 1st June 2025 @ 23.45pm

https://www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/graduate-teaching-assistant-translation-studies-glasgow?source=google.com

##metaglossia_mundus 

"We only launch a new language when we are confident that we can offer a better solution than what's already on the market, and that includes Arabic."

Breaking Boundaries: How DeepL's New Arabic Tool Aims to Lead AI Translation for MENA Businesses"We only launch a new language when we are confident that we can offer a better solution than what's already on the market, and that includes Arabic."

BY AALIA MEHREEN AHMEDMAY 12, 2025

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Image courtesy DeepL
David Parry-Jones, Chief Revenue Officer, DeepL

In January 2025, Germany-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI)-powered translation service provider DeepL revealed a study showing that 84% of professionals in the UAE and Saudi Arabia have integrated AI translation tools into their workflows. Now, put this statistic in the context of both nations' global economic milestones -which require efficient cross-border business communications and market access- and it immediately holds added value: in 2024, the UAE's total foreign trade stood at US$1.424 trillion (AED5.23 trillion), up 49% compared to its 2021 performance; while the Kingdom's non-oil exports alone in 2024 reached $137.3 billion (SAR515 billion), marking a 13% increase from 2023. As the Chief Revenue Officer at DeepL, David Parry-Jones has been able to closely observe the growing necessity for accurate translation tools. "In this recent study conducted to understand the increasing integration of AI-driven language technologies within organizations, we also found that 46% of professionals in the UAE and KSA reported that AI translation tools have helped them expand their business into new markets," he shares. "Additionally, our findings revealed that AI-driven tools are mostly applied to developing new language skills (UAE: 52%; KSA: 51%), boosting efficiency and saving time (UAE: 50%; KSA: 51%), and managing supplier relationships (UAE: 45%; KSA: 47%)."

These, of course, are just two nations in a region that comprises over 20 Arabic-speaking countries. "Arabic is the fifth most spoken language globally and has long been one of the most requested by our users," Parry-Jones says. "The language is spoken in over 22 countries and plays an important role in global communication. However, its right-to-left script, unique characters, and structural complexity made integration somewhat more challenging. Despite this, we're now pleased to be unveiling document translation, joining our in-app and desktop translation solutions."

Indeed, DeepL's Arabic Document Translation tool -launched officially on April 30, 2025- has been designed to simplify document translation for businesses and professionals that engage with Arabic-speaking markets across MENA. "Launching Arabic within the DeepL platform was a powerful step towards breaking down language barriers and connecting the world!" Parry-Jones adds. "We believe that Language AI is one of the most strategic investments a business can make. Some of the sectors that benefit the most from Language AI are retail, manufacturing and legal, where high quality and accurate translation is vital. In retail, it increases efficiency by developing multilingual marketing assets and customer service tools, translating internal systems, and enabling seamless international expansion. In the legal sector, AI translation services help international law firms overcome language barriers. Additionally, in manufacturing, AI translation allows global manufacturing facilities to ease their supply chain and distribution with accurate translation of customs documents, product descriptions and local regulations."

 

Image source: DeepL

Now, anyone with the slightest of linguistic interests would know that there are plenty of existing Arabic translation services already available. But the dire inaccuracies provided by these platforms have also been well documented in recent years. When DeepL's Arabic Document Translation Tool was announced in late April, it claimed to outperform GPT-4, Google, and Microsoft in translation quality– something Parry-Jones assures isn't an empty promise. "DeepL outperforms these models because our language model is purpose-built for translation, using proprietary training data collected over seven years," he explains. "Unlike general-purpose models like GPT-4, DeepL is tuned specifically for linguistic accuracy. In blind tests with language experts, DeepL's translations were preferred 1.3x more than Google's, 1.7x more than GPT-4's, and 2.3x more than Microsoft's. The model also requires significantly fewer edits, with Google needing twice as many, and GPT-4 three times more, to reach the same quality. We also rely on the expertise of thousands of hand-picked language specialists who "tutor" the model, resulting in best-in-class translation."

DeepL's decision to integrate the expertise of human translators has been pivotal in ensuring that the AI-powered machine translation platform incorporates the plethora of regional dialects within the Arabic language– a move that has, again, helped in outperforming its competitors. "Our expert team of translators are involved in many stages of our research and development (R&D) process, from building models for a new language to improving existing ones," Parry-Jones continues. "By incorporating a human element in the initial phases of our research, we avoid the risk of our translations sounding robotic and help ensure that our translations pick up cultural nuances. This also applies during the evaluation stage; while synthetic evaluations deliver quick results, the ground truth is to ask those that have invented and mastered the use of language to provide feedback on translations - how accurate they are, how nuanced, how native the language feels. Only we humans can judge on that. To this day, some of our earliest adopters and users are translators. We have recently introduced a new product called Clarify that helps customers clear up ambiguities by suggesting alternatives and asking context-specific questions, ensuring translations capture the right meaning and nuance of what you're trying to say."

But within the scope of business data translation comes the mammoth risk of security lapses or information leaks. "Our Pro customers' data is never stored or accessible to third parties!" Parry-Jones reveals. "In case of data breach, DeepL is legally required to notify users within 72 hours, guaranteeing maximum confidentiality for sensitive content like reports, patents, and customer data. As a company based in Germany, DeepL adheres to the GDPR -one of the strictest data protection and privacy laws worldwide- ensuring data remains protected and compliant. Our advanced encryption and adherences to global regulations, including ISO 27001 and GDPR standards, ensures peace of mind and enables confident multilingual communication across borders."

Image source: DeepL

Offering additional ease to users is the fact that DeepL's Arabic Document Translation Tool prioritizes popular formats such as Microsoft Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint as well as PDFS, while maintaining original layouts and fonts. It also allows users to edit their changes directly before downloading, allowing for increased control across supported file types. "We only launch a new language when we are confident that we can offer a better solution than what's already on the market, and that includes Arabic," Parry-Jones adds.

This faith in the platform's performance has emanated from DeepL's company culture- and if Parry-Jones words are anything to go by, it is all set to carry the platform towards its future goals too. "Since our inception, we have been a research-driven company and will continue to invest heavily in our development as a company within the next few years to create specialized translation and writing solutions to businesses worldwide," he says. "Combining our depth of research with proprietary data accumulated over seven years, we're able to understand unique business needs and address them with our solutions. With the launch of Arabic document translation in April and with any future products we take to market, we look forward to seeing how Middle Eastern businesses are able to use Language AI to expand their business across borders thanks to seamless communication. Working with businesses in the region, we will continue to learn and iterate the offering to make sure it provides them with the tools they need to expand their business across borders."

Related: INSEAD's Associate Professor Vikas Aggarwal on How Ecosystem Partnerships Shape MENA's Future in AI

 

Aalia Mehreen Ahmed

Features Editor, Entrepreneur Middle East

Aalia Mehreen Ahmed is the Features Editor at Entrepreneur Middle East.

She is an MBA (Finance) graduate with past experience in the corporate sector. Ahmed is particularly keen on writing stories about people-centric leadership, female-owned startups, and entrepreneurs who've beaten significant odds to realize their goals.

In her role as Features Editor, she has interviewed the likes of Dr. Jane Goodall, Sania Mirza, KL Rahul, and Najwa Zebian

https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-ae/growth-strategies/breaking-boundaries-how-deepls-new-arabic-document/491444
#metaglossia_mundus

""A new study, published in PNAS, led by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) has found that large language models (LLMs) – the AI systems behind chatbots like ChatGPT – generalise language patterns in a surprisingly human-like way: through analogy, rather than strict grammatical rules.

The research challenges a widespread assumption about LLMs: that these learn how to generate language primarily by inferring rules from their training data. Instead, the models rely heavily on stored examples and draw analogies when dealing with unfamiliar words, much as people do.

To explore how LLMs generate language, the study compared judgments made by humans with those made by GPT-J (an open-source large language model developed by EleutherAI in 2021) on a very common word formation pattern in English, which turns adjectives into nouns by adding the suffix '-ness' or '-ity'. For instance happy becomes happiness, and available becomes availability. The research team generated 200 made-up English adjectives that the LLM had never encountered before – words such as cormasive and friquish. GPT-J was asked to turn each one into a noun by choosing between -ness and -ity (for example, deciding between cormasivity and cormasiveness). The LLM’s responses were compared to the choices made by people, and to predictions made by two well-established cognitive models. One model generalises using rules, and another uses analogical reasoning based on similarity to stored examples.

The results revealed that the LLM’s behaviour resembled human analogical reasoning. Rather than using rules, it based its answers on similarities to real words it had 'seen' during training – much as people do when thinking about new words. For instance, friquish is turned into friquishness on the basis of its similarity to words like selfish, whereas the outcome for cormasive is influenced by word pairs such as sensitive, sensitivity.

