Metaglossia: The Translation World

"Concordia engineering student takes home top prize at Délie ta langue ! French-language public speaking competition

Wendy Mbog’s winning speech encouraged women to tune out the noise and define their own paths

 

Wendy Mbog, a Concordia software engineering student, won first place at the 2026 edition of Délie ta langue!, the annual French-language public speaking competition. The accomplishment earned her a $5,000 prize, awarded by Quebec’s Ministère de la langue française.

 

Mbog’s presentation centered on the French expression, “Les chiens aboient, la caravane passe,” (“the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on”), which she used as a lens to address the pressures placed on women. Her speech explored the contradictory expectations women often face, encouraging them to step away from external judgments and define their own paths.

 

Claiming space through language

For Mbog, French is not just for academics or competitions. As her first language, it is tied to her Cameroonian origins and has shaped her experiences at home, in school and in how she engages with the world. She says she is drawn to the language’s richness and precision, and she admires those who can use it to express complex ideas with clarity and simplicity.

 

For Mbog, participating in Délie ta langue became a way to take ownership of her relationship with the language.

 

“I had been wanting to take part in a public speaking competition for a long time, to step out of my comfort zone and experience the power of spoken words,” she says. 

 

Preparation and support

Mbog’s journey to the stage was supported by a network across Concordia. Espace Franco and Réussir en français coordinated her participation, with support from the Département d’études françaises, which provides mentorship to students from all disciplines.

 

“You could really say the whole university was behind her,” says Sophie Mailloux, Espace Franco manager and Concordia’s representative on this year’s Délie ta langue! organizing committee. “It was a proud moment to see francophone students who chose Concordia finding success and confidence in French.”

 

Pascale Sicotte, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, has attended the competition every year since Concordia began participating in 2022.

 

“It’s inspiring to see our students excel and share their passion for French,” she says. “Year after year, the candidates raise the bar. Standing on that stage takes courage, and their dedication and skill are evident in every moment of their performance.”

 

Mbog was also mentored by Julien Perrier-Chartrand, professor in the Département d’études françaises, and Noah Labranche, BFA 20 (Theatre), an actor and public speaking coach. She says they helped her refine her delivery and stage presence, complementing her own extensive preparation.

 

Where words meet action

Reflecting on her approach, Mbog connects her experience on stage with her engineering studies.

 

“My mother often says that scientists are first and foremost good writers: ‘It is necessary to understand the subtleties of a problem before being able to solve it,’” she says. “I think this also applies to the way I built my speech.”

 

For Mourad Debabbi, dean of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, Mbog’s success reflects a broader form of student development.

 

“It’s remarkable to see our engineering students embrace opportunities that cultivate leadership, communication and critical thinking — skills that are essential to their success as professionals and members of our community,” Debabbi says.

 

“Initiatives like this one allow students to grow in ways the classroom alone cannot.”"

June 8, 2026 | By Meera Nehme

https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2026/06/08/concordia-engineering-student-takes-home-top-prize-at-delie-ta-langue-french-language-public-speaking-competition.html

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"30e congrès annuel de la Fondation pour les langues en danger, FEL XXX (2026)

La Fondation pour les langues en danger (FEL), le CESSMA (Centre d'études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques) et l'Inalco vous invitent au 30e congrès annuel de la FEL à l'Inalco, Paris, France, du 3 au 5 novembre 2026.

 

Du mardi 3 au jeudi 5 novembre 2026

 

Inalco - Maison de la recherche (2, rue de Lille - Paris 7e) - Auditorium Dumézil

 

Type d'appel

 

Appel à communication

 

Équipe de recherche

 

CESSMA

Date limite

 

Vendredi 10 juillet 2026

 

Type d'évènement

 

Colloque

 

Site

 

https://ogmios.org/conferences/2026/

Thème de la conférence 

 

Langues en danger et technologies innovantes : documentation, traitement et revitalisation 

Alors que de plus en plus de langues dans le monde sont menacées d’extinction, en raison de l’accélération du changement linguistique et de la puissance croissante des langues économiquement ou politiquement dominantes et prestigieuses, les communautés linguistiques et les chercheurs s’efforcent de renverser la tendance afin d’empêcher la disparition des langues. Dans le cadre de leurs efforts, ils s’intéressent aux nouvelles technologies et à leurs diverses applications, ainsi qu’à leur potentiel pour améliorer la documentation et soutenir la revitalisation des langues en danger.

 

La documentation n'étant plus la seule option, puisqu'elle vise uniquement à dresser un état des lieux d'une langue à un moment donné, d'autres options et approches potentiellement plus efficaces, telles que la prévention, la préservation et la promotion des langues en danger, gagnent en importance. En fin de compte, la revitalisation, objectif ultime pour les langues en danger, a besoin de technologies et d'outils nouveaux et plus puissants pour réussir. Les technologies numériques peuvent fournir des outils précieux pour l'enseignement, l'enregistrement et le partage des langues, ainsi que pour la création de métadonnées pouvant être utilisées de manière créative dans des contextes de recherche et d'éducation.

 

Aujourd'hui, de nombreuses technologies et systèmes numériques innovants sont en grande partie conçus et fonctionnent à partir de données issues d'un petit nombre de langues dominantes et bien documentées. En conséquence, de nombreuses communautés, en particulier celles dont les langues sont en danger, principalement orales ou sous-documentées, restent exclues de ce qu’on appelle la sphère numérique. Cette exclusion ne constitue pas simplement une privation ou une absence d’accès aux outils, systèmes ou infrastructures technologiques, mais résulte de la domination des langues officielles sur les communautés linguistiques moinsbien dotées . Une telle domination a des conséquences directes sur la transmission linguistique et culturelle, l’accès aux nouvelles technologies, ainsi que sur les droits linguistiques.

 

De nombreuses communautés à travers le monde relèvent le défi et s’emploient activement à récupérer, préserver et revitaliser leurs langues. Dans ce processus, on tente parfois d’utiliser des outils et des technologies numériques, qui ont le potentiel de soutenir la documentation, l’apprentissage et la transmission. Cependant, ces outils ne répondent souvent pas efficacement aux besoins des communautés linguistiques en danger et peuvent au contraire imposer des hypothèses et des modèles dérivés des langues dominantes.

 

Bien que les technologies numériques puissent être des instruments puissants pour lutter contre la mise en danger des langues, elles peuvent être plus efficaces si elles sont développées en collaboration avec les communautés linguistiques, dans le plein respect de leurs connaissances, de leurs priorités et de leur souveraineté en matière de données.

 

Cette conférence, la trentième organisée par la Fondation pour les langues en danger (FEL), en collaboration avec le CESSMA et l’INALCO, place les communautés au centre du débat. Elle explore comment les technologies innovantes peuvent soutenir la documentation linguistique et renforcer la revitalisation, et, inversement, comment les savoirs communautaires et la diversité linguistique peuvent redéfinir la conception, l’évaluation et la finalité des systèmes numériques eux-mêmes, contribuant ainsi à une réponse plus durable et plus efficace à la menace qui pèse sur les langues. 

 

Un défi majeur pour la préservation et la revitalisation reste le goulot d’étranglement persistant en matière de documentation. Il existe de vastes collections d’enregistrements pour de nombreuses langues en danger, mais seule une petite partie a été transcrite, annotée ou mise à la disposition des communautés à des fins de revitalisation. Cela ne reflète pas un manque d’efforts, mais des réalités et des défis structurels : la documentation est chronophage, nécessite une collaboration étroite avec les locuteurs et s’effectue souvent dans des contextes où les pratiques d’alphabétisation diffèrent ou où les connaissances sont sensibles sur le plan culturel.

 

Parallèlement, les approches technologiques et outils actuels s’appuient fortement sur de vastes ensembles de données standardisés, qui sont rarement disponibles pour les langues en danger. Les nouvelles technologies ont le potentiel de résoudre les problèmes de transcription et d’annotation, de collecte et d’analyse des données, ainsi que de promotion et de diffusion des modèles et pratiques culturels et linguistiques, à condition qu’elles soient rendues accessibles aux communautés et aux institutions communautaires, grâce à des formations et partenariats collaboratifs.

 

Dans ce contexte, le défi des langues en danger ne doit pas être simplement considéré comme un problème de « faibles ressources » à résoudre. Elles peuvent devenir des terrains d’innovation qui remettent en question les hypothèses dominantes sous-jacentes au développement technologique et encouragent l’exploration de technologies plus flexibles, plus interprétables et ancrées dans la culture. En mettant de l’avant les perspectives des communautés et les expériences vécues, la conférence vise à explorer comment les technologies innovantes peuvent soutenir et pérenniser la revitalisation linguistique. Elle veutaussi montrer comment les initiatives, les expériences et les réalisations des communautés peuvent offrir de nouvelles perspectives et approches en ce qui a trait aux nouvelles technologies, telles que l’IA, et les transformer en outils plus pertinents pour la promotion et la revitalisation des langues en danger.

 

La conférence vise donc à établir un pont entre trois dimensions interdépendantes : les technologies, la documentation et la revitalisation, tant dans la pratique que dans le développement d’outils et d’approches futurs.

 

Nous invitons les contributions qui abordent, sans s’y limiter, les questions suivantes explorant l’application des technologies innovantes dans les efforts de documentation et les initiatives de revitalisation menées par les communautés :

 

Comment les technologies innovantes peuvent-elles améliorer la transcription, l'annotation et la constitution de corpus dans la documentation des langues en danger (EL) ?

Comment garantir des pratiques éthiques en matière de données et la souveraineté des données lors de l'application de nouveaux outils technologiques aux EL ?

Comment les pratiques d'archivage peuvent-elles être alignées sur les besoins et les valeurs des communautés, et quel rôle les systèmes d'IA peuvent-ils jouer dans ce processus ?

Comment acquérir, s'approprier et utiliser les nouvelles technologies linguistiques pour la transmission des langues en danger ?

Comment planifier et coconcevoir des technologies linguistiques avec les communautés de locuteurs ?

Comment définir et concevoir la formation des communautés, le renforcement des capacités et le transfert de connaissances à l'aide d'outils numériques afin de permettre la mise en œuvre de projets de revitalisation menés par les communautés ?

Quels exemples de réussite et études de cas peut-on identifier dans l'application des nouvelles technologies au processus de revitalisation des langues autochtones ?

Quels sont les risques, les limites et les conséquences imprévues des outils technologiques existants ou émergents dans le domaine de la revitalisation linguistique ?

La conférence vise à créer un espace de dialogue entre chercheurs, technologues et surtout, les communautés linguistiques elles-mêmes, abordant la question des opportunités et des défis présentés par les technologies innovantes dans les efforts visant à prévenir la perte des langues et à promouvoir la préservation et la revitalisation des langues en danger.

 

Nous encourageons vivement les soumissions de la part de membres de communautés, d'éducateurs, de militants et de praticiens, ainsi que les présentations de travaux collaboratifs entre partenaires universitaires et non universitaires.

 

Contact - Voir l'e-mail

 

Dates importantes 

 

10 juillet 2026 : date limite de soumission des résumés

13 juillet 2026 : ouverture des inscriptions

1er août 2026 : notification aux candidats sélectionnés

15 septembre 2026 : date limite de soumission des versions complètes des résumés acceptés

3-5 novembre 2026 : dates du congrès

6 novembre 2026 : excursion (à confirmer)

Soumission et informations pratiques

 

Nous vous invitons à soumettre des résumés de 500 à 700 mots (références non comprises) via EasyChair à l'adresse suivante : 

https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=felxxx2026 avant la date limite du 10 juillet à 23 h59 GMT.

 

Les résumés doivent être rédigés en anglais et soumis au format PDF.

 

Veuillez noter que les résumés sous forme de documents Word ne peuvent pas être acceptés et qu'ils ne peuvent pas être soumis par e-mail.

 

Les résumés doivent décrire des travaux achevés ou en cours. Le volume final des actes contiendra des travaux originaux et inédits. Le résumé doit inclure des mots-clés.

 

Ils doivent mentionner le(s) nom(s) de l'auteur ou des auteurs. Des références doivent être incluses si cela permet de situer le travail par rapport à des travaux réalisés par d'autres.

 

Vous devez signaler toute utilisation d'outils d'IA dans l'élaboration de votre résumé et de votre article. Vous devez indiquer au bas de votre article le logiciel ou l'outil d'IA utilisé, la version de ce logiciel et la nature exacte de son utilisation. Le non-respect de cette consigne peut entraîner la disqualification de votre article.

 

Les auteurs dont les résumés auront été acceptés pour être présentés lors de la conférence seront informés avant le 1er août et devront développer leur résumé en un article de conférence de 2 000 à 3 000 mots (références non comprises) avant le 15 septembre.

 

Les articles de la conférence seront publiés dans le recueil de la conférence, qui sera mis à la disposition des participants à la conférence et des membres de la Fondation pour les langues en danger.

 

Une sélection d'articles issus de la conférence sera publiée après celle-ci dans le cadre de la série « Endangered Languages Yearbook », éditée par De Gruyter Brill.

 

Plus d'informations

 

Site de la conférence : https://ogmios.org/conferences/2026

Contact : Voir l'e-mail

INSTITUTIONS ORGANISATRICES

 

Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL)

Centre d'Études en Sciences Sociales sur les Mondes Africains Américains et Asiatiques (CESSMA)

Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Inalco)

Comité d'organisation de la FEL

 

Hakim Elnazarov (président)

Eda Derhemi

Steven Krauwer

Salem Mezhoud

Christopher Moseley

Mujahid Torwali

Comité d'organisation de l'Inalco

 

Abdul-Hakim HAMIDI (président)

Marie Chosson

Johanna Cordova

Hélène de Penanros

Donabedian Demopoulos

Valentina Fedchenko

Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky

Rima Sleiman

Il-Il Yatziv-Malibert"

https://www.inalco.fr/recherche/appels-communication/30e-congres-annuel-de-la-fondation-pour-les-langues-en-danger-fel

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Toki Pona et Espéranto, deux initiatives linguistiques qui visent à briser les barrières de la communication mondiale. Que valent ces projets ambitieux ?

En prenant en compte les “entrées” du dictionnaire, la langue française compterait environ 100 000 mots, selon l’Académie française. Alors si même pour nous, parfois, certains arrivent à nous manquer, comment communiquer dans une langue qui ne compte que 137 mots ?

Toki Pona, jouet linguistique
Toki Pona n’est pas une langue à proprement parler, mais un projet philosophique ! Développé par Sonja Lang, une linguiste canadienne, le but est de créer une langue simplissime, qui maximise le sens et minimise la complexité. Toki Pona s’inspire de différents dialectes du continent européen comme le finnois, le néerlandais, l’anglais, mais aussi d’Asie comme le mandarin et le cantonnais.

Inventée en 2001, Toki Pona compte aujourd’hui des milliers de locuteurs et 137 mots essentiels. Des chansons en Toki Pona existent. Alors véritable langage, simple système de communication ou jouet linguistique ? Ce dialecte simplissime soulève de nombreuses interrogations.

Espéranto, sérieux projet humaniste
Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’un dialecte “universel”, s'inspirant de différents langages est créé. L’Espéranto, par exemple, est une langue proposée dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle par un médecin polonais, le docteur Ludwik Zamenhof, avec comme objectif principal de simplifier les échanges d’un pays à l’autre, encourager la communication entre les peuples et abolir la barrière de la langue.

Aujourd’hui, on estime que l’espéranto compte 3 à 5 millions de locuteurs provenant de 120 pays différents ! L’espéranto est une langue qui se veut neutre sur le plan culturel, social, politique. Cette langue se veut également facile à apprendre et rapide à assimiler. L’espéranto n’est pas une langue morte car elle continue d’évoluer. Deux organisations veillent à son bon développement :

– l’Académie d’espéranto, qui contrôle l’apparition de nouveaux mots ;

– l’Association mondiale anationale, qui publie le plus grand dictionnaire reconnu en espéranto.

EN BREF
Sonja Lang a créé Toki Pona en 2001, une langue minimaliste avec 137 mots, inspirée de divers dialectes européens et asiatiques.
L'Espéranto, conçu par Ludwik Zamenhof au XIXe siècle, vise à simplifier les échanges internationaux avec 3 à 5 millions de locuteurs.
Découvrez comment ces langues artificielles cherchent à surmonter les barrières linguistiques et à promouvoir une communication universelle."
Publié le 08 Juin 2026 à 15H00
Louise Guyonnet
https://www.science-et-vie.com/cerveau-et-intelligence/toki-pona-une-langue-de-137-mots-parlee-par-des-milliers-de-personnes-125169.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

" 'AI LINK's' English-conversion engine 'AI GLOBE'... translates 400 articles a day, more than 10,000 a month, into English in real time. It never stops, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Even real-time breaking news is converted into English and posted to the website in less than 10 minutes.

Since late last year, Seoul Economic Daily has been posting all articles uploaded to its website onto its English site through the AI GLOBE engine. Applying prompting to a top-tier AI foundation model makes the cost high, yet the cost of translating a single article and posting it to the website is only a few hundred won. Even running the English site on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform costs no more than the salary of one employee.

It is not only quantity and speed that stand out. Unlike machine translation that crudely swaps words, the engine renders systems and terms unique to Korea, along with corporate and financial context, in a way that English readers can easily understand.

Search Visibility Quadruples... Preparing for the 'Age of Asking AI' = The change is showing up in numbers. The number of times English articles appeared in Google searches rose fourfold in four months, from 3.38 million in January this year to 13.59 million in May. This means that, amid the stock market boom, more readers worldwide are seeking out and reading Korean news.

Seoul Economic Daily is taking this a step further. Until now, overseas readers found Korean news through search engines, but increasingly they ask AI tools such as ChatGPT directly. If Korean news is not accurately cited in those answers, the Korean perspective is left out of the global conversation. For example, when someone abroad asks AI "how are Korea's semiconductor exports," various tests are underway to ensure that Seoul Economic Daily's English articles are cited as the basis for that answer, going beyond appearing in searches so that AI can draw on Korean news as a trustworthy source.

Korea's Capital Market and Corporate Information in English = The English site offers more than just articles. It is surprisingly difficult for overseas investors to examine Korea's capital market and companies in depth in English, because English-language information is scarce or scattered. Seoul Economic Daily is filling that gap with content. 'SIGNAL,' which delivers exclusive scoops on Korea's capital market in English; 'Chaebol Tree,' which shows complex, intertwined conglomerate ownership structures at a glance; and 'AI KEY,' which provides various information on Korea's major conglomerates in English, are entering service one by one. They provide a window through which Korea's corporate information and news can be viewed in English, even without knowing Korean. Korean news, once confined within walls of text and language and kept within the country, can now cross those walls to reach readers and investors worldwide. While the form and language change, the facts remain unchanged, keeping the news flowing."
2026.06.07
Woo Seung-ho
https://en.sedaily.com/international/2026/06/07/ai-engine-translates-400-articles-daily-around-the-clock
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"...“Human creativity is under fire,” he tells Fortune. “Without it, society will lose far more than its capacity to innovate. Everything that brings joy, peace, or inspiration—music, art, sports, and even simple hobbies like baking—is a product of creativity.”  

Much of this pressure stems from the rise of AI in advertising. The future cracked open by this technology is full of both awful and awesome possibilities. That duality is a challenge for organizations investing heavily in these tools, Reilly says. 

“For a company like WPP which is deep into technology and deep into AI…the tension is: where does human creativity fit in?” he notes. The danger is that organizations, captivated by technological possibility, begin to mistake capability for value. “It’s easy to get distracted by technology,” he says. “AI in the hands of a skilled, visionary, creative person could be incredibly inspiring,” he says. “But in the hands of hacks, it’s only going to create more and more drivel.” 

WPP ranking on Fortune 500 Europe
Even as creative work has become a prized corporate asset, many of the people responsible for producing it believe its value remains poorly understood, and poorly rewarded. 

Marketing budgets have come under pressure as brands grapple with inflation, economic uncertainty, and demands for short-term efficiency. According to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Survey, marketing budgets have fallen to 9.6% of total company budgets, down from 11.4% a year earlier.

“I worry that creativity continues to be undervalued by the businesses that rely on it, how it’s paid for…all those things” Reilly says. In his view, the problem is partly structural. “Our business has not done itself a lot of favors when it comes to figuring out a really smart commercial model,” he argues, adding that “the advertising industry is struggling a bit and, you know…will continue to struggle.”

Protecting great ideas 
A pressing question is whether organizations that depend on human creativity still know how to cultivate it.

“But in the hands of hacks, it’s only going to create more and more drivel”

For Eric Monnet, chief of staff and global director of creative excellence at WPP, the answer begins with leadership. “The most consistent thing I have heard from senior CMOs over the past year is that creative ambition is a quality of the leaders inside brands who intentionally decide to champion it, defend it, and build the conditions for it to survive,” he says.

Contrary to popular belief, creative excellence is rarely the result of a single breakthrough campaign. More often, it emerges from leadership teams willing to invest in ideas consistently and shield those who came up with them from the pressures of quarterly thinking. 

Evidence of this can be found in some of the industry’s most enduring success stories. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign began more than two decades ago with a simple cultural insight and has since evolved into a brand platform worth an estimated $7.5 billion. Similarly, Volvo’s “EVA Initiative”, which was built on the company’s longstanding commitment to safety, releasing decades of proprietary crash-test data so that women could be safer in every vehicle, not just a Volvo.

Today, Monnet argues that large organizations are often structured in ways that make great creativity harder, not easier, to produce. 

“It’s almost unnatural for a large organization to be able to create great work,” he says. “There are a lot of forces that go against creativity, and none of them are villains.” CFOs, he says, are focused on efficiency, procurement departments on cost control, legal teams on risk management, and operations leaders on consistency. Each is performing a necessary function. 

“The most consistent thing I have heard from senior CMOs over the past year is that creative ambition is a quality of the leaders inside brands who intentionally decide to champion it, defend it, and build the conditions for it to survive”

The challenge is that creativity often requires organizations to tolerate uncertainty, embrace risk and make long-term investments whose value cannot always be measured immediately. “There must be a shared value for creativity across the organization,” Monnet insists. “When a brand views creativity as a force multiplier for growth rather than just an expense, it becomes easier to navigate the internal pressures.” 

New chapter, same values 
This may be the defining tension hanging over Cannes Lions this year. The festival was founded on the belief that advertising deserved recognition as a discipline worthy of artistic respect. Seventy years later, creative work has arguably never been more important to business. Yet many of the people responsible for it feel undervalued, whether by financial models that fail to reward it properly or by technological narratives that threaten to reduce it to a process.

“Cannes Lions has a thousand doors,” Reilly says. “Perhaps only a hundred of them lead directly into traditional creative work. The other nine hundred open into fields that would have seemed peripheral to advertising a generation ago—data science, venture capital, platform economics, creator ecosystems, and emerging technologies.”

For Reilly, however, none of this represents a departure from the festival’s original mission. He rejects the notion that creative ambition and commercial performance exist in opposition to one another. While Cannes continues to celebrate originality and craft, it increasingly rewards work that delivers measurable impact in the real world. “We don’t celebrate anything that doesn’t have good business results,” he says.

That belief underpins his optimism about the industry’s future. While acknowledging that there are “things we need to fix,” Reilly argues that the pace of change should excite rather than discourage creative professionals.

“If people aren’t psyched to be part of the industry now, they’re out of their minds,” he says. “The industry is changing so fast. If you’re not on the train, you’re going to be left behind.”

It is a lesson Cannes has reinforced for seven decades. The industry has weathered the arrival of television, the internet, social media, and every technological revolution in between. Each transformed how ideas were created and distributed, but none diminished the value of the idea itself. 

There is hope—beneath the spectacle, the branded cabanas, AI demos and rosé-fuelled networking—that the original premise of that Venetian gathering still lingers. The belief that creativity, properly understood, is not an indulgence of business, but one of its most powerful engines."
https://fortune.com/2026/06/05/human-creativity-is-under-fire-wpp-cannes-lions-marketing/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"ICC is looking for Tagalog, Cebuano translators ahead of Duterte trial
Apply via the ICC's website until July 4

Duterte's trial is set for Nov. 30.

The International Criminal Court is seeking Filipino and Cebuano interpreters ahead of the trial for former president Rodrigo Duterte.

On its website, The Hague tribunal posted two job openings for the following positions: Paraprofessional Interpreter - Filipino (Tagalog) and Cebuano (Bisaya) and Associate Court Interpreter - Filipino (Tagalog) and Cebuano (Bisaya).

The paraprofessional and associate court interpreters are tasked with interpreting witness testimony and other subject matter, including legal and forensic discourse, and providing consecutive and chuchotage interpretation. According to Accredited Language Services, chuchotage refers to a technique in which a linguist stands with a small audience and whispers a simultaneous interpretation of what's being said.

The positions also entail participating in supervised training, studying witness statements, compiling vocabulary lists, translating and proofreading documents, carrying out transcript corrections, and contributing to the terminology and reference databases of the ICC's Language Services Section.

Qualifications include an advanced university degree, preferably in interpretation, translation, linguistics, or law, or a first-level university degree with two additional years of qualifying experience.

Additionally, they need at least two years of relevant work experience in Filipino (Tagalog) and/or Cebuano (Bisaya), computer skills, basic knowledge of international legal instruments, procedure and law, as well as relevant specialist subjects like legal, political, military, medical, forensic, human rights, administrative, financial, and others.