The study also found pervasive and subtle influences of how often word forms had appeared in the training data. The LLM’s responses on nearly 50,000 real English adjectives were probed, and its predictions matched the statistical patterns in its training data with striking precision. The LLM behaved as if it had formed a memory trace from every individual example of every word it has encountered during training. Drawing on these stored ‘memories’ to make linguistic decisions, it appeared to handle anything new by asking itself: 'What does this remind me of?'

The study also revealed a key difference between how human beings and LLMs form analogies over examples. Humans acquire a mental dictionary – a mental store of all the word forms that they consider to be meaningful words in their language, regardless of how often they occur. They easily recognize that forms like friquish and cormasive are not words of English at this time. To deal with these potential neologisms, they make analogical generalisations based on the variety of known words in their mental dictionaries.

The LLMs, in contrast, generalise directly over all the specific instances of words in the training set, without unifying instances of the same word into a single dictionary entry.

Senior author Janet Pierrehumbert, Professor of Language Modelling in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, said: 'Although LLMs can generate language in a very impressive manner, it turns out that they do not think as abstractly as humans do. This probably contributes to the fact that their training requires so much more language data than humans need to learn a language.'

Co-lead author Dr Valentin Hofman (Ai2 and University of Washington) said: 'This study is a great example of synergy between Linguistics and AI as research areas. The findings give us a clearer picture of what’s going on inside LLMs when they generate language, and will support future advances in robust, efficient, and explainable AI.'

The study also involved researchers from LMU Munich and Carnegie Mellon University."
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-05-12-humans-chatgpt-favours-examples-and-memories-not-rules-generate-language

#metaglossia_mundus 

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language

"The origins of language
Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language

MAY 09, 2025
Language

Chimpanzees Asanti and Akuna vocalising. A new study shows that wild chimpanzees use a variety of call combinations to expand messaging.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

To the point
Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication: The human capacity for language may not be as unique as previously thought. Chimpanzees have a complex communication system that allows them to combine calls to create new meanings, similar to human language.
Combining calls creatively: Chimpanzees use four ways to change meaning when combining single calls into two-call combinations, including compositional and non-compositional combinations, and they use a large variety of call combinations in a wide range of contexts.
Origins of language: The discovery of a complex communication system in chimpanzees has important implications for understanding the evolution of human language, suggesting that complex combinatorial abilities may have been present in the common ancestor of humans and great apes, and highlighting the need for further research into the complexity of animal communication and its relationship to human language.
Humans are the only species on earth known to use language. They do this by combining sounds into words and words into sentences, creating infinite meanings. This process is based on linguistic rules that define how the meaning of calls is understood in different sentence structures. For example, the word “ape” can be combined with other words to form compositional sentences that add meaning: “the ape eats” or append meaning: “big ape”, and non-compositional idiomatic sentences that create a completely new meaning: “go ape”. A key component of language is syntax, which determines how the order of words affects meaning, for instance how “go ape” and “ape goes” convey different meanings.

One fundamental question in science is to understand where this extraordinary capacity for language originates from. Researchers often use the comparative approach to trace the evolutionary origins of human language by comparing the vocal production of other animals, particularly primates, with that of humans. Unlike humans, other primates typically rely on single calls (referred to as call types), and while some species combine calls, these combinations are only a few per species and mostly serve to alert others to the presence of predators. This suggests that their communication systems may be too restricted to be a precursor to the complex, open-ended combinatorial system that is human language. However, we may not have a full picture of the linguistic capacities of our closest living relatives, particularly how they might use call combinations to significantly expand their meaning.

Studying the meaning of chimpanzee vocalisations
Researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and from the Cognitive Neuroscience Center Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and Neuroscience Research Center (CNRS/Inserm/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) in Lyon, France recorded thousands of vocalisations from three groups of wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast. They examined how the meanings of 12 different chimpanzee calls changed when they were combined into two-call combinations. “Generating new or combined meanings by combining words is a hallmark of human language, and it is crucial to investigate whether a similar capacity exists in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, in order to decipher the origins of human language,” says Catherine Crockford, senior author of the study. “Recording chimpanzee vocalisations over several years in their natural environment is essential in order to document their full communicative capabilities, a task that is becoming increasingly challenging due to growing human threats to wild chimpanzee populations”, says Roman Wittig, co-author of the study and director of the Taï Chimpanzee Project.

Chimpanzees' complex communication system

The researchers recorded thousands of vocalisations from three groups of wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

The study reveals four ways in which chimpanzees alter meanings when combining single calls into 16 different two-call combinations, analogous to the key linguistic principles in human language. Chimpanzees used compositional combinations that added meaning (e.g., A = feeding, B = resting, AB = feeding + resting) and clarified meaning (e.g., A = feeding or travelling, B = aggression, AB = travelling). They also used non-compositional idiomatic combinations that created entirely new meanings (e.g., A = resting, B = affiliation, AB = nesting). Crucially, unlike previous studies which have mostly reported call combinations in limited situations such as predator encounters, the chimpanzees in this study expanded their meanings through the versatile combination of most of their single calls into a large diversity of call combinations used in a wide range of contexts.

“Our findings suggest a highly generative vocal communication system, unprecedented in the animal kingdom, which echoes recent findings in bonobos suggesting that complex combinatorial capacities were already present in the common ancestor of humans and these two great ape species,” says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, first author on the study. He adds: “This changes the views of the last century which considered communication in the great apes to be fixed and linked to emotional states, and therefore unable to tell us anything about the evolution of language. Instead, we see clear indications here that most call types in the repertoire can shift or combine their meaning when combined with other call types. The complexity of this system suggests either that there is indeed something special about hominid communication – that complex communication was already emerging in our last common ancestor, shared with our closest living relatives – or that we have underestimated the complexity of communication in other animals as well, which requires further study.”"

https://www.mpg.de/24666339/0506-evan-the-origins-of-language-150495-x

"The power of translation services in patient care

When communication barriers impede care, Penn nurses play a role in bridging language and cultural gaps.

 

Aparticular patient in the emergency room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania wasn’t assigned to resource nurse Monica Phann, but colleagues had asked for her help because the man and his wife had limited English proficiency, and they couldn’t immediately locate a translator. Phann grew up speaking Khmer with her parents and grandparents in South Philadelphia.

 

View large image

Image: Doug Chayka

“When I stepped in, they let go of all their formalities and [the patient was] finally able to say, ‘yes, I don’t feel good, and I need to be able to have someone understand the pain that I’m in,’” Phann recalls.

 

With her as a go-between, the hospital team was able to run the appropriate tests and quickly diagnose the patient with lung cancer. He started radiation treatment within a week. Though the diagnosis was unsettling, Phann knew she had made a positive impact on his course of care.

 

“When there’s a language barrier, patients aren’t able to fully express what they’ve been feeling. It was really empowering to see how eliminating that barrier allowed this patient to then get further care,” Phann says. “It speaks to how powerful it is to have bilingual or multilingual nurses when other resources aren’t available. We need more of us at the bedside.”

 

Around the country, Penn Nursing alumni are using multilingualism to improve patient outcomes in hospitals, doctor’s offices, and community health settings. They reduce longer lengths of stay and readmissions and increase patient satisfaction. They foster trust with patients and their families, and serve as strong advocates for multilingual patients and those with limited English proficiency.

 

“We live in a multilingual world. I say this to colleagues in the United States and in Latin America. We have to develop those skills,” says School of Nursing professor and Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing Antonia M. Villarruel.

 

Federal law requires free translation services be offered to those who need it—in person or remotely through, for example, a videoconference on a tablet. And even multilingual providers call on certified medical interpreters to navigate complex topics. However, Villarruel says, when a nurse converses and tends to basic needs in the patient’s native language, “there’s a benefit to that one-on-one connection. To be able to say ‘hi, how are you’ humanizes care.”

 

Bilingual nurse scientists also contribute with more inclusive research. For decades, studies left out people who aren’t fluent in English. Penn Nursing faculty and alumni are addressing that gap, designing solutions with everyone in mind.

 

Still, multilingual day-to-day communication is valuable, says Phann. “You’re not always going to be able to predict that you need a translator or an interpreter at the bedside. When I started working in the health care system, I realized that my languages were a huge bonus … and needed in this world.”

 

This story is by Janine White.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-nursing-translation-services-patient-care

#metaglossia_mundus 

NDO - L'auditorium de l'Université de Hanoi était rempli, dans l'après-midi du 10 mai, de générations d'étudiants du département de langue russe de différentes périodes. Ils se sont réunis dans de beaux costumes, arborant les drapeaux vietnamien et russe, pour chanter ensemble lors d'une cérémonie très spéciale : rendre hommage au professeur et traducteur Le Duc Man, ancien professeur du département de langue russe.

"Le professeur et traducteur Le Duc Man est celui qui a traduit avec diligence des dizaines de chansons vietnamiennes célèbres en russe. Non seulement M. Man a traduit les paroles et le sens, mais il a également soigneusement choisi la langue afin que les paroles conservent leur sens et leur mélodie d'origine une fois traduites en russe, de sorte que lorsqu'elles sont chantées, la chanson sonne comme si elle était écrite en russe et non comme une traduction.

Le programme « Chansons vietnamiennes avec paroles russes » présente des chansons vietnamiennes qui existent depuis des années, traduites en russe par M. Le Duc Man, organisé par un groupe d'anciens étudiants du Département de langue russe en collaboration avec des unités de l'Université de Hanoi, à l'occasion du 75e anniversaire de l'établissement des relations diplomatiques entre le Vietnam et la Russie (30 janvier 1950 - 30 janvier 2025), l'anniversaire de la victoire de Dien Bien Phu le 7 mai et la victoire sur le fascisme le 9 mai.

Le traducteur Le Duc Man est né en 1941 à Duy Tien, Ha Nam, c'est un excellent professeur, poète et traducteur célèbre. Il a travaillé à l’Université de Hanoi de 1966 à 2002.

Doté d’un profond amour et d’une profonde compréhension de la musique et de la poésie, le professeur et traducteur Le Duc Man a commencé à traduire des chansons vietnamiennes en russe dans les années 1990. Au départ, ce n'était qu'un passe-temps personnel, mais il a ensuite transformé la traduction de chansons en un travail systématique.

Les chansons qu'il a traduites en russe comprennent des chansons composées par de nombreux musiciens vietnamiens célèbres, avec des mélodies familières au public, des chansons d'avant-guerre, des chansons révolutionnaires, des chansons lyriques, jusqu'aux chansons appréciées des jeunes d'aujourd'hui telles que : la chanson de Ho Chi Minh, la nuit dernière, j'ai rêvé de rencontrer l'oncle Ho, la chanson de l'espoir, la marche vers Hanoi, la chanson d'amour, la chanson d'amour du nord-ouest, le bateau et la mer, te souviens-tu encore ou as-tu oublié, l'automne à Hanoi, la poussière de craie, chaque jour je choisis une joie, le premier printemps, se donner la main dans un grand cercle, cette terre est à nous, bonjour le Vietnam, un tour du Vietnam, renaissance..."

https://www.vietnam.vn/fr/tri-an-nguoi-chuyen-ngu-hon-60-ca-khuc-viet-sang-tieng-nga
#metaglossia_mundus

"Prix Cheikh Hamad pour la traduction – 11e édition : 287 candidatures provenant de 32 pays
Doha, le 10 mai /QNA/ Le Prix Cheikh Hamad pour la traduction et la compréhension internationale a clôturé les candidatures pour sa 11ᵉ édition (2025), avec un total impressionnant de 287 dossiers en compétition pour les différentes catégories du prestigieux prix.

Dans un communiqué rendu public ce samedi, le comité organisateur a révélé que cette édition marque une progression de 5% par rapport à l'exercice précédent, avec 26% de candidatures émanant d'institutions et une représentation féminine notable de 30%. Les propositions reçues, d'une remarquable diversité géographique, proviennent de 32 pays différents et couvrent la totalité des langues éligibles cette année.

Cette édition se singularise par une innovation majeure : l'introduction, pour la première fois dans l'histoire du prix, de trois langues majeures - l'anglais, l'allemand et le turc - accompagnées de deux langues moins représentées : l'albanais et le thaï. Cette évolution stratégique témoigne de l'ambition du prix d'élargir son influence à l'échelle mondiale tout en mettant en valeur la richesse des expressions linguistiques et culturelles."
https://qna.org.qa/fr-FR/news/news-details?id=prix-cheikh-hamad-pour-la-traduction-11e-edition-287-candidatures-provenant-de-32-pays&date=10/05/2025
#metaglossia_mundus

"La Fondation du Roi Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud pour les Études Islamiques et les Sciences Humaines de Casablanca annonce la parution d’un nouveau volume dans sa série "Bibliographies", intitulé "Traducteurs marocains en sciences humaines et sociales", dirigé et présenté par Mohamed El Ferran, directeur général adjoint de la Fondation..."

https://snrtnews.com/fr/article/un-nouvel-ouvrage-bibliographique-met-en-lumiere-les-traductions-marocaines-en-sciences
#metaglossia_mundus

Manifestations, événements et animations : le 26 juin 2025, Médiathèque de la Canopée, à Paris (Paris) - horaires, tarifs, renseignements.

"Table ronde « les enjeux de la traduction littéraire en Langue des Signes Française »
Le 26/06/2025
Médiathèque de la Canopée | Paris
Gratuit

Dans le cadre du Mois Parisien du Handicap, la médiathèque vous propose une table ronde de discussions et débats autour des enjeux de la traduction littéraire en Langue des Signes Française !

Au cours de cette table ronde, et à travers les expériences de nos intervenants, nous aborderons plusieurs aspects de la traduction littéraire, mettant en lumière ses défis et la richesse de cette pratique. Quelles sont notamment les spécificités de la traduction en Langue des Signes Française (LSF) ? Ses particularités linguistiques, syntaxiques et grammaticales propres à la LSF. Quels sont les différents types de traductions : support vidéo ou performance en direct ? Qu'en est-il de la sensibilité artistique pour traduire la poésie ou le romanesque ? Comment transmettre complètement une performance littéraire ?

Les intervenants :

Félix Bianciotto : Il est interprète LSF-Français depuis deux ans. Il a participé à plusieurs projets d’interprétation littéraire, notamment vers la LSF, avec l’association Arts Résonances, lors du festival annuel de poésie contemporaine Voix Vives à Sète, ou vers le français dans le cadre de résidences de traduction collective de poètes sourds, notamment de Levent Beskardes. Il a également interprété des extraits du roman Les méduses n’ont pas d’oreilles d’Adèle Rosenfeld, dans une représentation avec le danseur Jules Turlet.

François Brajou : est un poète et traducteur sourd. Après un mémoire de Master Traduction et Interprétation LISH de Paris 8 intitulé « La traduction poétique de Charles Baudelaire en langue des signes française ». François Brajou s'emploie à promouvoir la Langue des Signes Française à travers des créations de poésignes (poème en LSF) et poèmes en français.

Delphine Leleu : est une artiste française qui s'investit dans la création de spectacles inclusifs depuis de nombreuses années. En 2009, elle a mis en scène la pièce Oscar et la Dame rose d'Eric Emmanuel Schmitt ; en 2018, elle a contribué à l'adaptation du Petit Prince d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, mise en scène par Hrysto.

Christelle Pépin : Son travail de traduction vers la Langue des Signes Française (LSF) prend deux formes : la traduction simultanée, comme pour la pièce Village des sourds, permettant à une comédienne de jouer en LSF ; et la traduction complète, comme lors du festival Sourland 6, où elle a traduit des interviews en les ciblant pour un public sourd. Ces pratiques illustrent une traduction qui dépasse le simple transfert linguistique, en intégrant une dimension culturelle et structurelle en restant fidèle à l’intention et au sens du discours original...

Entrée gratuite, réservation conseillée...👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿
https://www.jds.fr/paris/manifestations/table-ronde-les-enjeux-de-la-traduction-litteraire-en-langue-des-signes-francaise-969537_A
#metaglossia_mundus

"Dictionnaire berbère tachelḥiyt - français" published on 31 Mar 2025 by Brill.

"Dictionnaire berbère tachelḥiyt - français établi sur la base d’ouvrages publiés et non-publiés, d’études et documents divers, de thèses universitaires, d’archives, et de recherches sur le terrain
Author: Harry Stroomer

Tashelhiyt Berber is spoken in Morocco. With approximately eight to ten million speakers it is the world’s largest Berber language. The lexical data for this work were collected, over almost forty years, from a great number of publications and from various archives. These data were studied and checked by the author and enriched by lexical data from the author’s own fieldwork. In this dictionary Tashelhiyt Berber words and phrase are presented in alphabetic order and written in a clear Latin transcription. Meanings of words and phrases are given in French. All lexical data in this work are fully referenced. This book is the first comprehensive dictionary for Tashelhiyt Berber.See Less
ISBN: 9789004716445..."

https://lnkd.in/e45-Xb4t
#metaglossia_mundus

"VANCOUVER, Colombie-Britannique--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LAT Multilingue Traduction et Marketing inc. a le plaisir d’annoncer la nomination de Julie Wong-Gravend au poste de présidente, en vigueur immédiatement. Elle succède à Lise Alain, qui prend sa retraite après une riche carrière en tant que fondatrice et présidente. Lise continuera de soutenir l’entreprise à titre de conseillère.