Shortlisted applicants will undergo an aptitude test on their interpretation ability and an interview.

The paraprofessional interpreter can receive a minimum net annual salary of €55,665 (P3.96 million), while the associate court interpreter's starting yearly pay is €71,173 (P5.07 million). The contracts for the job will be until Dec. 31, 2026.

Interested applicants can apply via the ICC's website until July 4, midnight (The Hague time).

Duterte, who is detained at The Hague, is set to face trial at the ICC on Nov. 30. He is charged with three counts of crimes against humanity, with prosecutors alleging his involvement in at least 76 murders in his so-called "war on drugs.""
By AYIE LICSI
Published Jun 07, 2026
https://philstarlife.com/news-and-views/730815-icc-looking-for-tagalog-cebuano-translators-ahead-duterte-trial?page=2
#metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus

"The leader of a religious group - facing trial over the death of a woman whose body was found in Auckland's Gulf Harbour - has challenged parts of translations of Chinese handwritten notes found in his home, including saying one part of the English translation can sound like "cult induction".

 

The body of 70-year-old Shulai Wang was found wrapped in layers of rubbish bags in March 2024 and was initially unidentified for more than half a year, before rice bags filled with stones tied to the body led police to Kaixiao Liu and his Ōrewa home.

 

On Monday, Liu cross-examined veteran translator Crown witness Cyril Young on the accuracy of his translation of notes and diaries found at their home, claiming that he had found dozens of mistakes.

 

Earlier, the jury heard evidence from a book of over 70 translated documents that detailed the daily life at the house known as "the Ark" by its occupants - its contents ranging from women at the house writing "covenants" pledging their bodies and souls to Liu, to diary entries on the punishment of Wang in the days and weeks leading up to her death.

 

The Crown said Wang, from Hainan Island in China, came to New Zealand to seek religious instructions from Liu, and that she and five other Chinese women lived "in servitude" to Liu and his family.

 

Liu, his wife Lanyue Xiao, and his mother Xiuyun Li - who is a doctor of more than three decades - and his father Jingui Liu have each denied the kidnapping and manslaughter of Wang.

 

The four defendants are self-represented in the trial, with the assistance of court-appointed standby lawyers.

 

One note said Wang was caught back after she tried to escape to a neighbour's yard, followed by notes saying "placed him/her onto the little black bed to make him/her repent" and "placed into the big suitcase/box".

 

Liu questioned Young on his use of the word "conversion" in his translation of the title of a letter signed off by one of the women at the house, which said "I'm grateful to have the opportunity to be converted to the secret LIU family of the tribe of Judah, descendants of David".

 

"So in English, conversion can sound like religious recruitment or cult induction," said Liu.

 

Young said he did not think the word was wrongly translated.

 

Liu said the meaning of the Chinese text referred to "family affiliation".

 

Liu also questioned Young on his translation of a paragraph in a covenant letter by another woman in the house, in which Young's English translation said: "I, a slave like, ant like living thing, existing in the passing time and space, coming and going, searching and searching. Not knowing the direction of life, not knowing where the path of destiny is."

 

Liu, his wife Lanyue Xiao, and his mother Xiuyun Li - who is a doctor of more than three decades - and his father Jingui Liu have each denied the kidnapping and manslaughter of Wang. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi

Liu asked where Young saw the word "slave" in the Chinese text, to which Young pointed to a word that he thought was the word "Nu" (奴) for slave.

 

Liu said that word wasn't "Nu", but "Ru"(如) meaning like or similar to, and that it was a four word idiom which which meant life like an ant (命如蝼蚁)

 

Young said that particular word was scribbled and that Liu's interpretation could be possibly correct.

 

Earlier, the jury heard translations of a diary entry that wrote of establishing a "kingdom", and having "many servants". The jury had been shown notes where Liu was referred to as "the lord" and Xiao as "the queen".

 

Liu also asked Young about his translated text of "Thick skin slap, beat the face until broken" (the Chinese characters on a photo of the original note said 脸厚，把脸抽破).

 

The body of 70-year-old Shulai Wang was found wrapped in layers of rubbish bags] in March 2024. Photo: Supplied / Police

Liu asked Young if he agreed that in Chinese, the word face could be idiomatic, such as the word thick skinned referring to arrogance.

 

Young said that was correct.

 

However, when Liu said he would translate it as "this person doesn't know shameful, so this person should break her own arrogance, not physically break the face, the literal face", Young disagreed.

 

Young said the Chinese characters in the notes said to beat the skin on the face until it's broken.

 

The more than 70 translated notes had references to slapping the face or swollen faces in many parts.

 

Including a note saying "those who delay for too long, slap/beat their face until broken," and a diary entry by Jingui Liu dated 3 March, 2024, saying Wang's face was swollen.

 

The notes revealed a point a system by which people in the house would be deducted points for breaking the rules, such as eating too slowly, or not having heads bowed while gardening, and awarded points for good behaviour, such as studying earnestly and singing seriously.

 

The trial is later expecting to hear audio recordings found on the devices seized from the defendants - including conversations between the defendants in Mandarin, mixed with Dongtai dialect.

 

Dongtai dialect is a language spoken in the Northern part of China's coastal Jiangsu Province."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/regions_auckland/597591/gulf-harbour-body-trial-religious-leader-defendant-challenges-handwritten-note-translations

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Perplexity Search as Code Lets AI Models Write Their Own Search Pipelines
June 8, 2026
Perplexity has launched Search as Code, a new architecture that lets AI models write their own search pipelines in Python instead of calling fixed APIs. The approach cuts token usage by 85% and outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic on research benchmarks.

Why Fixed Search APIs Are Breaking AI Agents
AI agents have a search problem. The standard loop — model writes a query, search API returns results, model reads them, model writes another query — was designed for humans, not for autonomous systems doing hundreds of rapid searches. Context windows get stuffed with junk because the filtering logic is locked inside the search engine. The model can tweak the query but cannot control how results are ranked, deduplicated, or filtered.

Perplexity's answer, announced on June 6, is Search as Code (SaC) — an architecture where AI models write their own search pipelines as Python code and execute them in a sandbox. As 1 put it: "Instead of calling a ready‑made search API, models in Perplexity's new Search as Code architecture write their own search workflows as Python code."

How Search as Code Works
The architecture has three layers, described in detail in Perplexity's research paper:

Model (Control Plane) The AI reasons about the task, decomposes it, and generates Python code that assembles a custom search pipeline. It decides strategy — not just which keywords to use, but how to combine retrieval, filtering, and ranking.
Compute Sandbox A secure execution environment with a persistent filesystem for cross‑turn state. Chosen over a REPL approach because explicit state handling via serialization improves reliability on long research trajectories.
Agentic Search SDK Breaks Perplexity's search backend into atomic primitives — retrieve, fanout, filter, dedupe, rerank, parse_field — that the generated code can freely combine. No retrieval operation is dispatched through function calling; everything is code‑driven.
The Numbers — 85% Fewer Tokens, 4x Competitor Accuracy
In a case study tracking down 200 high‑severity CVEs (2023‑2025) with vendor‑specific advisory formats, Perplexity reported that SaC achieved 100% accuracy while consuming 42,900 tokens — an 85% reduction from the 288,700 tokens used by Perplexity's own standard pipeline. Competing systems scored below 25% on the same task.

Across benchmarks, Perplexity claims SaC outperformed 1 on 4 out of 5 tests. The largest improvement came on the WANDR broad‑research benchmark, where SaC showed a 45% absolute gain over Perplexity's own baseline. On DSQA, the gain was 29%.

Code Is the New Interface Layer
Search as Code reflects a broader shift in how AI agents interact with infrastructure. As Perplexity's research team wrote: "Code is a powerful medium for orchestrating preexisting capabilities — it can also serve as a gap‑filler for capabilities that aren't present in the search stack or SDK."

Rather than the model being limited to the parameters a search API exposes, SaC gives it access to the same primitives a human engineer would use to build a search pipeline — then lets it compose them programmatically. As The Decoder noted, the emerging paradigm combines models for strategy with deterministic runtimes for batching and filtering, with search infrastructure becoming an I/O layer rather than a black box.

What This Means for Builders
Search as Code is rolling out now in Perplexity Computer, the company's agentic AI platform. For developers building AI agents that need to do complex research — gathering data across hundreds of sources, verifying facts, compiling reports — SaC represents a fundamentally different approach from the "one query, one response" model that dominates current search APIs.

The implications are significant. If models can write their own search pipelines, the bottleneck shifts from can the API return the right results to can the model design an effective search strategy That favors frontier models with strong reasoning and code‑generation capabilities — and puts pressure on search API providers to expose their internals as programmable primitives rather than black‑box endpoints. Perplexity's SDK‑based approach may become the template for how search infrastructure is packaged for the agentic era."
https://opentools.ai/news/perplexity-search-as-code-ai-models-write-search-pipelines
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Lost in translation
Attempting to understand the lives and thought of our ancestors can teach us about ourselves

Emily Wilson opens Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature with a quote from Louis MacNeice’s 1938 poem Autumn Journal, written in the looming shadow of the Second World War. Wilson highlights MacNeice’s meditations on the value of looking back to antiquity in such dark times — or, perhaps, at the futility of such an endeavour.

Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature, Emily Wilson, Profile Books, £10.99
MacNeice’s poem contrasts the difference between viscerally imagining the ancient world, and teaching it within the constraints of the 1930s educational system, as well as contemplating the prejudices and idealisations through which we may view the past. Despite the unimaginable gap in time, Wilson believes there are elements of the ancient world that she can clearly imagine. How a translator can bring alive this tension between the strangeness of the complex human beings and alien cultural practices from millennia ago and their strange familiarity is the core question that runs through her book. Is it possible to do so without projecting ideas from our time and place, and even the translator’s own personal experience? Can their words be brought back to life in a new language — or must the dead stay dead?

The book is a collection of Wilson’s essays she has unwoven and re-weaved, before stitching together as a coherent whole, so each chapter that explores a different aspect of ancient literature and culture and its journey into the present, adds to our understanding of the translator’s challenges. The chapters include a skewering of the modern “watered-down form” of Stoicism (it is a spiritual path for people who want to hold on to their sense of self and their own power: a fancy, rationalised form of egoism), a reminder of the invective and eroticism of Catullus, the fight over ownership of fragments of Sappho and fascinating essays on the comedies of Aristophanes and Terence, and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Wilson also traces how Ancient Greek and Roman literature assumed its revered place in Western culture (in the US, Wilson claims this is in large part down to the work of Edith Hamiliton, whose stylistic “highly Americanised, vaguely Christianised” translations remain popular almost one hundred years after first being published and contribute to the belief in the continuity of a Western cultural superiority from Greece to modern-day America).

The last, longest essay, is the most fascinating. Wilson compares single phrases from the Odyssey across several translations. The different choices of not just words and phrases, but style and structure, each translator makes, shows the rich variety of options translators have. Wilson believes it is important to also translate the musical rhythms of ancient metrical verse. Many modern translations ignore this challenge and translate into English free verse or prose (Wilson’s version uses iambic pentameter). Wilson feels that by failing to do so you do not convey the artfulness of the originals, which is a major component of their strangeness for the modern reader. In both this book and her translations Wilson makes a strong case for this to be so. Through sharing the anguished and long debate Wilson had with herself in how to translate a single Greek word — polytropos — she draws back the veil on how a brilliant scholar approaches her work. After many twists and turns Wilson translates it as “complicated.” Others have used “man of many ways” (Richmond Lattimore), “that man skilled in all ways of contending” (Robert Fitzgerald), “man of many twists and turns” (Robert Fagles), and “resourceful man” (E. V. Rieu). Wilson describes the process that took “many hours, days and weeks” to eliminate countless other options before landing on “complicated” for a combination of syntactical and semantical reasons (from the number of syllables to liking the concept of complexity as a positive quality in the world of the poem).

Wilson states that the, “juxtaposition of ancient and modern languages, literatures and lives reminds us that it is through our words that we are remembered and understood, long after our deaths, and that even the most minute differences of language or phrasing may make all the difference.” With the increasing use of artificial intelligence applications and models to craft communications, this is a timely point to make. Many are now speaking through translators, when they outline the gist of what they want to say leaving technology to select specific words. Wilson’s explanation of her choice of “complicated” is an insight into the thought processes involved in translating and a reminder of the importance of what we are relinquishing to technology. It is also a justification for her deeply thought out choice.

Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey was the first by a woman into English. Inevitably, as the first woman, some critics argued that her approach at times distorted the original text by overlaying modern feminist ideas that would have been alien to those in Homer’s time. Her choice of “complicated” was the focus of some of that criticism. Supporters praised her for removing archaic, “imported” misogyny and challenging established interpretations. Wilson recognises that, “Language is never a neutral tool by which we represent the world: every word and phrase carries with it a tangle of cultural assumptions and connotations.” If Wilson is guilty of overlaying modern ideas, have not all previous translators been guilty of similar?

George Chapman, the first man to complete a full translation of the Odyssey and Iliad into English (published together in 1616 after decades of working on them), claimed that he was visited by the ghost of Homer. This, he believed, gave him unique insight into the poet’s true intentions. More believably, his interpretation of Homer would have been influenced by the philosophical currents of the Elizabethan Golden Age. In the introduction to her translation Wilson notes that Chapman transformed Odysseus into “a true soldier and a gentleman, a proto-Christian and a proto-Stoic, whose greatest virtue is his ability to endure suffering”. In translating the Greek into English, he translated Odysseus’ characteristics into those of a hero of his day. Whole passages of Aristophanes and Catullus were omitted by prudish Victorian translators, due to the moralities of their era.

In the same introduction Wilson announces that, “I try to avoid importing contemporary types of sexism into this ancient poem, instead shining a light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that do exist in the text, which are only partly familiar from our world.” Wilson discusses the scene where Telemachus hangs the slaves (others have translated dmōai less literally as “maids” or “maidservants” which subtly suggests they would have had more agency in an elite household of that time than they would have). Most translations introduce derogatory language that suggests these women are justifiably punished due to their sexual digressions, yet original Greek does not contain such language. Their punishment is as likely motivated by wider dynamics of honour and the loss of face caused by the suitors’ breaches of etiquettes of hospitality (xenia) as for their promiscuity.

Wilson is not the first to challenge the orthodoxy of established translations or to use comparative analysis across multiple translations of Homer to do so. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1932’s The Homeric Versions conducted a similar exercise. The heart of the essay is a close reading of a single passage of the conversation between Odysseus and Achilles’ ghost, about his son Neoptolemus, across six English translations; “Buckley (literal prose), Butcher & Lang (literal but archaicizing), Cowper (1791, Miltonic blank verse), Pope (1725, heroic couplets with lavish amplification), Chapman (1614, vigorous and idiosyncratic), and Butler (1900, ironic bourgeois prose).”

Borges treats them as equally legitimate “perspectives on a mutable fact”. He asks and answers, “Which of these many translations is faithful? my reader will want to know. I repeat: none or all of them.” For Borges there is no “definitive text”: the concept corresponds only to “religion or exhaustion.” He argues that every text, including Homer’s, is mutable; what we take to be fixed and sacred is merely the product of familiarity and habit. He goes further and claims that translations are not inherently inferior to originals. A good text seems invariable only because we have read it many times; we mistake repetition for necessity. In his 1936 essay The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights, he declared: “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

In The Homeric Versions, Borges discusses the famous 1861–62 exchange between Francis Newman (who advocated literal translation) and Matthew Arnold (who advocated eliminating distracting details in favour of Homer’s essential qualities: syntactical simplicity, flowing rapidity, and loftiness). Borges argues that both positions are valid. Wilson has also engaged with this debate on several occasions. Whilst acknowledging Arnold’s snobbery towards “poor Newman”, she has described his translation as unreadable, and in conversation about her Iliad translation, stated that she feels, “fairly directly inspired by Matthew Arnold’s discussion of what a Homeric translation should aim for — rapidity, plainness of thought and diction, and nobility.” Today, the debate is also between those who believe a good translator should be invisible, creating work as easily accessible as if it was not originally in a different language, and those who believe a translation should embody the strangeness of the original language and culture, not disguise it. The latter believing the former “colonises” texts into English creating a false kind of homogeneity. Wilson believes that the creation of a more reader-friendly translation does not necessarily imply a desire to appropriate or “colonise” the foreign original, but wants the shock and surprise of a foreign text to be preserved as much as possible. 

In life sometimes literal translations are essential. In his translation of the Odyssey, Alexander Pope interprets Odysseus’ single black ship as a fleet. In Afghanistan, the interpreters I worked with needed to be more precise in the numbers of foreign fighters or IEDs on the road ahead. Errors in basic vocabulary could lead to the targeting of a wedding party over Taliban jirga. The coalition used service personnel who had often only been through less than a year’s worth of language training for the roles that required access to sensitive conversations, and for many other roles hired urban, Dari-speakers from the north to serve as interpreters in the rural, Pashtun-dominated south. The former would not be able to untangle the cultural assumptions and connotations and communicate past the words to the meaning of what each was trying to say. The latter often possessed marginal English skills and would fail to do the same in the reverse direction. Consequently, conversations between politicians, leaders, soldiers and elders were reduced to a dialogue conducted on the level of children pointing and naming when trying to navigate sensitive and complex cultural issues.

A tragicomic example was provided during the 2006 siege of Musa Qala in Helmand Province. British forces were using an interpreter who had been raised in Birmingham, UK. The local soldiers working alongside the British suspected that he was adding his own words and interpretations to the dialogue between them. Concern over mistranslations escalated into a physical confrontation, with the local soldiers chasing the interpreter around the compound. A British officer had to draw his pistol to stop the chase. In Afghanistan, at times the gulf between allies and enemies; between Western notions of democracy, liberalism and individualism and those of tribal loyalty and the values of the Pashtunwali honour code, felt as vast as that between the modern West and Homer’s Greece. We did not have interpreters with the depth of knowledge, eloquence and intellectual rigour as Wilson and her fellow translators of Homer. Even if we did, would we have understood the heroic code of the Pashtunwali as well as Odysseus might have?

Borges shows us that the reader is also complicit in the act of constant reinterpretation. In his 1939’s Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Menard sets out to immerse himself so thoroughly in Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote, that he can spontaneously “re-create” it, word for word, in the original seventeenth-century Spanish. (Initially, he considers achieving this by becoming Cervantes through learning Spanish, returning to the Catholic faith, fighting against the Moors, and forgetting the history of Europe 1602-1918. He ultimately rejects this approach as too easy). At the time of his death, Menard had successfully produced the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote, along with a fragment of chapter twenty-two. The narrator compares a passage from Cervantes’s text with the identical passage from Menard’s text. Despite the words being exactly the same, the narrator argues that Menard’s version is infinitely richer, more subtle, and more complex because it was written by a modern man with the weight of three centuries of history behind him. Menard’s achievement is not that he wrote the same book again but that he wrote another book.

Anticipating post-structuralism, Borges implies that the meaning of literary works depends on the historical and social contexts in which they are read. The act of reading becomes the primary site of meaning creation. Each generation rewrites the classics by reading them through the lens of their own contemporary experiences as much as each translator does. We did not arrive in Afghanistan as blank slates, but as the products of a civilisation that traced itself back to Ancient Greece on a mission to convert those we found there to the pinnacle of a superior culture and way of being: western liberal democracy. Unable to think outside of our own paradigm, we could not understand that even if we could deliver what we were claiming we were going to (without the resolve and resources to do so) it was what few wanted. Afghanistan was not a military failure; it was a failure of translation. 

These ancient texts can help us to see the air we breathe and the water in which we swim

In the challenge, though, there is also opportunity. Wilson claims that it can be as difficult for us to see the cultural assumptions of our own time as for a bird to see air, or fish water. Yet, these ancient texts can help us to see the air we breathe and the water in which we swim. Reading translations of both past and present foreign works can help us see that some of what is normal to us is alien to others. They can give us a sense that another way of being is possible. The evidence of this can be found in the smallest nuance of one translated word in the changing layers of translations over time. As Wilson states “it is more valuable than ever to remember that the world has not always been as it is now.” We are living through a time of social, geopolitical and technological transition.

MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is both a panorama of his era — capturing the anxieties of the Munich crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the looming shadow of another global conflict, as well as the disintegration of his personal life — and a situating of his time against the people and thinkers of the past. As MacNeice did in his time of uncertainty, we should meditate on the flux of the present, the fleeting moment between past and future, and try to imagine ourselves amongst those so unimaginably different yet strangely familiar. Their anxieties were not our anxieties, but also not wholly different. We cannot simply mirror their solutions but understanding them may help open us up to the possibilities of our complicated times, and knowing that they endured should give us comfort that we may too.

Wilson’s book is a timely reminder that that selection of words and phrases is key to the richness of human interaction and explaining what we really mean. We may not ever be able to fully understand the dead, but in trying to do so we may understand ourselves a little better."
Artillery Row 8 June, 2026
Andy Owen
https://thecritic.co.uk/lost-in-translation-2/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"$250,000 for African Language AI Projects
LINGUA Africa funds projects that build the open data, models, and applications African languages need to participate in modern AI. The program goal is reaching one billion Africans with locally relevant AI tools by 2029.

Three grant categories are open:

Data creation: building, curating, translating, or licensing language datasets. Up to $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in compute credits.
Model or tool development: creating or adapting models, benchmarks, and infrastructure for African languages. Up to $100,000 in cash and $100,000 in compute credits.
Sectoral applications: piloting language technologies in real-world settings with a credible path to measurable impact. Up to $250,000 in cash and $400,000 in compute credits.
Priority sectors include agriculture and food security, education, healthcare and public health, financial inclusion, and government and civic services. All supported projects must contribute openly licensed resources.

Who Can Apply
Eligible applicants include nonprofits, universities, research institutes, social enterprises, cultural organizations, startups, and consortia working in the public interest. Organizations based outside Africa can apply if they show meaningful partnership with Africa-based institutions or communities.

Beyond cash, selected projects receive Azure and Google Cloud Platform credits and in-kind technical collaboration from Microsoft AI for Good Lab.

Apply Now: Deadline is June 15, 2026

More Funding Opportunities
Please sign up now to get our email updates. Learn how to get startup funding for your technology business, and find new funding opportunities with donors..."

https://www.ictworks.org/apply-now-250000-for-african-language-ai-projects/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Posted by Lokesh Vyas | Jun 2, 2026 | Limitations & Exceptions to Copyright

 

This post was originally published on Spicy-IP...

 

Today, I want to talk about something French. No, not wine. Not even cheese. But the French language, and my hobbyhorse: international copyright law.

 

Here’s the story of why the beating heart of the Berne Convention still pulsates in French. As Article 37 of the Convention clarifies, while the Convention is drafted in both French and English, in the event of divergence, the French text prevails.

 

Every time I glide through the Berne archives in French, I’m reminded: this isn’t just a few documents. Nay. The entire “Travaux préparatoires”—used to clarify the meaning of provisions—is in French, especially until 1948. The rest? Translations.

 

This causes a peculiar anxiety—inadequate to stop one from reading/translating, but enough to remind one that every sentence understood/translated into the English language is contingent and fallible. Such is life. Alas …

 

But how did this happen? Let’s unspool the tale. But first, why does it matter?

 

Why does this story matter?

 

Two reasons, at least.

 

First, given that these archival texts in French carry interpretive authority under the Vienna Convention, it can be useful for scholars, particularly those engaging with policy or treaty negotiations, to contest and corroborate the meanings of provisions of the Berne Convention.

 

Second, a monolingual or hierarchically multilingual archive does far more than record events. It shapes thought, too. It decides who reads with ease and who squints, dictionary in hand or translation tool whirring in the background.

 

With this context, the archive exhales, and the story unfolds …

 

French as Diplomacy’s Darling

 

Since at least the eighteenth century, international legal parleys have unfolded en français. ‘Twas the language in which law was negotiated, quarrelled over, and, of course, archived. (see generally, here)

 

This is visible in 1858, at the Brussels Congress that laid the groundwork for what would later become the first international copyright treaty. French stood uncontested as the juridical lingua franca (quite literally, hmm…). States were free, of course, to speak in their own tongues. But only by the grace of an interpreter, or by the submission of a dutiful written note in French. Voila … you could speak your local language, but the legality spoke French.

 

But time is rarely kind to monopolies.

 

As the twentieth century unfolded—with its world wars, political realignments, and collapsing empires—the linguistic hegemony of French began to wobble. By the end of the First World War, the murmurs were no longer polite whispers. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations broke precedent by recognising both English and French as official languages. Power was shifting, and new actors were joining the discourse.

 

And with them came new linguistic ambitions: to admit other European languages, especially English, into the inner sanctum of international law. The Berne Convention was not immune to these scenes. By the time the Brussels Conference of 1948 took place, the language question no longer lingered as a matter of conversational convenience. It demanded, in the UK delegates’ words, urgent attention. 

 

To be clear, while I focus on the Berne Convention, later international copyright instruments (UCC, TRIPS, etc.) emerged in different geopolitical environments, giving English, alongside other languages, authoritative status. See generally, here)

 

Note: What follows draws on the discussions at the 1948 Revision Conference, recorded in Union Internationale pour la Protection des Œuvres Littéraires et Artistiques, Documents de la Conférence réunie à Bruxelles du 5 au 26 juin 1948 (Bureau de l’Union Internationale pour la Protection des Œuvres Littéraires et Artistiques, Berne 1951). Professors Sam Ricketson and Jane Ginsburg have made available an English translation of the records of the 1948 revision on the OUP website, though they are incomplete. As translation, on which I base this post, inevitably leaves room for doubt, I claim no absolute accuracy. If anything appears unclear or doubtful, please do let me know.

 

 The Language Question(s)

 

It was Britain that first broached the issue in the 1948 Brussels Revision conference, proposing that a new Convention text be drafted in both French and English, with both languages enjoying equal authority. The British delegate insisted this was not about the ‘relative merit’ of languages, but about a practical problem: how to ensure the Convention works most effectively for the Berne Union.

 

The language question entailed two issues, however. 

 

The first was substantive. That is, which (European!) language, if any, should be admitted into the Berne Convention’s linguistic sanctum? And under what conditions?  

 

The second was procedural: how was such an admission, which may amount to a change in the convention, to be effected? Simply put, the question is whether the inclusion of a new authoritative language requires unanimity or a majority decision.

 

Substantive Anxiety: Which Language Counts?

 

Portugal, led by Mr Dantas, visibly piqued by the British proposal, expanded its scope, arguing that if linguistic equality was the goal, why not have multilingualism? And, it proposed that Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, and Italian all be recognised as official languages of the Convention, with equal authority. He also stated that while French exclusivity had long been a “Berne tradition,” it had been questioned since the 1920s. And thus Dantas heralded a “future American tradition.”

 

Spain, led by Mr Forns, joined the debate. The real question, for Spain, was not about French and/or English, but whether a single official language (French) should be maintained or multiple official languages should be allowed. Accordingly, Spain proposed drafting the Convention in French, English, and Spanish, with all texts verified by the Berne Bureau becoming official and authoritative. Though French would continue to be the working language of discussion.

 

Then came a telling take from the Indian delegate, Mr Mani, who was scheduled to depart Brussels soon. 

 

Mani said that both French and English were foreign tongues to India. For purely practical reasons, he requested that English be accepted alongside French as an official language of the Conference. (Sidenote: India, a very new independent nation then, was having funding issues to send a delegate to Brussels. And this likely impacted Indian participation in the convention. I’ll share that little tale another day.)

 

Hither entered France, with its delegate, M. Marcel Plaisant, rising to challenge the British proposal. 

 

Plaisant pronounced that his stance was guided by “the interest of greater understanding among the peoples represented … and… a wish that the Act to be signed … have absolute authority, shielded from divergent interpretations.” He noted that if English were made the official language, “many other languages of important cultures would have the right to a version of the Convention in their own tongue.”

 

To prove his point, Plaisant cited numerous academics and writers who had long extolled French, offering historical examples of its use in diplomacy and law. For him, French should be adopted as it’s the “Latin of modern times”—a language at everyone’s disposal, belonging not to one nation alone, but to all.

 

Procedural Problem

 

France also challenged Britain procedurally. The French delegate argued that admitting English required unanimous approval. Britain disagreed, saying that unanimity was required only when revising substantive provisions—not for deciding the language of drafting. He quoted the 1934 London Conference for the Protection of Industrial Property, where the decision to draft the Convention in both French and English was taken by simple majority. 

 

He further maintained that the language question fell within the competence of each Conference’s rules of procedure, and that such matters ought not to be resolved in an unduly rigid fashion. The British position found support from Australia. 

 

Britain then clarified (perhaps sensing mounting resistance?) that it was not seeking to revise the rules of procedure at all, but merely to supplement them on a point whose resolution had previously been deferred. (well … isn’t that what revision is?)

 

Re-enter France, with panache. Plaisant quipped: “If we were to follow the British suggestion… You would have a Convention drafted in two languages, without any explanation. This would be contrary to all precedent… From the moment a Convention is drawn up in more than one language, it becomes essential to explain the status of the texts… so that those who interpret it may find sufficient guidance.” Thus, he insisted that any multilingual drafting must clarify the authentic status of French.

 

The British Delegation requested time to obtain further instructions from its Government. Eventually, a compromise emerged. The language provision would appear in both the rules of procedure and the Convention itself.

 

The endgame – a middle path?

 

Thusly, three coteries emerged.

 

First, France, with support from Austria and Hungary, demanded unilingualism. Per this club, the Convention should be drafted solely in French, with the French text alone enjoying authoritative status.

 

Second, Britain, with support from Canada, Greece, and Syria, demanded bilingualism, proposing that the Convention be drafted in both French and English, with both texts accorded equal authenticity. Although the Syrian delegate added a caveat: should the Conference move towards multilingualism, Arabic should be admitted as an official language.

 

Third, Portugal, backed by Spain and Brazil, advocated multilingualism, i.e., the Convention be drafted in several languages, with all texts enjoying equal authoritative status.

 

No camp quite got everything it wanted, however. 

 

While a majority favoured the British proposal for bilingualism, several hesitated to accept it as it was. This unease caused a conciliatory turn. Thanks to Belgium, Italy, and Sweden. In principle, these countries accepted bilingualism. But in practice, they insisted that in cases of divergence or interpretive doubt, the French text must prevail.

 

And that compromise carried till the day. English was admitted, but French prevailed. The linguistic fate of Berne was thus sealed. Bilingual in appearance, hierarchical in effect. Voilà …

 

And that is the story of Berne’s official language(s).

 

Thanks to Daanish Naithani, Avani Marudwar, Swaraj Barooah, and Prof. Lionel Bently for reading the draft and sharing their thoughts."

https://infojustice.org/archives/46688

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"...Translated novels

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell 

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses 

The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated by Gene Png 

Red Sword by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur 

The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur 

Ice by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillips 

Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori 

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery 

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken ..."

https://www.andrewliptak.com/locus-award-winners-2026-harrow-okorafor-jones/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Headsome Communication and the Association of Romanian Publishers are launching the project “The Romanian Shelf in Sofia” – a call for book donations intended for the University Library of Sofia, an initiative supporting the study of Romanian language and literature in Bulgaria.

The call is addressed to publishers participating in this year’s Bookfest edition, as well as authors, who are invited to accompany their donated volumes with autographs.

Organized in the context of Bulgaria’s participation as Guest of Honour Country at the International Book Fair Bookfest 2026, the project aims to foster cultural dialogue and academic exchange between the two spaces. Romanian language studies in Bulgaria contribute to the formation of a community of translators, researchers, and cultural mediators who facilitate the circulation of ideas and literature between the two countries. The development of these skills depends directly on access to a diverse and up-to-date book collection.

Within the initiative, the following may be donated:
● volumes of contemporary and classic Romanian literature;
● poetry, essays, and memoirs;
● children’s and young adult books;
● art albums and illustrated volumes;
● literary criticism, linguistics, and humanities works.

Donations may be deposited at the Bulgaria stand, Guest of Honour country at Bookfest 2026, throughout the entire duration of the book fair (June 3–7, 2026).

The initiators of the call are convinced that the donated volumes will contribute to the development of academic resources available to students and professors and will facilitate access to the diversity and dynamics of contemporary Romanian literature.

The visual identity of the initiative is signed by Zelmirka (Szabó Zelmira).

About the organizations

The Association of Romanian Publishers (AER) was founded in 1991 and is the main professional association of Romanian book publishers, bringing together publishers from all fields of cultural interest. Under the aegis of the Federation of Romanian Publishers, AER organizes the Bookfest International Book Fair, the most important book fair in Romania and the only publishing industry event that has achieved a significant international dimension, as well as local Bookfest editions.

Headsome Communication is a creative and strategic boutique with 13 years of experience in developing and implementing cultural projects and PR campaigns for institutions in Romania and international institutions based in Romania. This year, it coordinates Bulgaria’s participation as Guest of Honour Country at Bookfest, being the tenth Guest of Honour in its portfolio, after German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland – 2013), Czech Republic (2015), Israel (2016), Sweden (2017), United States (2018), United Kingdom (2019), Japan (2022), Republic of Moldova (2024), and Portugal (2025)..."
By Romania Journal Last updated Jun 3, 2026
https://www.romaniajournal.ro/spare-time/romanian-book-shelf-in-sofia-promotes-translation-studies/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Deadline: 27-Jun-2026

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is inviting applications to support protection activities through the provision of professional interpretation and translation services for refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt. The initiative aims to ensure equitable, timely, and high-quality communication support that enables refugees to access protection services, legal procedures, registration processes, and essential information in languages they understand.

 

By reducing language barriers and strengthening communication, the project seeks to improve protection outcomes, enhance accountability, and ensure that refugees can effectively participate in decisions affecting their lives.

 

About the Project

UNHCR Egypt currently supports more than 1 million registered refugees and asylum seekers originating from over 35 countries.

 

Given the diversity of languages spoken by refugee communities, professional interpretation and translation services are essential to ensure that individuals can access protection services, understand their rights, and communicate effectively with UNHCR and its partners.

 

The project focuses on delivering reliable, culturally sensitive, and confidential language services that support protection activities across multiple operational areas.

 

Project Objectives

The initiative aims to:

 

Ensure equitable access to interpretation and translation services

Reduce language barriers faced by refugees and asylum seekers

Improve communication during protection and legal procedures

Support timely access to essential services and information

Strengthen protection case management

Promote accountability and transparency in service delivery

Ensure confidentiality and ethical interpretation practices

Enhance participation of refugees in decision-making processes

Maintain consistent quality standards across language services

The project plays a critical role in ensuring that language differences do not prevent refugees from accessing protection and assistance.

 

Key Focus Areas

The project focuses on:

 

Interpretation services for refugees and asylum seekers

Translation of protection-related documents

Registration support

Refugee status determination procedures

Resettlement processes

Legal assistance and legal procedures

Protection case management

Community services and outreach

Access to basic services

Confidential and culturally sensitive communication

These services help ensure effective communication across all stages of refugee protection.

 

Why Interpretation Services Matter

Language barriers can significantly affect a refugee’s ability to access services, understand procedures, and exercise their rights.

 

Professional interpretation and translation services help:

 

Improve access to protection services

Ensure informed decision-making

Facilitate accurate information sharing

Strengthen legal and administrative processes

Reduce misunderstandings and communication gaps

Promote inclusion and participation

Protect the rights of refugees and asylum seekers

Effective communication is a fundamental component of quality refugee protection.

 

Services to Be Provided

Selected partners will support a broad range of interpretation and translation activities.

 

Services may include:

 

Oral interpretation during interviews

Translation of official documents

Support during counseling sessions

Interpretation during legal procedures

Assistance during refugee status determination interviews

Resettlement-related interpretation

Community outreach interpretation

Telephone interpretation services

Training and workshop interpretation

Translation of protection information materials

All services must meet high standards of accuracy, professionalism, and confidentiality.

 

Translation Support

Translation services may cover documents related to:

 

Registration procedures

Refugee status determination

Resettlement applications

Protection case files

Community services

Legal documentation

Information materials

Training resources

Official correspondence

Accurate document translation is essential to ensure fair and effective protection processes.

 

Interpretation Support Activities

Interpreters may assist during:

 

Individual interviews

Case management sessions

Counseling meetings

Protection briefings

Information sessions

Legal consultations

Community engagement activities

Telephone inquiries

Capacity-building workshops

Training programmes

These services help refugees understand available support and communicate their needs effectively.

 

Expected Outcomes

The project aims to achieve several important outcomes, including:

 

Improved access to information and services

Enhanced protection outcomes

Better case management processes

Greater participation of refugees in decision-making

Stronger accountability within protection systems

Consistent and reliable language services

Reduced communication barriers

Improved trust between refugees and service providers

These outcomes contribute directly to more effective refugee protection and assistance.

 

Quality and Ethical Standards

All interpretation and translation services are expected to comply with UNHCR protection standards.

 

Key principles include:

 

Confidentiality

Neutrality

Accuracy

Professionalism

Cultural sensitivity

Impartiality

Respect for refugee rights

Protection of sensitive information

Maintaining these standards is essential for safeguarding the integrity of protection services.

 

Benefits for Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Through this initiative, refugees and asylum seekers will benefit from:

 

Language-appropriate communication

Clear understanding of procedures and rights

Improved access to services

Better support during legal and protection processes

Greater confidence in interacting with institutions

Increased participation in community activities

Reduced risk of misunderstandings

The project helps ensure that all individuals can access protection services regardless of the language they speak.

 

Who Should Apply?

The opportunity is intended for organizations capable of providing professional interpretation and translation services that meet UNHCR standards.