« Julie est une force motrice chez LAT depuis près de dix ans, indique Lise Alain. Sa connaissance approfondie du secteur, sa vision stratégique et son dévouement à notre mission font d’elle la dirigeante idéale pour guider LAT vers l’avenir. Je lui fais entièrement confiance pour continuer à développer l’entreprise avec détermination et passion. »

Au fil des ans, Julie a noué des relations solides et fondées sur la confiance avec des clients d’un large éventail de domaines, contribuant de manière considérable à la croissance de LAT tout en favorisant une culture d’équipe inclusive et collaborative.

« Je suis honorée et heureuse d’accepter ce rôle, déclare Julie Wong-Gravend. Depuis 26 ans, LAT permet aux entreprises de prospérer dans des marchés multilingues. C’est avec fierté que je continuerai ce travail avec notre incroyable équipe pour aider nos clients à tisser des liens avec des communautés diverses, d’une manière à la fois significative et efficace. »

Dans son rôle précédent de vice-présidente, Julie a supervisé l’équipe de traduction de LAT et a joué un rôle clé dans l’évolution stratégique de l’entreprise. En tant que membre agréée de l’OTTIAQ, l’ordre professionnel des traducteurs du Québec, elle a également dirigé avec succès des projets d’adaptation et de transcréation de marketing de grande portée.

À propos de LAT Multilingue

Fondée en 1999, LAT Multilingue est une entreprise détenue par des femmes, certifiée ISO et B Corp, spécialisée dans la traduction, l’adaptation culturelle et le marketing multiculturel. Grâce à ses bureaux à Vancouver, Montréal et Toronto, LAT aide les organisations de toutes tailles à tisser des liens authentiques avec divers publics en Amérique du Nord. En combinant l’expertise linguistique à des stratégies prenant en compte la diversité culturelle, LAT offre une qualité fiable, des résultats significatifs et un engagement à l’égard de pratiques commerciales éthiques et inclusives."
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250508627786/fr
#metaglossia_mundus

Eina, baas, dwaal, lekker, sommer and wors are only some of the South Africanisms that have managed to toyi-toyi into the 10th edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

"Oxford Dictionary adds lank SA slang
Robert Greig
|
Published 25 years ago

2min
Who said English was a single language? Rather, says Oxford University Press (OUP), in launching its 10th Concise Oxford Dictionary, it is many languages in many places.

About 150 South African words make their first official entry, along with Australianisms, Americanisms and Canadianisms, in the new edition launched in Britain this week. In total, there are 1 486 new words.

Why a new edition?

OUP explains: "During the past 50 years, the dramatic expansion of English worldwide has led to an explosion in the discovery of new words, forms of usage, and meaning.

"English is not a language, it's many languages: English is spoken in different ways around the world."

Many new South African entries have Afrikaans sources. Some are slang, like "I'm going to stay at his house", meaning "I'm going to live there".

Some are ejaculatory, like eina, and some come from tsotsitaal, like stroller, meaning a vagrant. Others reflect political changes, like tricameral.

These are some of the new entrants: baas, bond (league or association), bundu, dingus, dwaal, hamba, lank (excellent or plentiful), lekker, outie, robot (for automatic traffic lights), slim (for crafty or unscrupulous), sommer (for just, simply), toyi-toyi, tsotsi, and wors.

From other countries, these are some of the new words.

bawbee: coin of low value (Scotland)

bazoo: mouth (United States)

bindlestiff: tramp (United States)

brummie: flashy, counterfeit, cheap (Australia/New Zealand)

cereology: the study and investigation of crop circle phenomena

consilience: agreement in approach to a topic across academic subjects, especially between science and the humanities

daggy: scruffy, unfashionable (Australia/New Zealand)

dockominium: an apartment on the waterfront with private mooring (US)

enculturation: acquisition of the norms of a foreign culture

fizgig: police informer (US)

fossick: rummage around (Australia/New Zealand)

glaikit: stupid, foolish, or thoughtless (Scots, North English)

greenwash: disinformation put out by a group or organisation to make it appear as if it's environmentally responsible

howff: a favourite haunt, especially a pub (Scots)

illywhacker: small-time confidence trickster (Australia)

kundalini: yoga term for latent female energy at base of spine

lagniappe: bonus or gratuity (North American)

monopsony: market situation where there is only one buyer

Pentagonese: cryptic language supposedly used by the high-ranking military (US)

phreaking: hacking into telecommunications systems

splatterpunk: literary genre full of explicit violence or pornography

tamburitza: long-necked mandolin (Croatia)

trustafarian: rich young person who adopts ethnic lifestyle in non-affluent urban area

zorbing: sport that involves rolling down hills inside a large transparent ball."

https://iol.co.za/news/south-africa/1999-08-07-oxford-dictionary-adds-lank-sa-slang/
#metaglossia_mundus

Would we get a different view of translation if we turned to translators themselves?

THE TRANSLATOR’S DILEMMA: THINKING VERSUS DOING?
5.7.2025
LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
BY LAWRENCE VENUTI
"What passes for translation commentary today can be pretty dismal—i.e., of questionable value as well as depressing, particularly if translation is your métier. Reviews, perhaps the most egregious example, make minimal acknowledgment of a translator’s intervention, even of their existence. Worse, when reviewers do comment on a translator’s work, their notion of translation is so simplistic as to be demoralizing.

Take the New Yorker’s 2020 review of Guido Morselli’s novel Dissipatio H.G., translated from Italian by Frederika Randall. The reviewer understands translation as seamless reproduction: “Randall … manages to get across, in English, the bleakness of Morselli’s restraint.” The translator is praised, clearly, but “the bleakness of Morselli’s restraint” isn’t exactly the Italian novel. The phrase evidently describes a meaning contained in the Italian, possibly linked to the author’s style, yet it is so abstract, not grounded on any linguistic or textual features, that it is obviously the reviewer’s interpretation. Hence the praise is self-congratulatory: the translator’s work is esteemed, but only insofar as it agrees with the reviewer’s reading (whether of the Italian text or the English version isn’t indicated). Translation is imagined as mechanical transfer, so transparent as to be invisible, not particularly resourceful or creative, certainly not an interpretive act in its own right.

Would we get a different view of translation, one that is both more illuminating and more appreciative, if we turned to translators themselves? Since the start of the new millennium, we’ve been given plenty of opportunities for an inside look, a veritable spate of books about translation written by professional translators, where “professional” means “with substantial lists of translated books to their credit,” some working at it full-time, others working in various other capacities as well—academics, poets, fiction writers, editors.

These translators are also pros, lest we forget, because they get paid for their translations. Some list translation among various sources of income; others translate as their livelihood, a situation that coincides with a certain precarity because English remains a language that translates relatively little, especially in the United States. Here translations make up a tiny fraction—far less than one percent—of total annual book output, which currently tops three million titles with self-published books far exceeding those published by trade and university presses.

Nevertheless, to be considered a pro, you must translate large quantities. Anthea Bell (1936–2018), the British translator of Asterix and W. G. Sebald, published approximately 250 book-length translations; the American poet Richard Howard (1929–2022), who translated Baudelaire and Proust, Camus and Sartre, Abdelkebir Khatibi and Gilles Deleuze, published over 200. Bell and Howard left little commentary about their voluminous work as translators, the odd essay or preface, some interviews, nothing compared to the sustained attention given to translation in Lydia Davis’s Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (2021) or Daniel Hahn’s Catching Fire: A Translation Diary (2022) or Damion Searls’s The Philosophy of Translation (2024).

All three translators qualify as professionals just in terms of productivity. Davis has written an acclaimed body of experimental short fiction over several decades, but she has also translated some 20 literary works from French and Dutch. Hahn and Searls have each Englished over 60 books from multiple languages—Spanish, Portuguese, and French in Hahn’s case, German, Norwegian, Dutch, and French in Searls’s. Despite how busy translating they are, they still managed to squeeze out an entire book-length account of it: they must feel driven to tell us about what they do. Can their ruminations have any impact on, say, the low level to which reviewing translations has sunk? Can knowing how they translate enhance our appreciation of their translation projects, maybe in an upbeat way that boosts the status of their profession (and their own)? Or will their revelations make us suspicious, if not paranoid, readers of their work, raising doubts about the interpretations they might be inscribing in their source texts sub rosa?

Lydia Davis’s Essays Two collects fascinating discussions of her translations of French fiction writers like Flaubert and Proust. She attends to specific verbal choices, although she is likely to pull up short when the analysis really starts to get interesting. In the first volume of Proust’s magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu, as the narrator elaborately describes a stained-glass window depicting a mountain of pink snow, he uses the phrase “des flocons éclairés par quelque aurore,” which Davis translates: “snowflakes illuminated by some aurora.” She pronounces the English word “aurora” to be “the perfect equivalent” of the French word “aurore,” which had been translated as either “sunrise” or “dawn” by Proust’s previous English translators: C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1924–30) and his revisers, Terence Kilmartin (1981) and D. J. Enright (1992). Davis points out that their choices, along with “daybreak,” usually translate a different French word, “aube.” She decided to use “aurora” because of definitions she found in a particular dictionary, Le Petit Robert:

the aube is the first light that begins to whiten the horizon; the aurore is the brilliant pink, rosy, or yellow-gold gleam that appears in the sky following the aube; then the sun itself appears.

The English word, Davis writes, “means the same as the French: the redness of the sky just before the sun rises.” I was disappointed that she didn’t cite an English dictionary to show the words are really “the same.” But this omission doesn’t stop her from concluding, confidently, that aurora “does add something else of its own to a text—its surprise, its novelty, and of course its perfect match to the French original.”

Yet if the English translation “adds something else of its own,” can it really be called “the perfect equivalent”? Wouldn’t some addition mean that the words don’t match, there’s some overspill or remainder in the translating language, a ragged edge between the translation and its source text? If “something else” is added, it goes beyond any strict equivalence, and the English is doing something different from the French. Davis doesn’t seem aware that her choice has fixed the meaning of the French word by excluding other semantic possibilities, especially after consulting a dictionary. If she had consulted a variety of dictionaries, she might have interpreted the word differently. French-English dictionaries vary. So do French ones. The Trésor de la langue française informatisé (1971–94) gives virtually the same meaning as Davis for “aurore”: “Moment qui suit l’aube et précède immédiatement le lever du soleil, où l’horizon présente des lueurs brillantes et rosées” (the moment that follows dawn and immediately precedes sunrise, when the horizon shows brilliant pink glimmers). Cambridge’s Global French-English Learner’s Dictionary (2018), however, defines “aurore” simply as “moment òu le soleil se lève” (the moment when the sun rises). Then it translates the word as “dawn.”

BROWSE
ARABIC ≠ LATIN: SACRED LANGUAGE IN A SECULAR...
BY HENRY CLEMENTS
What makes Davis’s choice interesting happens only in English. “Aurora” is a poetical archaism that dates back to the 15th century, whereas the French “aurore” is not archaic but current usage, whether now or in Proust’s period. The English word carries a range of resonances, mythological as well as astronomical, although they include the generic “dawn” as well as Davis’s meaning: “aurora” can signify “the colour of the sky at the point of sun-rise; a rich orange hue,” according to the OED, which cites the Elements of Dyeing (1791): “silks to be dyed of an aurora or orange colour.” This text is itself an English translation from French, William Hamilton’s version of the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet’s dyeing manual, so that Davis has in effect adopted an 18th century translator’s solution for the French word.

The age of “aurora” must surely be part of the surprise and novelty that Davis mentions, a lexical obsolescence that suddenly turns into newness, starting with its deviation from the choices made by the previous Proust translators (“sunrise,” “dawn”). “Aurora,” Davis believes, “will not be very expressive” because “it has not accumulated the same emotional and metaphorical associations for us as dawn.” But “aurora” feels new precisely because it is old and because it circumvents those “associations,” which now seem so banal, drained of feeling or resonance by overuse, reduced to the romantic or the sensational. “Aurora” is just so much more evocative than “dawn” would be, especially in the context: a breathlessly intricate account of a stained-glass church window that depicts a mountain of pink snow, “snowflakes illuminated by some aurora.” The word not only names an atmospheric phenomenon, and a moment in the day, but it’s a color, a particular shade of glass, aestheticized to the point of preciosity in this passage, the church setting giving it an ethereal or spiritual quality. Davis’s poetical translation participates in the image of Proust as the gay aesthete, a fin de siècle sexual stereotype.

She doesn’t talk much about the effects of “aurora,” the way it nuances the narrator’s tone or voice, tracing a personality. She is distracted by the idea of establishing a perfect match. So she can’t explain what is so striking about her choice. A poetical archaism can only seem like a surprising novelty when the cultural norm imposed on translation consists of the current standard dialect of the translating language, the form of the language that is the most commonly used and therefore the most familiar. Davis’s “aurora” breaks that norm of everyday English to stage a reading of Proust that wasn’t new when she did it (2004), but that hadn’t yet been done in English translation.

Daniel Hahn’s “diary” covers roughly three months during which he translated a novel by the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, Never Did the Fire (2022). He describes it as drawing back the curtain on his “process,” mostly his writing decisions and why he made them. He offers a glimpse of what it means to be a professional translator today, moving from one book to the next, revising one translation while proofreading the galleys for another, keeping an eye on the bottom line: cost efficiency. “In practical terms,” he makes clear, “my working process cannot possibly afford my having a diligent little conversation with myself about each individual word, weighing up every pro and con, etc.” His diary resembles what used to be called “think-aloud protocols,” empirical research that had translators verbalize their thoughts about their translation decisions as they were being made. Hahn’s exposition has a blow-by-blow quality, as if we’re getting the straight dope without embroidery, immediately, while it’s happening. The whole thing was posted online, apparently, and Hahn mentions other translators chiming in on the translation problems he was encountering. His book represents the world of professional literary translation, or a sizable segment of it.

The introductory chapter, written after the diary was completed, gathers Hahn’s ideas about translation and writing. It makes conceptual statements, but it isn’t really theoretical speculation and doesn’t cite any theorists, at least not explicitly. Readers familiar with the history of translation theory and commentary might notice covert references to commonplace notions. When Hahn opines, “You might think of translating as writing the book I believe the author would have written if they’d been writing a book in English,” he echoes early modern translators like John Dryden who in his 1697 version of the Aeneid “endeavor’d to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.” Here the translator presides improbably over some sort of weird ventriloquism, or reincarnation, or transmigration of souls (while Hahn channels Dryden?), magically erasing differences of language, identity, culture, history. And when Hahn declares that “If fidelity is a useful notion at all, what I am seeking is fidelity to what I imagine to be the source text’s effect” (his italics), he insinuates Eugene Nida’s “principle of equivalent effect” (circa 1960s), where the goal is to ensure (somehow) that a reader’s response to a translation is the same as a reader’s response to the source text—regardless of when, where, how, and by whom the reading is done.

Hahn seems to know that these theoretical clichés are false: perfect equivalence between two languages doesn’t exist. When he asks, “Is the work’s re-expression really the same thing as its source?” he answers, “No, nor could it ever be,” treating what he does as “sleight of hand,” an illusion of linguistic transparency that enables a translation to pass for the original composition it translates. He insists that “readers should feel they’re getting unmediated access to a work of art, even if they know—once you’ve brought the house lights back up—that they aren’t.”

WOULD WE GET A DIFFERENT VIEW OF TRANSLATION, ONE THAT IS BOTH MORE ILLUMINATING AND MORE APPRECIATIVE, IF WE TURNED TO TRANSLATORS THEMSELVES?
Why, according to Hahn, doesn’t a translation give readers direct access to the source text? “Since every language works differently,” he points out, “every language encodes slightly different information into its words, beyond their simple meaning.” This makes translation “impossible,” in his view. But untranslatability doesn’t repress his blind ambition to translate or, as he puts it, to keep “aspiring to a pre-existing perfection” (pre-Babelian?), writing translations that “aspire to be impossibly the same as another text.” He expresses this frustrated idealism with affable, even teddy-bearish resignation. “I create a new thing,” he writes, “one that’s identical to the original book, except for all the words.”

Hahn considers translators to be “individual interpretative readers and individual creative writers” (his italics). His verbal choices, he asserts, “will be based mostly on the specific context (how the word fits into the narrator’s train of thought, the rhythm of her sentences and things like that).” Yet he describes Eltit’s narrative “voice” as “curiously hard-to-pin-down,” and he confesses that her novel is one “I’m not sure I do understand.” Not surprisingly, then, his diary presents only vague, elliptical interpretations of the Spanish text. Whether they result in a translation that is creatively written would be difficult to assess.

Hahn’s translation process, by his own admission, is not so much intended action as automatic writing, largely unconscious:

I don’t stop to think about it—I go with what feels right, and while I probably could explain the decision if I chose to turn back and look at it, most of the time I don’t allow it any such deliberate intention.

This frank account inevitably makes one wonder what Hahn’s translations have done to their source texts. Whatever transformations he might have wrought would, in any case, be concealed beneath the illusionistic transparency he prizes in a translation, giving the impression of unmediated access to the original. If he ever got called out, he could always say he didn’t “allow it any such deliberate intention.”

In Damion Searls’s The Philosophy of Translation, the professional translator is just the opposite, exceedingly deliberate in both reading and writing. Searls’s own deliberations, however, are filled with peculiar demurrals over what kind of book he is writing and how he defines and practices translation. He claims to be doing “philosophy,” speculation that is more personal than “theory,” which he sees as “academic” and “naturally” in “tension with practice.” He includes himself among the “practitioners” who “don’t want to be told they have an ‘implicit’ theory in their head that some theorist knows more about than they do.” Yet he weaves a discourse about translation that convincingly synthesizes phenomenology and Russian formalism (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Viktor Shklovsky) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. In other words, Searls’s engagement with translation is couched in High Theory, and his exposition sometimes reads like an article in an academic journal, circa 1980s, when an influx of Continental theoretical discourses washed over humanities departments in US colleges and universities. This apparent contradiction makes me curious about why Searls is so prickly about theory. Is his distress over theoretical accounts of translation caused by some that were aimed at his own work? Or is he just in denial about the translator’s unconscious?

Searls locates his thinking about translation in a specific theoretical tradition, “the so-called Western tradition,” or “basically Greek-Latin-French-English-German-Russian.” He feels this entails an acceptance of the “German Romantic understanding” of translation, which he criticizes for viewing language as coterminous with ethnicity, so that it judges translations as either ethnocentric—assimilating the source text to the receiving culture (“domesticating”)—or ethnodeviant—registering linguistic and cultural differences in receptors (“foreignizing”). Deep down, however, Searls is really a foreignizer: he connects Friedrich Schleiermacher’s notion of the translator (“who is well acquainted with the foreign language, yet to whom it remains nonetheless foreign”—in Susan Bernofsky’s version) with Shklovsky’s defamiliarization in art. In the end, Searls confesses to “a wavering adherence to the German Romantic model.”

He divides his book into two halves that turn out to be contradictory in their approach to translation. In the first half he develops a concept of literary language as an innovative deviation or “arc” away from the “baseline” of everyday language use. “Reading like a translator,” Searls’s mantra, is reading for this arc in the source text—and then reproducing it in the translation. Searls illustrates the idea with his own translation of Uwe Johnson’s 1,700-page novel Anniversaries (2021): “the translator has to tease out what’s an aspect of Johnson’s particular writing from what’s merely the default German baseline and then capture what Johnson is doing to and with the German language.” That word “capture” waves a red flag: if the translator must reproduce a specific stylistic “aspect” of the source text, then the translation process can’t avoid the appearance of mechanical substitution, a matter of engineering a perfect fit, a strict equivalence.

The second half of Searls’s book abandons this instrumentalism by opening up everything to variation. “Each translator translates a different thing,” he writes, “in precisely the same way that each reader of a given book reads a different book.” There can be as many translations of a source text as there can be interpretations of it. “No one translates a text,” Searls observes, “they translate their reading of the text, and everyone has different reading experiences.” This view assigns the translator an omnipotence that can seem brutal in its treatment of the source material: “What’s important to preserve,” Searls says flat-out, “depends on what the translator finds in the original.” The translator’s power takes the form of remaining “attentive to how the translating language works, overriding any demand for ‘equivalence’ with how the original language works.” In the long run, the play’s the thing, the impact of the translation, not its relation to the source text.

In emphasizing the translator as reader, Searls seeks to distinguish translation from “’analyzing’ or ‘understanding’ the original,” arguing that “reading” carries less “authority” than “interpretation.” But this view seems like an unwillingness to take responsibility for reading, for its relations to other, competing readings, its place in the world. Searls believes that “a translation is not so much an interpretation of the original text as its own special kind of strangeness-reinforcing writing.” But isn’t it rather the strength of the translator’s interpretation—gauged against other, more familiar readings—that creates a sense of foreignness in a translation, that arc of literary innovation jumping away from the normative baseline, as in Davis’s use of “aurora” instead of “dawn”?

Searls seems to assume a hermeneutic model of translation. He characterizes M. D. Herter Norton’s 1930s versions of Rilke’s poetry as laying down “her vision of who he is. For her, he is the canonical Great Man, one who speaks to us all.” What we want to know, however, is: By what verbal means did she inscribe her interpretation of the “monumental” Rilke in her translation? And why did it get marginalized in the flood of other versions that make him the most frequently (re)translated modern poet in English? Searls mentions different Rilke translations by the likes of the Sackville-Wests, J. B. Leishman, and Stephen Spender, but we never hear about their “vision” of Rilke, only the verse forms they chose. Translation, it would seem, is nothing if not a conflict of interpretations, some stranger than others. But even to make that point, a translator needs not just to enumerate verbal choices but to articulate precisely how a source text is being interpreted.

BROWSE
A TRANSLATION THE SIZE OF THE WORLD
BY RYAN CARROLL
In a conversation about her work posted last year on the Granta website, Julia Sanches, a young translator from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan (with nearly 30 books so far), made a telling remark: “sometimes,” she said, “it’s hard to think about the thing you’re doing when you’re busy doing it.” Don’t be misled: Sanches is not suggesting that her translation process doesn’t involve thinking. She had just said, in fact, that “it depends less on the language than the book, the author and how they use the language in question.” For her, translation is more than a matter of matching words and phrases: the translator constructs contexts in which to interpret the source text, framing verbal choices not with the word, phrase, or sentence but with the entire “book,” placing it in the oeuvre or career of an “author,” and analyzing its “use” of language. What seems to trouble her is not the effort to think while doing, but the difficulty of moving back and forth between different kinds of thinking: practical intuition versus hermeneutic reasoning.

This movement also seems to trouble the professional translators who authored the books under review. They share an emphasis on translation practice that threatens to push issues of interpretation into the background, or merely suppress them. Even translators willing to comment at length, to draw on research and develop theoretical arguments, are reluctant to articulate the interpretive angles they take in their work. This elevates intuition over argument, discussion, debate. Readers, including reviewers, would appreciate translations more deeply if translators talked about what makes their translations different from—not similar to—the source texts they translate. That difference results from the translator’s interpretation, the act that enables a text to be rewritten in a different language for a different culture. This can’t be understood with an instrumental discourse, where the ideal translation is imagined to be the seamless reproduction of a source-text invariant, “preserving the essence of the original,” as it is commonly put, even when the essence is held to be untranslatable. No, to understand translation in a way that matters, we need to think of it as endless interpretation, endlessly variable, endlessly innovative.

This article was commissioned by Bécquer Seguín."

https://www.publicbooks.org/the-translators-dilemma-thinking-versus-doing/

"Political pressures may have driven the federal agency to backtrack on its decision to suspend automated weather translations.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carillo / AFP via Getty Images

 

Ayurella Horn-MullerStaff Writer

PublishedMay 06, 202

 

At the beginning of last month, the National Weather Service, or NWS, discontinued its automated emergency-weather translation services in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Samoan. The agency had decided not to renew its contract with Lilt, an AI-translation platform.

Then, just about three weeks after the contract lapsed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the NWS is a subagency, shared an update: The automated translation services would be back up and running as of Monday, April 28. 

 

The agency’s back-and-forth turned April into a monthlong test case: How would communities around the U.S. fare without adequate information during extreme weather events?

In the span of a single week, belts of Louisiana were battered by flash flooding, while severe storms brought deadly hail and heavy rain to parts of Oklahoma and Texas, and a succession of destructive tornadoes touched down in nine states. Alarms flashed across screens and blared on radios warning people to get to safety. Many of those messages, however, were issued only in English. 

One thing that’s certain is that the increasing frequency and strength, due to climate change, of these events will make life harder for people everywhere. NOAA’s decision sparked an uproar across the country, as advocates and policymakers spoke out against the Trump administration — and the millions of people it put at undue risk.

Monica Bozeman, who leads the National Weather Service’s automated language translations, told Grist that the agency’s contract with Lilt has been renewed for another year. A week after NOAA’s update, however, that restoration is still underway. “We are in the process of standing back up the last few translation sites,” said Bozeman. 

The agency confirmed that Lilt’s software will once again generate translations for 30 of its regional weather forecast offices throughout the nation, in addition to the National Hurricane Center. The Lilt models automatically translate urgent updates and warnings from the NWS, which are then posted on websites like weather.gov and hurricanes.gov, and voiced over NOAA’s weather radio. The agency is still “working to restart AI translations,” said Bozeman, to populate those websites and broadcasts. 

“The NWS is committed to enhancing the accessibility of vital, lifesaving weather information by making urgent weather alerts available to the public in multiple languages,” Bozeman said. “Utilizing artificial intelligence allows us to keep up with this level of demand.” 

When asked about the NWS shuttering radio translations in the southern region, as previously first reported by Grist, Bozeman said the agency is “working to turn on that capability for the NOAA Weather Radio to broadcast the translated information coming from Lilt AI translations at the affected sites.” 

Neither Bozeman nor a national NOAA spokesperson addressed Grist’s requests for further information.

For instance, the agency has remained tight-lipped about why translation services were suspended in the first place and has not clarified why it moved to reinstate the contract. It also did not provide a timeline on when to expect all stalled translations to be restored to their former capacity or address whether the ongoing workforce cuts have impeded progress. Representatives from Lilt did not respond to a request for comment for this article.  

Analysts say the reasons for the initial decision may be linked to what they see as the administration’s “act first, ask questions later” approach to policy. Public response is also likely to have helped propel the weather agency’s sudden backtrack.

“What I’m noticing with this administration is a huge trend where certain pressures really work on them when it comes to walking back the things that they’re doing,” said Priya Pandey, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. Those include economic levers, as seen with tariffs, she noted, as well as the court of public opinion. “Republican Congress members that have some of these weather centers in their districts were putting pressure on the administration to look into this and look into the impacts of the rollbacks on NOAA.”

The New York Times reported that as of May 2, about 10 percent of the weather service’s total staff have been terminated or accepted buyout offers. Now it appears that more turbulence is in store for the agency: President Donald Trump’s budget proposal includes significant cuts to NOAA’s budget and the dismantling of its research arm. Five former NWS leaders wrote in a letter dated Friday that they feared the cuts would lead to understaffing in weather forecast offices and “needless loss of life.”

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With the exceptions of New York and Hawaiʻi, which mandate their own statewide emergency translation services, few other states have adopted similar comprehensive models enforcing multilingual information accessibility in the event of a disaster. 

Pandey thinks that could very well change, as the federal government’s anti-immigrant approach could prompt some states to adopt their own inclusive emergency management policies while also ramping up the need for community-led efforts. 

The executive order that Trump signed in March that designated English as the country’s official language and rescinded a Clinton-era mandate for federally funded agencies and entities to provide language aid to non-English speakers, said Pandey, “doesn’t prohibit people from translating things outright.” 

Still, she noted, the order does make what used to be a prerequisite entirely voluntary and provides government institutions such as the NWS or NOAA, in addition to state and county-level emergency management operations, the ability to “outright ignore providing translations.”

In the days following the initial announcement from the NWS, the Nebraska Commission on Latino-Americans doubled down on its commitment to provide translated extreme weather alerts to residents statewide. Executive Director María Arriaga told Grist the “pivotal” decision exposed how vulnerable non-English-speaking communities become “when translation infrastructure disappears overnight” and pushed the commission into action.

They’ve since accelerated conversations with state agencies to develop the framework for a multilingual emergency information plan, initially serving Spanish speakers, with the goal to also support residents who speak K’iche’, Arabic, and Vietnamese.

“While we are not a weather agency, we step in as a connector, disseminating accurate and timely information where we see that essential communication is missing or inaccessible,” said Arriaga. “Language should never be a barrier when lives are at stake.” 

Kate Yoder contributed reporting to this story."

By Ayurella Horn-MullerStaff Writer

PublishedMay 06, 2025

https://grist.org/extreme-weather/the-national-weather-service-reinstated-translation-alerts-what-happened/
#metaglossia_mundus

"The Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) has decided to use the CEF eDelivery building block to provide a highly secure means of using their machine translation tool.

DGT's machine translation tool - CEF eTranslation - performs state-of-the-art machine translation to and from any official EU language. It is freely available to public administration employees and all European SMEs.

The Commission has been working continuously to improve this service, adding Russian and Mandarin to its available languages, and including domain-specific translation engines that are particularly suited to translating certain styles of text (legal, health-related, etc.).

Now, DGT is looking to improve its service further by adding an optional layer of extra security for those accessing eTranslation.

How does eDelivery help?

The eDelivery building block provides the technical specifications and standards needed to build a secure, interoperable and reliable communication channel or network using AS4 Access Points.

DGT has chosen to use eDelivery in their eTranslation tool through EU Send, its associated Managed Service provided by the Directorate-General for Informatics, DIGIT. This allows for the secure, reliable exchange of data between the machine translation platform and other systems. By using eDelivery for secure data exchange, eTranslation can now enjoy the following benefits:

Additional security and confidentiality for the data translated;
Automatically encrypted messages;
Automatic recovery of information if the transmission is interrupted;
eDelivery AS4 Access Points are fully interoperable, allowing eTranslation to be seamlessly integrated with other systems.
If you need to exchange documents and data reliably, securely and seamlessly, use the eDelivery building block to build your solution.

The building blocks

DGT’s decision to use eDelivery as a Managed Service in its machine translation tool shows how powerful the CEF building blocks can be when used in combination to develop a digital system.

The INEA 2020-2 open call for eArchiving is making €1 million available to projects looking to adopt solutions and standards from the CEF eArchiving building block in their digital archive(s). This call encourages proposals promoting synergy between eArchiving and other building blocks, such as CEF eDelivery.

Visit the INEA website to find out more about funding opportunities. You can find useful tips for writing a strong proposal by looking at the recording and presentations from the 2020-2 CEF Telecom Virtual Info Day.

Building Blocks were developed by the European Commission to support seamless digital interactions across borders, fostering connectivity, security, and efficiency for citizens and businesses across Europe."
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=533365202
#metaglossia_mundus

"How to be more creative — using science
MAY 6, 20253:00 AM ET
13-Minute Listen
TRANSCRIPT
EMILY KWONG: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

BERLY MCCOY: Hi, Short Wavers, Berly McCoy filling the host chair today. And I'd like you to meet psychologist Zorana Ivcevic Pringle. When Zorana was an undergraduate, she was searching for a thesis topic. To spark ideas, she was reading everything she could get her hands on. And she stumbled across work from the 1960s during the Space Age about creativity. She read that creative people often have personality traits that don't seem to go together.

ZORANA IVCEVIC PRINGLE: Creative individuals, at times, can be extroverted, other times, very introverted. They can be playful, but also very serious about their work. Can seem naive and see things with fresh eyes, but also be very focused in their work.

MCCOY: In the two decades Zorana has been studying creativity, she's realized that even though creative people are unique, it's not because they're born with it. But that idea that some people are creative and some people aren't, what scientists call a "fixed mindset," can stop creativity in its tracks.

PRINGLE: Oftentimes, just the fact that we don't think of ourselves as creative is going to prevent us from ever attempting it.

MCCOY: But this idea is pervasive. We can sometimes think it's only the Einsteins or Beyoncés of the world who are creative.

PRINGLE: Scientists call those people Big-C creators, Big-C as big, influential, creativity eminent creators. But they are not the only ones. Creativity exists on a continuum for what we call mini-c creativity and the process of learning--

MCCOY: One example of mini-c might be your unique way of learning times tables.

PRINGLE: --little-c in everyday interactions and activities--

MCCOY: Like gifting your friend a present.

PRINGLE: --and Pro-c that is professional creativity in our work contexts.

MCCOY: Like designing new software, writing a novel, or making a science podcast. So even if you aren't Big-C level like Beyoncé, you and anyone can always start by opting in to being creative, which Zorana learned the hard way after years of limiting herself.

PRINGLE: I concluded that I was not creative. But I also know that somebody else, a best friend of mine, who was creative, and I wanted whatever she had. I wanted to understand how was she able to do things that I did not think that I could do at the time. In retrospect, I think I was able to do it, but that I was not willing to make that choice.

MCCOY: That has changed, and it culminated into a very creative thing-- a book called The Creativity Choice about how creative people can stick with an idea. So today on the show, the science of creativity. We talk about how psychologists study it and the choices people make to grow their creativity. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MCCOY: OK, Zorana, so now let's talk about how you go about studying and measuring something so vague and mysterious as creativity. How do scientists study it?

PRINGLE: Scientists have lots of different tools to study creativity. So if we think of creativity in its most basic form of coming up with original and appropriate or effective ideas, scientists have developed tests, oftentimes called tests of creative thinking or tests of divergent thinking. And an example of this test, probably the most frequently asked question, is, how do we use a simple everyday object in new and different ways? So how can you use a brick? The instruction simply asks for as many answers as you can think of. And then we can look at how many different ideas you can come up with, and then we can look at the originality of those ideas. When we are first asked the question, our mind goes to the most obvious answer. Well, we could build something with it. But then, as you exhaust those more obvious answers, you get into the area of originality. There, you can come up with things that are really interesting. So you can grind a brick and make pigments from it. You can use it for a miniature mural. And you can go on and on with answers that are going to be rare.

MCCOY: So this is the brick test. That's one way scientists can study creativity. What if they want to ask more complicated questions? What are some of those complicated questions? And then how would scientists go about measuring that?

PRINGLE: One method we can use is called experience sampling method. And what that means is that we want to see what people's experience is at different times on working on their creative project. Technically, how we do it these days, we use our smartphones, and there are apps that send notifications at random times during the day to complete a series of questions depending on the research question and what we are interested in studying. And at the end of the process, we have the final product that we can then evaluate for how creative it was. And it's a judgment on a scale of, well, this is not creative at all, to, this is very creative. And there is a continuum there. And when we have a group of people who are experts in some way, so if they are judging pieces of art-- they are artists or art critics or art professors, for example-- we find that people tend to agree. When we see creativity, we recognize it, even independently looking at it. Of course, there are limits to this technique, but it is very, to me, quite surprisingly robust.

MCCOY: Hmm, interesting. And one of the ways you write that people can build their creative skills is by being aware of their emotions and working with them to problem-solve and even regulate those emotions. So how does building your emotional intelligence muscles feed into creativity?

PRINGLE: Different emotions have these different connections between thinking and feeling. And if we know the connections about thinking and feeling, we can use it to our advantage.

MCCOY: OK. Can you give me an example of that, using an emotion to our advantage?

PRINGLE: So imagine you are happy. You are happy, and you can now be playful. You can be silly. And in these emotional states, you are better able to think in ways that are original, that are going beyond what is obvious, that are unconventional. But if you are in a more subdued or even grumpy mood, now, you are better able at critical thinking.

MCCOY: So the flip side of creativity is creative blocks. To illustrate this, can you tell me about the candle test?

PRINGLE: The candle test is very, very hard. So when researchers administer a candle test, they bring a person into a room, and they see a desk. On the desk are several objects-- a candle. There is a book of matches and a box of thumbtacks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PRINGLE: The task that the person has is to affix this candle to the wall so that wax does not drip on the table.

MCCOY: OK, so spoiler alert, if you want to try this, don't keep listening right now.

PRINGLE: But there is a trick, actually, a very simple trick, that completely flips the number of people who are successful at solving this problem. Instead of 20% success rate, a simple change in instructions is resulting in 80% success rate in solving the problem.

MCCOY: What's the change?

PRINGLE: The change is not to present these materials as the box of thumbtacks, but saying "a box and thumbtacks." If you say "box of thumbtacks," people perceive it as a unit. They do not see there is a box and there are thumbtacks.

MCCOY: OK.

PRINGLE: If you say "box and thumbtacks," now you have removed that unit and broken it into two separate pieces.

MCCOY: OK. And so, in your book, you say this is an example of reconstructing the problem. You give the example of your book, of how you got stuck and how you got unstuck. What was that like, one, and what do you think other people could from that example?

PRINGLE: Lots of people get stuck at some point during their creative process. And I actually hit a wall when writing a chapter about creative blocks, which is rather funny. I had a creative block about writing about the creative block.

MCCOY: Fitting.

PRINGLE: So what I did is I printed out my draft chapter that was not working and cut-- physically cut with scissors units of meaning and then started arranging them. And at one point, they fit into place, like a puzzle fitting into place. I think it is important to start with the moment where we give ourselves a break. What happens when we are experiencing a creative block is something very emotional. What would you say in this situation if a friend was experiencing it?

PRINGLE: And another way of broadening our thinking is working on reconstructing the problem, saying, let me examine the problem in a different way. Maybe there is an aspect of it I haven't looked at yet. And then if we have a mindset of we can do something about it, we can grow in our ability, we can develop it, different kind of decisions happen.

MCCOY: Zorana, thank you so much for talking to me today about creativity.

PRINGLE: Thank you.

MCCOY: Zorana's book, The Creativity Choice-- The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas Into Actions, is out now. And Short Wavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss an episode by following us on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps our show. And if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave@npr.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Berly McCoy. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR."

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1266983726
#metaglossia_mundus

Términos en español y latín, que escucharemos y leeremos en toda esta etapa que se abre el 7 de mayor con el cónclave de cardenales.

"Términos en español y latín, que escucharemos y leeremos en toda esta etapa que se abre el 7 de mayor con el cónclave de cardenales.

28/04/2025 | 10:42Redacción Cadena 3

A
Acceptasne electionem

Frase en latín ("¿Aceptas tu elección canónica como Sumo Pontífice?") pronunciada por el cardenal decano al candidato electo tras alcanzar la mayoría de dos tercios. El elegido confirma su aceptación y elige su nombre papal.

C
Camarlengo

Cardenal que administra los bienes y derechos temporales de la Santa Sede durante la Sede Vacante. Verifica la muerte del Papa, sella sus aposentos y organiza el cónclave. Actualmente, es el cardenal Kevin Farrell.

Capilla Sixtina

Lugar en el Vaticano donde se celebra el cónclave. Los cardenales votan aislados, bajo los frescos de Miguel Ángel, tras el cierre con el "Extra omnes".

Cardenal elector

Cardenal menor de 80 años al inicio de la Sede Vacante, con derecho a votar en el cónclave. En 2025, se espera que participen unos 133 cardenales de 73 países, el cónclave más internacional hasta la fecha.

Casa Santa Marta

Residencia vaticana donde se alojan los cardenales durante el cónclave, construida por Juan Pablo II para reemplazar los alojamientos improvisados del Palacio Apostólico.

Cónclave

Del latín cum clave ("con llave"), reunión cerrada de cardenales electores en la Capilla Sixtina para elegir al Papa, entre 15 y 20 días tras la muerte o renuncia del pontífice. Regida por estrictas normas de secreto, fue formalizada en 1274 por Gregorio X.

Colegio Cardenalicio

Cuerpo de todos los cardenales, dividido en obispos, presbíteros y diáconos. Gestiona asuntos limitados de la Santa Sede durante la Sede Vacante. En 2025, tiene 252 cardenales, 135 electores.

Congregaciones generales

Reuniones previas al cónclave donde los cardenales discuten el perfil del futuro Papa y preparativos administrativos. Se realizan en el Palacio Apostólico bajo secreto.

D
Decano del Colegio Cardenalicio

Cardenal de mayor antigüedad que preside el cónclave, convoca a los cardenales y pregunta al electo si acepta. En 2025, es el cardenal Giovanni Battista Re.

E

Escrutinio

Método de votación en el cónclave. Los cardenales escriben el nombre de su candidato en una papeleta con Eligo in Summum Pontificem ("Elijo como Sumo Pontífice"). Se necesitan dos tercios de los votos.

Extra omnes

Frase en latín ("todos fuera") pronunciada por el Maestro de las Celebraciones Litúrgicas Pontificias para ordenar la salida de no electores de la Capilla Sixtina, iniciando la clausura.

F
Fumata

Humo de la chimenea de la Capilla Sixtina tras cada votación. La fumata negra (humo negro, con perclorato de potasio, antraceno y azufre) indica no elección; la fumata blanca (humo blanco, con clorato de potasio, lactosa y colofonia) anuncia al nuevo Papa, con campanas desde 2005..."
Very más👇🏿👇🏿👇🏿
https://www.cadena3.com/noticia/internacionales/diccionario-para-entender-la-eleccion-del-papa_418308
#metaglossia_mundus

"Quatre Belges sur dix n’utilisent jamais l’intelligence artificielle (IA) dans leur travail, ressort-il d’un sondage mené par le Cefora, le fonds sectoriel pour les travailleurs de la commission paritaire 200, cité dans La Libre Belgique mardi.

Quelque 40 % des sondés ont indiqué qu’ils n’utilisaient jamais l’IA dans leur travail et 25 % qu’ils n’avaient même aucune connaissance en la matière. Seuls 8 % l’utilisent quotidiennement. Ils le font essentiellement pour de la traduction, de la recherche et de la synthèse d’information et pour rédiger et corriger des textes.

“Mais de nombreux travailleurs l’utilisent sans en avoir conscience (...) Une traduction sur Google, un correcteur orthographique… tout cela, c’est déjà de l’intelligence artificielle”, mentionne Olivier Lambert.

Selon l’étude de Cefora, qui représente plus de 500.000 employés et 60.000 entreprises en Belgique, 66 % travailleurs recherchent activement des formations en IA. Les sujets qui les intéressent particulièrement: la façon dont elle peut les aider à accroître leur productivité, la rédaction de textes dans une autre langue ou tout simplement comprendre comment elle fonctionne."
E.L 06-05-25, 08:21
Source: BELGA
https://www.7sur7.be/tech/de-nombreux-travailleurs-belges-utilisent-lia-sans-en-avoir-conscience~a57e7639/?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

#metaglossia_mundus