 

Applicants should demonstrate:

 

Experience in interpretation and translation services

Capacity to work across multiple languages

Understanding of refugee protection contexts

Strong quality assurance mechanisms

Ability to maintain confidentiality and ethical standards

Capacity to deliver timely and reliable services

Organizations with expertise in humanitarian, refugee, migration, or protection-related language services may be particularly well positioned to contribute.

 

Why This Initiative Matters

Communication is central to effective refugee protection. Without appropriate language support, refugees may struggle to access legal assistance, protection services, education, healthcare, and other essential support systems.

 

This initiative strengthens:

 

Refugee protection systems

Access to justice

Service delivery effectiveness

Community participation

Accountability and transparency

Inclusion and equality

Human rights protection

By ensuring high-quality interpretation and translation services, UNHCR helps create a more accessible and responsive protection environment for refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the purpose of this UNHCR initiative?

The project aims to provide professional interpretation and translation services that support communication between refugees, asylum seekers, and protection service providers.

Where will the project be implemented?

The initiative supports UNHCR operations in Egypt.

Who benefits from the project?

Refugees and asylum seekers registered with or supported by UNHCR Egypt.

What types of services will be provided?

Interpretation for interviews, counseling, legal procedures, training sessions, and translation of protection-related documents and materials.

Why are interpretation services important in refugee protection?

They help refugees understand their rights, access services, participate in procedures, and communicate effectively with service providers.

What standards must interpreters and translators follow?

Services must adhere to principles of confidentiality, neutrality, accuracy, professionalism, and cultural sensitivity.

What outcomes does UNHCR expect from the project?

Improved communication, stronger protection outcomes, better access to services, enhanced accountability, and reduced language barriers.

Conclusion

The UNHCR interpretation and translation services initiative in Egypt seeks to strengthen refugee protection by ensuring that language barriers do not prevent refugees and asylum seekers from accessing essential services and exercising their rights. Through professional, confidential, and culturally sensitive language support, the project will improve communication, strengthen case management, and enhance the overall effectiveness of protection services for more than one million refugees and asylum seekers living in Egypt.

 

For more information, visit UN Partner Portal."

https://www2.fundsforngos.org/refugee-asylum-seekers-2/call-for-interpretation-and-translation-services-for-refugee-protection-egypt/amp/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Not lost in translation: training AI to speak African languages

Frustrated by the neglect of African languages by AI platforms, researchers at the University of Cape Town have developed their own tool.

 

The African continent is home to more than 2,000 languages, yet a 2025 study of large language models – advanced artificial intelligence systems designed to understand, generate and interact with human language – published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research found only limited support for African tongues.

 

The paper, which comparatively analysed African language coverage across six large language models, eight small language models and six specialised small language models (SSLMs), found support for 41 African languages and 23 available public data sets. But it found “a big gap” with only four languages – Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans and Malagasy – always handled, while over 98% of African languages went unsupported.

 

With so many African languages neglected, there are fears that entire groups of speakers could be cut out of the AI revolution. So one team of computer scientists from the University of Cape Town is looking to close the gap that has left millions underserved by mainstream AI tools.

 

Earlier this year, researchers Anri Lombard, Jan Buys, Francois Meyer and their team unveiled MzansiLM, a language model specifically built to include data from all 11 of South Africa’s official written languages. Alongside it, they released MzansiText, the curated multilingual dataset on which MzansiLM was trained.

 

Compared to the behemoth large language models (LLMs) developed by global tech companies, MzansiLM is a small player. Yet the team’s stringent testing showed it has outperformed larger, well-funded global LLMs in terms of accuracy. When writing in isiXhosa, it bettered the results of systems more than ten times its size in terms of accuracy and fluency.

 

“MzansiLM was meant to provide a small decoder-only baseline that future work can compare against and build on,” Lombard explains. “It is not a chatbot. It is a foundation; something developers and researchers can adapt for specific purposes, such as summarising documents or annotating data in a language most global AI cannot handle at all.”

 

Digital footprints

 

The inability of AI to handle most African languages comes down to the gap between the number of real-world speakers and a language’s digital footprint. IsiZulu is spoken by over 12m South Africans, and Hausa by more than 70m people across West Africa, yet both are considered “low-resource” languages in AI terms, because they leave a small “digital footprint” on websites and in books, so there is little data for AI developers to “scrape”.

 

“In language modelling, languages are considered low-resource primarily because there are much fewer and smaller textual datasets available in these languages for training language models,” says Buys, a senior lecturer in the University of Cape Town (UCT) department of computer science. “The internet has always skewed heavily towards English.”

 

“The data pipelines that feed large language models skew even more heavily. The result is a compounding inequality: the languages that already dominate online spaces get better AI tools, which makes them more useful digitally, which generates more data, which makes the AI even better. Everyone else falls further behind.”

 

Nine of South Africa’s 11 official written languages fall into this low-resource category. Languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa have attracted some research attention, but others, including isiNdebele and Sepedi, have been largely overlooked even within African language AI. The UCT team is on a mission to change that.

 

Post-colonial data neglect

 

In a 2025 policy brief, AI and Language Data Flaring in Africa: Addressing the Low-Resource Challenge for the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Ife Adebara describes this phenomenon as “language data flaring” – which he likens to the gas flaring, common in oil extraction, in which a valuable resource is wasted through neglect.

 

Adebara argues that a multitude of factors – including under-investment in local languages and foreign language-dominant colonial and post-colonial policies – have meant that African language data goes under-collected, is poorly stored and remains largely unused in AI development.

 

“If AI continues to evolve without African linguistic inclusion, the continent will not only be a consumer of foreign technologies but will also have little say in shaping its development,” Mpho Primus, co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg, wrote in a February 2025 opinion piece for Independent Online (IOL).

 

“The digital divide will become a cultural and intellectual divide.”

 

This is more than just a mere inconvenience. If AI cannot understand or process a language, the consequences reach well beyond the odd mistranslation. Language accessibility effectively decides which countries and cultures get to participate in the digital economy, and which do not.

 

Many public services in South Africa are now piloting and adopting AI, from healthcare to banking and education.

 

 

Help me, but only in English

 

In 2025, for example, South Africa’s National Department of Health endorsed “Self-Cav”, a digital health chatbot piloted to talk via WhatsApp to young South Africans about sensitive topics such as HIV prevention medication, sex and mental health in a judgement-free way.

 

It is available only in English – and for life-saving tools like this to reach their full potential creators need to “hyperlocalise” them, training them in languages such as isiZulu and Sepedi and in slang. Without this, they will not be able to reach the people who need them most.

 

Bridging that language gap is what drove Lombard, Buys and Meyer to build MzansiLM, laying the groundwork for reclaiming digital sovereignty – and they are part of a rapidly growing movement to do so across the African continent.

 

In late 2025, a team backed by a $2.2m Gates Foundation grant released African Next Voices, described by the BBC as “the largest AI-ready speech dataset for African languages ever assembled,” covering 9,000 hours across 18 languages including Kikuyu, Dholuo, Hausa and Yoruba.

 

In February 2026 Google launched WAXAL, an open dataset spanning 21 African languages. The Masakhane research community, a pan-African natural language processing (NLP) network whose name means “we build together” in isiZulu, has published translation tools for over 48 African languages.

 

Outside of the continent, Cohere, a Canadian AI company, has partnered with HausaNLP to bring African language data into its Aya multilingual model.

 

These collaborative efforts are all steps in the right direction, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Africa is home to over a billion people and more than 2,000 languages, yet global AI systems require a staggering mountain of data to learn how to speak a language fluently.

 

The UCT team is confident about where their own work sits in the scale of the solution.

 

Open research

 

“A lot of the progress we were able to make depends on earlier open research from the African Natural Language Processing research community, so continuing that openness is essential,” Lombard told UCT News.

 

“We still need better and broader data sources, stronger benchmarks and the kind of shared datasets, models, code and results that make it possible for others to reproduce and extend the work.”

 

Meyer agrees: “The research community plays an important role here by working openly, sharing datasets, models and findings so others can build on them.

 

“That kind of openness is often what leads to progress, especially compared to proprietary systems where much of the data and methodology isn’t accessible.”

 

MzansiLM is small compared to the behemoths of Silicon Valley, but its accuracy proves the potential of localised research compared solely to corporate funding.

 

The mountain of data left to build is still staggering, but the momentum has already begun."

Emily Allen

Wed 3rd June 2026

https://african.business/2026/06/arts-culture/not-lost-in-translation-training-ai-to-speak-african-languages

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"20 Robert Munsch titles are being translated into Indigenous languages

 

For generations of Canadian kids, Robert Munsch stories have been a bedtime staple. Now, some of those beloved books are getting a Yukon twist. The Yukon Native Language Centre is translating 20 Munsch titles into Indigenous languages — including several stories with Yukon connections..."

June 3

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7222867

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"How One Media Company Is Fighting Manga’s Major Piracy Problem

The manga industry has a big problem and it’s not lack of demand, but a lack of authorized supply.

“There is a global demand for manga worldwide, and there’s far more demands than any content that’s officially translated right now, and that’s a very big issue,” Shoko Ugaki, the CEO of manga translation company Orange Inc., told Variety in an interview via translator last month.

Based on Orange’s recent survey, there are approximately 30,000 manga titles that have been translated into English versus the number of pirated English-translation mangas, which come out to “about five times more than officially translated manga,” per Ugaki.

Orange’s mission is to release licensed manga, with its most notable project to date being “The Gene of AI,” which was originally released in Japan in 2016 to critical acclaimed and received an anime adaptation that launched globally on Crunchyroll in 2023. But despite that success, the original “The Gene of AI” manga never had an official English release until this May, when Orange partnered with publisher Akita Shoten to release the edition through Orange’s emaqi platform.

“Most of the manga the fans read, they’re reading the pirated version, so that is the bottleneck,” Ugaki said. “Officially translated manga is about several thousand titles, which is 20,000 books or comics right now. I own 30,000 comic books privately. So officially translated manga is less than what I own privately. A lot of pirated versions — five to 10 times more than officially translated versions — are translated by volunteers. So the manga fans, if you like manga more, then you read more pirated versions. The issue is that there is no returns for the creators of these [pirated] mangas, that’s the bottleneck.”

Ugaki says there was a financial loss of “close to 6 trillion Japanese yen last year alone” due to manga piracy.

“There’s no appropriate compensation for creators of manga, and at the same time, all the publishers, they don’t receive income or revenue because of the piracy issues,” Ugaki said. “Then they cannot allocate enough budget to create the next works or next line of work, so this influences the entire ecosystem of this manga industry.”

That’s where Orange aims to make real change with its digital cross-publisher manga app emaqi, scaling official translations of never-before-available titles in a creator-friendly way.

“If we can establish the system and produce more official translations, then that will be beneficial for not only creators, but all the publishers that participate in our system, so that within that system we can create a more beneficial cycle for everyone to produce more and produce better works in the future,” Ugaki said. “I believe that we are going to have to put everything we have into this industry itself to raise more official translation and official services, so less people will use or depend on pirated versions.”

Ugaki attributes the growing appetite for official manga translations to the rising popularity of anime in the U.S., and adaptations like Netflix’s “One Piece.”

“I think anime started this manga appetite globally; however, I think that we’re still at the very early phase; that global populations or audiences are starting to notice or become aware of the sort of appeal that manga and anime has, so we have a lot more to offer,” Ugaki said. “However, we have so much to do in order to convey the appeal of manga compared to anime. We need to do more, so that global audiences will be more aware of appeal and attractiveness of manga. In Japan, it’s common sense, where everyone knows that all these anime came from manga, or the manga was the original, and then that was made into anime. But this kind of flow is not really understood overseas, so that is another aspect that we need to work on.”"
Jennifer Maas
Jun 3, 2026
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/manga-piracy-problem-orange-emaqi-1236764978/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"AI goes medieval on translating

   

Modern AI technology has found its way into the Byzantine Empire, unlocking the ability to decipher medieval Greek. This language bridged the transition between ancient Greek and modern Greek, spanning the era from 600 to 1500 A.D. This new ability to understand these ancient texts can help us to better understand historical facts and culture, offering new insights into that age. Since medieval Greek is difficult to read, an AI optical character recognition (OCR) engine was used to decipher the language. Finally, we can read a firsthand account of the Siege of Thessalonica (good for Ottoman Empire enthusiasts).

 

Just like deciphering your doctor’s handwriting can feel like it requires some sort of cryptex, trying to read medieval Greek has been a head-scratching puzzle. The appearance of medieval Greek can vary depending on the period and writer, not only in terms of penmanship but also in format. In some cases, the script can be fragmented, and the spelling is inconsistent. Sometimes there are spaces between words and other times not, making it impossible to understand without a 600-year-old scholar helping you to study the language.

 

Without a time machine to bring back those ancient scholars, the 5000 medieval Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library are left to collect dust. That was before TOPPAN, a Japanese printing company, used 50 annotated items from the Vatican Library to transcribe the text into training data. To verify its findings, TOPPAN presented its transcriptions to two experts in medieval Greek philology, who reviewed the data set.

 

 

 

 

Image courtesy of iStock.com/TopVectors.

 

The researchers used a deep-learning handwritten text recognition (HTR) system based on TOPPAN’s Fuminoha OCR technology. The system uses a cursive script data set, an AI cursive script recognition program, and a viewer — like a literary Swiss Army knife (or Greek makhaira). It enables the identification of character coordinates even for the most difficult-to-read characters. The system allows users to discard characters with low confidence levels and perform more accurate single-character recognition instead. Fuminoha, a classical Japanese reading service, proved to be well suited for this project, with medieval Greek manuscripts having various ligatures and an unconventional layout of letters. For this kind of complex character layout, the hybrid system is more effective than a solely line-based system; establishing a foothold in translation is a bit like the Ottoman Turks establishing a foothold in northern Greece.

 

 

 

Culture is meant to be preserved, not forgotten. This research is part of TOPPAN’s 30-year collaboration with the Vatican Library to conserve culture for future generations. The collaboration has made more than 2 million items from the Vatican Library’s collection available to the public for research and educational purposes as International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) high-resolution images. During the past 30 years, TOPPAN and the Vatican Library have created a high-resolution digital archive of the Gutenberg 42-line Bible and developed a project that deciphers and reconstructs ancient, reused parchment manuscripts.

 

Beyond medieval Greek, TOPPAN has worked on deciphering cursive-style classical Japanese texts — another form of writing that is difficult for modern people to read. This project used historical materials from across Japan. In 2021, TOPPAN launched Fuminoha and the Komonjo Camera, a mobile application that allows anyone to read classical Japanese easily.

 

This is not just a fun opportunity for researchers to scream “níke” (victory); it is a monumental contribution to the field of Greek language research. The release of the high-resolution images and documents has made cultural documents accessible to people worldwide — and has solved a puzzle that was hundreds of years old.

 

Published: June 2026"

https://www.photonics.com/Articles/AI-goes-medieval-on-translating/p5/a72275

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

About 6.2 billion people have the entire Bible translated in their native tongue, announced Wycliffe Bible Translators UK.

"Wycliffe Bible Translators UK announced that the Bible has been translated into its 800th language, meaning 6.2 billion people have the entire Bible translated in their native tongue. The achievement comes amid what the organization calls a “tremendous acceleration” in Bible translation efforts within recent years. 

 

James Poole, Wycliffe UK’s executive director, says reaching the 800-languages mark is notable, but more important, it means wider global access to the Bible in the heart language or dialect of millions of people. 

 

“Celebrating the 800th completed Bible translation is very exciting, of course,” Poole said. “But more significant than the number itself is what it represents. Millions more people are now able to engage with the whole Bible in the language that speaks to them best, often for the first time.”

 

In 1998, Bible translation reached its 400th language. But that number has doubled since then in a surge that is only increasing. In 2020, Bible translation reached its 700th language. And since then, 500 million more people have the whole Bible in their language. The acceleration of Bible translation in recent years is remarkable considering that it took over 1,900 years for the first 400 languages to be translated.

 

Poole says that now “is an extraordinary time for world mission.”

 

“Over recent decades we have seen remarkable progress, with translation work accelerating in many parts of the world. Communities are receiving the Bible far sooner than would have seemed possible only a generation ago,” Poole said. ‘That matters because it means people are gaining access to God’s Word in languages they understand deeply and naturally. As churches engage with the Scriptures in their own languages, they are better equipped for evangelism, discipleship and ministry.”

 

Among the most recently translated Bibles is a translation for the Podoko people who live in north Cameroon. They are receiving the Bible through a smartphone app rather than a printed Bible.

 

Languages currently being translated include Weh and Mokpe, tongues spoken in Cameroon, as well as Ifè which is spoken in Togo and Benin. A language in Ghana known as Koma and a language known as Shor in Siberia are also in the works. 

 

“We are witnessing God at work: this is a historic opportunity, and it is a privilege to play a part in what He is doing,” Poole said. 

 

Despite this milestone, about 1.5 billion people do not have the Bible translated in their native language.

 

“As we join in the celebrations for the 800th Bible, at the same time we remember the 1 in 5 people worldwide who do not yet have access to the Bible in the language that serves them best,” Poole said. “So, alongside our gratitude for what has been achieved, there remains a sense of urgency. Every language represents people whom God loves. That is why we continue to work with Christians and churches around the world as they seek to make God’s Word accessible to their communities.”

 

Wycliffe Bible Translators UK attributes the sharp increase in Bible translations in part to technological advancements such as generators that allow computers to operate in places with unpredictable electricity as well as access to computers that are empowering language teams to effectively complete translations. Additionally, new translation software is allowing the quality and speed of translations to improve. The increased ability for people to connect overseas to work together on such projects has also accelerated Bible translations. 

 

Mark Woodward, a Wycliffe UK staff member who is helping develop AI technology to aid in translation-accuracy checking procedures, is seeing AI’s effectiveness in producing accurate translations. 

 

“We think AI can be a tool that can make things better and more efficient for Bible translators,” Woodward explains. “It could be a similar revolution within the work of Bible translation to when translation teams started to use computers.”"

Written by:

Hannah Davis

https://billygraham.org/decision-magazine/articles/bible-translation-hits-landmark-800th-language-mark

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

⁸Conférences, le 15 juin 2026, à Marseille (Bouches du Rhône) - horaires, tarifs, renseignements. La traduction littéraire est un espace où s'opèrent des réflexions linguistiques et culturelles sur des univers d'expérience spécifiques. 

"Traduction des expériences? La littérature comme lieu d’émancipation

 

La traduction littéraire est un espace où s'opèrent des réflexions linguistiques et culturelles sur des univers d'expérience spécifiques. Les pratiques de traduction et de publication peuvent ainsi ouvrir la voie à de nouveaux publics – ou au contraire la fermer. Jeffrey Trehudic et Marie Herrmann examinent cette question sous un angle féministe, queer, intersectionnel et plurilingue. Ils posent les questions suivantes : comment s'opère le transfert d'expériences spécifiques entre l'Allemagne et la France, et au-delà ? Et la traduction peut-elle être un espace propice à la compréhension et à la solidarité ?

 

Après des études de médiation culturelle et de traduction à Paris et en Allemagne, Jeffrey Trehudic s'installe à Berlin où il commence à travailler dans le milieu culturel franco-allemand, puis littéraire, avant de participer au programme Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt en 2022. Depuis 2022, il est traducteur littéraire de l'allemand et responsable éditorial de la revue Litterall, et il travaille également comme libraire.

 

Marie Hermann est éditrice, traductrice et interprète. Elle a fondé les éditions Hors d’atteinte en 2018, domiciliées à Marseille, et a notamment publié des ouvrages de Sara Ahmed, Jacques Bouveresse, Mehdi Charef, Mariame Kaba et Tassadit Imache, ainsi qu'une réactualisation des classiques Notre corps, nous-mêmes et Nos enfants, nous-mêmes. Elle a traduit des textes de Rosa Luxemburg, de Trevor Noah ou de Clara Zetkin.

...

Cet événement est organisé avec le soutien du Fonds citoyen franco-allemand. Il est organisé en partenariat avec le FIDMarseille, le Goethe-Institut de Marseille, la Maison allemande de Marseille, Litterallea et l'AMU.

 

Cet événement a été renseigné par un organisme institutionnel (Office Métropolitain de tourisme et des congrès de Marseille). Date de dernière mise à jour le 03/06/2026"

Le 15/06/2026

FIDMarseille, 14 allée Léon Gambetta | Marseille

Ouverture des portes à 18 h 45.

L'événement se déroulera en français.

Après la rencontre, un verre de l'amitié sera offert.

 NC

https://www.jds.fr/marseille/manifestations/conferences/traduction-des-experiences-la-litterature-comme-lieu-d-emancipation-1569769_A

"Décisions d’avant 1969 de la Cour suprême: pas d’obligation de traduction

 

MONTRÉAL — L’organisme Droits collectifs Québec (DCQ), qui souhaite forcer la Cour suprême à traduire en français ses décisions antérieures à 1969, a été débouté en Cour fédérale.

 

Dans une décision rendue mardi, la juge Denise A. LeBlanc a conclu que les décisions historiques du plus haut tribunal du Canada ne constituent ni des «services» ni des «communications au public» assujetties à l’obligation de traduction prévue à la Loi sur les langues officielles (LLO).

 

DCQ accueille avec déception, mais sans grande surprise, la décision de la Cour fédérale, a réagi son directeur général, Étienne-Alexis Boucher, qui a porté la cause devant le tribunal.

 

«Il faut quand même réaliser qu’on demandait à la Cour de renverser et d’aller à contre-courant d’un système qui était bien établi depuis plusieurs décennies», a commenté M. Boucher en entrevue. Il indique que l’organisme étudiera la possibilité de porter en appel la décision.

 

 

DCQ avait intenté des procédures en Cour fédérale contre le Bureau de la registraire de la Cour suprême en vertu d’un article de la LLO, après avoir eu gain de cause auprès du commissaire aux langues officielles.

 

L’organisme reprochait l’absence d’une version française pour des décisions rendues entre 1877 et 1969 et mises en ligne sur le site du plus haut tribunal du pays.

 

Avant l’entrée en vigueur de la LLO en septembre 1969, la Cour suprême n’était pas tenue de publier ses décisions dans les deux langues officielles. On compte environ 6000 décisions unilingues, qui avaient été rendues généralement dans la langue de l’audience ou celle choisie par le juge.

 

Pas une «retranscription modifiée»

 

DCQ soutenait que la transcription et la mise en ligne ultérieure de ces jugements constituent un acte de communication ou de prestation de services au public visé par l’obligation de les diffuser en anglais et en français en vertu de la loi.

 

 

Pour sa part, le Bureau soutenait plutôt que l’obligation de traduction ne vise que l’interface bilingue du site web de la Cour suprême, et non le texte des décisions historiques elles-mêmes.

 

La Cour fédérale s’est rangée derrière les arguments du Bureau et a tranché que les décisions des tribunaux fédéraux relèvent exclusivement de la partie de la LLO portant sur l’«administration de la justice».

 

Cette section prévoit que les décisions des tribunaux fédéraux doivent être «simultanément mises à la disposition du public dans les deux langues officielles» ou «dans les meilleurs délais».

 

Rien dans la loi ne prévoit que cette disposition s’appliquerait de manière rétroactive aux décisions historiques, mentionne la juge LeBlanc. Elle soulève également que les termes «simultanément» et «dans les meilleurs délais» pouvaient difficilement s’appliquer aux décisions antérieures à 1969, ne pouvant «manifestement pas être mises à la disposition du public ‘‘simultanément’’ ou ‘‘dans les meilleurs délais’’.

 

 

DCQ affirmait toutefois que «le texte affiché en ligne, bien qu’identique au contenu papier, constitue un support différent et une nouvelle mise à la disposition du public», peut-on lire dans la décision. Il s’agit alors, selon l’organisme, d’une «retranscription» qui a été produite dans une seule langue officielle, violant ainsi la LLO.

 

La Cour fédérale a conclu que «tant que le contenu du document n’est pas modifié, un document peut être conservé sous forme électronique, ce qui permet aux jugements de la (Cour suprême) d’exister sous cette forme».

 

«Il apparaît donc que le transfert sur support technologique pour mise à disposition du public ne constitue ni une ‘‘reproduction’’, ni une ‘‘republication’’ ni une ‘‘retranscription’’ modifiée: le document électronique demeure identique au document original avant sa numérisation», a écrit la juge.

 

Un problème d’égalité

 

Bien que le tribunal donne raison au Bureau de la registraire «au niveau de la technique», M. Boucher note un enjeu d’égalité entre les citoyens canadiens.

 

 

«Je ne vois pas en quoi cette décision-là permet de respecter l’esprit de la loi sur les langues officielles, c’est-à-dire que le français et l’anglais soient traités sur un pied d’égalité», évoque-t-il à La Presse Canadienne.

 

«Des jugements, ce sont des documents sérieux sur lesquels travaillent, par exemple, des juristes pour défendre des causes citoyennes ou organisationnelles. Que ces jugements-là soient traduits dans les deux langues, pour nous, ça va de soi», ajoute M. Boucher.

 

Le directeur général de DCQ se réjouit tout de même des retombées positives de ses démarches judiciaires.

 

Après le dépôt de la requête de l’organisme, en 2024, la Cour suprême a annoncé le retrait des quelque 6000 jugements unilingues de son site. L’année suivante, elle a annoncé la traduction de 24 d’entre eux, soit «certaines des décisions les plus importantes rendues par la Cour». L’initiative était présentée comme s’inscrivant dans le cadre du 150e anniversaire du tribunal.

 

«La seule existence de ces procédures-là a convaincu, pour ne pas dire forcé, la Cour suprême à agir. (…) Oui, on a perdu au niveau juridique aujourd’hui, mais on avait déjà fait des gains réels et concrets pour les francophones du Canada», a souligné M. Boucher.

 

Au moment d’écrire ces lignes, le Bureau de la registraire n’avait pas encore réagi à la décision de la Cour fédérale.

 

La cause a été entendue en janvier dernier à Montréal. DCQ a ciblé le Bureau de la registraire, car la Cour suprême elle-même, comme tous les tribunaux, est protégée contre ce genre de recours en vertu du principe de l’indépendance des tribunaux."

Par Frédéric Lacroix-Couture, La Presse Canadienne

2 juin 2026, 20 h

https://www.coupdoeil.info/nouvelles-nationales/decisions-davant-1969-de-la-cour-supreme-pas-dobligation-de-traduction/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Bouygues Telecom ajoute un usage bien plus concret à la puce d’intelligence artificielle intégrée à son nouveau décodeur b.tv disponible avec la Bbox Ultym. Après avoir surtout servi à améliorer l’image, ce composant permet désormais la traduction locale des sous-titres de certaines chaînes TV en direct, le tout grâce à l’intelligence artificielle.

De l’IA pour la traduction de sous-titres
La fonction de traduction en direct permet de suivre un programme télévisé quand le français n’est pas parfaitement maîtrisé ou utiliser la télévision comme appui pour apprendre une autre langue.

Pour l’instant, Bouygues Telecom reste dans une phase d’expérimentation menée auprès d’un nombre limité de clients. Le dispositif ne s’applique qu’aux flux en direct qui disposent déjà de sous-titres pour sourds et malentendants, ce qui ancre la fonction dans une base technique déjà existante plutôt que dans une génération complète de sous-titres par l’opérateur.

L’accès à l’option passe par l’interface de la chaîne en cours de visionnage, via la section « Langue et sous-titres ». L’utilisateur peut ensuite choisir une langue de traduction parmi cinq possibilités, selon la disponibilité des sous-titres d’origine. On retrouve l’anglais, l’espagnol, le portugais, l’arabe et le mandarin.

Cette première liste reste provisoire. Bouygues Telecom précise qu’elle peut évoluer pendant la phase de test qui doit se poursuivre jusqu’en septembre. L’opérateur se laisse donc une marge pour ajuster l’offre avant une éventuelle généralisation.

L’intérêt potentiel de la fonction est assez large. Elle peut aider des personnes peu à l’aise avec le français, servir à des foyers multiculturels ou accompagner des utilisateurs qui veulent progresser dans une langue étrangère.

Il reste toutefois plusieurs points importants à éclaircir. La liste des chaînes réellement compatibles n’est pas encore détaillée et le modèle d’intelligence artificielle n’est pas précisé. Surtout, la valeur réelle du service dépendra de la qualité de traduction sur des programmes en direct, où la vitesse compte autant que la précision."
Jean-Baptiste A.
3 Juin. 2026 • 18:34
https://kulturegeek.fr/news-353148/bouygues-telecom-ajoute-traduction-ia-titres-chaines-tv
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Kuala Lumpur, 31 mai 2026, SPA -- Le pavillon du Royaume, invité d'honneur de la Foire internationale du livre de Kuala Lumpur 2026, a inauguré son cycle de séminaires culturels par une table ronde intitulée « La traduction du contenu islamique : transmission du sens et fidélité du message », sur la scène des foires internationales du livre.
Modéré par Ahmed Al-Alkami, le séminaire a accueilli Dr. Waleed Al-Omari, spécialiste de la traduction. Ce dernier a souligné l'importance d'une traduction rigoureuse du contenu islamique pour transmettre une image juste de l'Islam. Il a précisé que la traduction des concepts islamiques exigeait une compréhension profonde des contextes culturels et des nuances juridiques, afin de préserver l'authenticité du sens et l'exactitude du message.
Dr. Al-Omari a abordé les principaux défis liés à la traduction de la terminologie islamique, mettant en garde contre l'usage de concepts susceptibles de transposer le terme originel vers des référentiels culturels différents, ce qui pourrait altérer sa compréhension réelle par le récepteur.
Il a par ailleurs expliqué que les technologies de l'intelligence artificielle constituaient un outil de soutien pour développer et accélérer les travaux de traduction, mais qu'elles ne remplaçaient en aucun cas la révision humaine spécialisée. Il a ainsi insisté sur la nécessité d'une révision visuelle et éditoriale pour garantir la justesse de la traduction et la fidélité de la transmission.
En conclusion de son intervention, il a évoqué le rôle de la formation de compétences spécialisées dans la traduction du contenu islamique, ainsi que l'importance de soutenir les initiatives dédiées à la traduction des connaissances et des sciences islamiques vers les différentes langues.
Ce séminaire s'inscrit dans le cadre d'une série d'événements culturels et intellectuels organisés par le pavillon du Royaume à la Foire internationale du livre de Kuala Lumpur. Ces activités visent à mettre en valeur le dynamisme culturel saoudien, à renforcer les échanges intellectuels avec les diverses cultures, et à enrichir le dialogue autour des enjeux de l'édition et de la traduction.
-- SPA
10:53 Heure locale 07:53 GMT
0011

"In English, words are rarely deleted from dictionaries. So why in 2021 did a Japanese dictionary publisher give 1,100 words the boot?

...It’s not uncommon in Japanese for dictionary editors to decide that a word has outlived its usefulness and should be chucked out the window.

 

This happened en masse in 2021, when Sankoku, under editor Iima Hiroaki, added 3,500 new words – and ejected 1,100. It was the largest deletion in the dictionary’s history.

 

Iima later took to X to defend the cuts, which he says were based on contemporary usage frequency and search patterns. For example, “MD” (MiniDisc) was removed because the MiniDisc is dead tech, with Sony discontinuing manufacture in 2013. By contrast, カセットテープ (cassette tape) wasn’t cut because nostalgia keeps it alive.

 

In other words, words don’t “age out.” They get cut when the general populace stops using them.

 

“Words are fated to be born and die”

 

Fortunately, these dead words aren’t lost to time. In 2023, Sanseidō published what amounts to a memorial album: the 三省堂国語辞典から消えたことば辞典, or Dictionary of Words That Disappeared from the National Language Dictionary. As a sign of the times, they even released a “dead words” sticker pack on messaging app LINE. (Yes, you can still buy it!)

...

Sanseidō isn’t the only one cataloging dead words. Yonekawa Akihiko, a professor emeritus at Baika Women’s University, is the author of the 2016 俗語発掘記 消えたことば辞典 (The Dead Words Dictionary: A Forensic Journal of Slang). The words cut between the two dictionaries are revealing, as they show how language vacillates alongside the trends of the day.

 

Some of the clusters of words eliminated include:

 

Bubble-era (late Showa) vocabulary. Language from before the economic bubble of the 1980s and 90s popped. Terms like hana-kin (花金) – “Flower Friday,” the Japan Showa equivalent of “TGIF,” reflect the insane work culture of the time. itameshi (イタメシ), “Italian food,” reflects how Italian restaurants were seen as high-end dining and a status symbol. And then there’s スッチー (sutchī) for “stewardess” – a pre-equality relic that got chucked as Japan crawled its way into the Heisei era.

 

Mid-90s kogal words. With the gyaru era officially over, words like チョベリバ (cho-beriba, “very bad”), 写メ (sha-me, flip phone photo mail), and, yes, even コギャル (ko-gyaru) found themselves on the chopping block.

 

The boyfriend words. Yonekawa documents a set of words that reflected the extravagant spending of the late bubble period. For example, women used to talk about having three boyfriends: the アッシー君 (asshī-kun) who drives you home; the メッシー君 (messhī-kun) who pays for dinner; and the ミツグ君 (mitsugu-kun) who buys you presents. These days, it seems, women are more intent on avoiding the Three Cs than on finding the Three Ks.

 

Those aren’t the only relationship words to die. As I discussed in my last write-up about dead Japanese language, for decades leading up to World War II, アベック (abekku), from the French “with,” was used to refer to a couple. This usage petered out sometime in the 1970s.

 

Press accounts talk about “Showa dead words” or “Heisei dead words.” But some linguists argue that the dead word phase is much tighter – about five to 10 years – and isn’t clearly bounded by imperial eras, which often last decades.

 

Maybe some of these words, like Heisei retro loose socks, will come back into fashion at some point. Or maybe they’ll stay dead as new trendy words, like kaiwai, take their place.

 

After all, “words,” as Yonekawa likes to say, “are fated to be born and die.”"

https://unseen-japan.com/japanese-slang-words-dictionary-killed/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Opinion: Latin is more than a dead language, deserves a larger place in UCLA’s curriculum

Dodd Hall is pictured above. Columnist Catherine Price argues Latin should fulfill General Education requirements because of its many academic benefits. (Amelia Chief/Daily Bruin senior staff)

By Catherine Price
May 31, 2026 2:37 p.m.

Latin is a dead language.

Or at least that’s what I’d heard growing up. As a kid, the only time I was confronted with the language was in church, singing hymns I couldn’t hope to translate.

But as a classics student, Latin or Greek is required for the major.

So, I signed up for Latin 1: Elementary Latin in the fall. At first, I viewed the class as a box to check, one more step to completing my degree. However, after a full year of Latin, I can admit that it’s more than a dead language used during Mass.

Latin is a central foundation for subjects like medicine and law. Learning the language teaches valuable skills that all students should have.

As a subject that lays the groundwork for career success, UCLA should promote Latin to a broader range of students – including by allowing Latin courses to fulfill certain General Education requirements.

Students are required to complete GE courses before graduating, including a Philosophical and Linguistic Analysis course for the Foundations of the Arts and Humanities subcategory. These classes teach students how to examine the world around them and their place in it, according to the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

What could help you understand the world around you more than a Latin class?

I first noticed this quality of Latin in a non-academic setting. It was just after midterms, and I was lounging in my dorm, finishing off a season of Supernatural.

The CW show is not necessarily peak television. But it’s entertaining: two flannel-clad brothers driving across the country in their old car, fighting ghosts. The brothers investigate deaths in a tiny town, and if it’s the work of the supernatural, they kill the monster.

In this episode, it was a demon. So, as one does with demons, they started performing a Latin exorcism.

To my surprise, I understood what they were saying.

It wasn’t difficult stuff. “Glory to God,” that sort of thing. But I was intrigued by what I knew.

I then began to notice Latin in more academic settings.

In a political theory class, my professor asked what the word benevolent actually meant – not just the standard definition, but what the word means when broken down.

Well, “bene” was on my vocabulary list, and I knew it meant “well” or “rightly.” I recognized “volent” as a form of “velle,” the verb “to wish.”

My professor confirmed my line of thinking. The word means “to wish to do good.”

I don’t remember why that was important to the lecture, but I do remember the feeling of satisfaction I had that Latin was a skill I could use in real life.

My peers have the same line of thinking. Many of my classmates are pre-med or pre-law students, hoping to use Latin on graduate school entrance exams.

Students who major or double major in classics have higher medical school acceptance rates than those who only focus on science, according to The Princeton Review. Classics students tend to score the highest on the Graduate Record Examination, according to the same article. A 2014 analysis of law school admissions data found that classics students scored highest on the Law School Admissions Test as well, according to The National Jurist.

Those scores make sense. Jargon like “habeas corpus” is easier to break down if students know the Latin translation – in this case, “you should have the body.” If you forget the definition, you can think through the meaning. Latin teaches students to think critically and analytically.

Nearly half of UCLA undergraduates go on to pursue higher degrees, according to data released by the University of California. Students would benefit from learning Latin in preparation for these endeavors. Fitting Latin courses into GE requirements would make them more accessible to students outside of the classics department who otherwise may not be able to fit such classes into their schedules.

While Latin can go toward fulfilling UCLA’s language requirement, students may overlook the option as it is no longer used conversationally. Latin’s value instead lies in its ability to provide context and teach students logical reasoning. These benefits are why the university should create more opportunities for Latin to fulfill more course requirements.

Now that I’ve taken Latin, when I’m approached by a concept I don’t know, my first instinct is to see if I can glean something from the words themselves.

Once students understand that Latin is more than a dead language, they can gain the critical thinking and analytical skills it provides.

Or, more importantly, they can translate exorcisms while watching television."
https://dailybruin.com/2026/05/31/opinion-latin-is-more-than-a-dead-language-deserves-a-larger-place-in-uclas-curriculum
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus