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Charles Tiayon
August 13, 2024 12:49 AM
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Harnessing AI to Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages Introduction The world’s linguistic diversity is under threat. According to UNESCO, over 40% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally are endangered, with many at risk of disappearing forever. As globalization and the dominance of major world languages like English, Mandarin, and Spanish continue to grow, the race is on to preserve the unique cultural treasures embodied in these minority tongues before they are lost to future generations. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are providing powerful new tools in the fight to save endangered languages. From high-tech documentation efforts to community-driven language revitalization programs, AI is playing a critical role in reversing the tide of linguistic extinction. In this article, we’ll explore some of the innovative ways that AI is being leveraged to preserve the world’s endangered languages. The Power of AI in Language Preservation At the heart of the endangered language crisis is a lack of comprehensive data. Many minority and indigenous languages have never been thoroughly documented, with no written grammars, dictionaries, or recorded oral histories available. This lack of linguistic data makes it extremely challenging to develop the educational resources, language-learning tools, and computational applications needed to support language revitalization efforts. This is where artificial intelligence is creating a significant transformation. Advanced speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms are enabling the rapid digitization and documentation of endangered language materials at unprecedented scales. Researchers are deploying AI-powered audio and video recording devices to capture spoken language data from fluent elders, while AI-assisted transcription and translation tools are allowing this data to be efficiently processed and annotated. One pioneering example is the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS University of London. This initiative has used AI-powered recording devices and transcription software to build a vast digital archive of endangered language materials, including over 4,000 hours of audio and video recordings in more than 300 languages. By automating the data collection and processing workflow, the ELDP has been able to significantly accelerate the documentation of these at-risk tongues. Similarly, the Wikitongues project has leveraged AI-powered speech recognition to create an online repository of crowdsourced video recordings of people speaking over 1,000 different languages. This growing digital library allows linguists, educators, and community members to access authentic language data and collaborate on preserving their linguistic heritage. Revitalizing Endangered Languages with AI Beyond just documenting endangered languages, AI is also playing a crucial role in revitalizing them. Intelligent language-learning chatbots, for instance, are being developed to provide interactive, conversational practice for endangered language speakers, particularly younger generations who may not have had the opportunity to learn from fluent elders. These AI assistants can be customized with culturally relevant content and designed to encourage frequent use, helping to foster intergenerational transmission of endangered languages. In New Zealand, the Te Hiku Media organization has created an AI-powered language app called “Te Reo Hāpai” that teaches conversational Māori through interactive games and lessons. Similarly, in Canada, the FirstVoices initiative has developed a suite of mobile apps powered by AI speech recognition that allow Indigenous language learners to practice their skills through voice-enabled activities. Multilingual AI systems are also proving useful for language preservation, as they can facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different endangered languages. For example, the Universal Dependencies project is using AI-driven multilingual natural language processing to create vast datasets of syntactically annotated text in over 100 languages, including many at-risk minority tongues. This linguistic data can then be leveraged to build machine translation systems, educational resources, and other computational tools to support endangered language communities. Ethical Considerations Of course, the integration of AI into language preservation efforts also raises important ethical and practical considerations. There are valid concerns about data privacy, intellectual property rights, and the potential for AI-powered tools to be misused or to inadvertently cause harm to vulnerable language communities. Careful design, rigorous testing, and close collaboration with local stakeholders are essential to ensure that AI is deployed responsibly and equitably in this domain. Conclusion The urgent need to preserve the world’s endangered languages has never been more pressing. With over 40% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally now classified as at-risk, the race is on to document, revitalize, and transmit these vital cultural artifacts to future generations before they disappear forever. Fortunately, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies is providing powerful new tools to aid in this critical effort. From automated language documentation and digitization to interactive AI-powered language learning apps, the integration of AI into language preservation initiatives is transforming the landscape of endangered language conservation. As we continue to explore the remarkable potential of AI to support endangered language communities, it will be essential to do so in a responsible and ethical manner – one that prioritizes the needs, rights, and cultural autonomy of these vulnerable linguistic groups. Only then can we truly harness the full power of AI to safeguard the rich diversity of human expression and ensure that no language is left behind. You may also like: AI and the Revival of Extinct Languages FAQ Q1. What is AI’s role in endangered language preservation? A1. AI is revolutionizing endangered language preservation through technologies like automated language documentation, AI-powered language learning apps, and multilingual AI systems that facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different minority languages. Q2. What are some examples of AI-powered language preservation initiatives? A2. Examples include the Endangered Languages Documentation Programmed at SOAS University of London, the Wikitongues project, the Te Reo Hāpai Māori language app in New Zealand, and the First Voices initiative in Canada. Q3. What ethical considerations arise with using AI for language preservation? A3. Key concerns include data privacy, intellectual property rights, and the potential for AI tools to be misused or cause unintended harm to vulnerable language communities. Careful design, rigorous testing, and close collaboration with local stakeholders are essential. Q4. How can AI help reverse the tide of linguistic extinction? A4. By automating and streamlining the documentation, revitalization, and transmission of endangered languages, AI technologies are providing new hope for safeguarding the rich cultural diversity embodied in the world’s minority tongues. Q5. What is the current state of endangered language preservation globally? A5. According to UNESCO, over 40% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally are currently endangered, with many at serious risk of disappearing forever due to factors like globalization and the dominance of major world languages.
Researchers across Africa, Asia and the Middle East are building their own language models designed for local tongues, cultural nuance and digital independence
"In a high-stakes artificial intelligence race between the United States and China, an equally transformative movement is taking shape elsewhere. From Cape Town to Bangalore, from Cairo to Riyadh, researchers, engineers and public institutions are building homegrown AI systems, models that speak not just in local languages, but with regional insight and cultural depth.
The dominant narrative in AI, particularly since the early 2020s, has focused on a handful of US-based companies like OpenAI with GPT, Google with Gemini, Meta’s LLaMa, Anthropic’s Claude. They vie to build ever larger and more capable models. Earlier in 2025, China’s DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, added a new twist by releasing large language models (LLMs) that rival their American counterparts, with a smaller computational demand. But increasingly, researchers across the Global South are challenging the notion that technological leadership in AI is the exclusive domain of these two superpowers.
Instead, scientists and institutions in countries like India, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are rethinking the very premise of generative AI. Their focus is not on scaling up, but on scaling right, building models that work for local users, in their languages, and within their social and economic realities.
“How do we make sure that the entire planet benefits from AI?” asks Benjamin Rosman, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and a lead developer of InkubaLM, a generative model trained on five African languages. “I want more and more voices to be in the conversation”.
Beyond English, beyond Silicon Valley
Large language models work by training on massive troves of online text. While the latest versions of GPT, Gemini or LLaMa boast multilingual capabilities, the overwhelming presence of English-language material and Western cultural contexts in these datasets skews their outputs. For speakers of Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa and countless other languages, that means AI systems may not only stumble over grammar and syntax, they can also miss the point entirely.
“In Indian languages, large models trained on English data just don’t perform well,” says Janki Nawale, a linguist at AI4Bharat, a lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. “There are cultural nuances, dialectal variations, and even non-standard scripts that make translation and understanding difficult.” Nawale’s team builds supervised datasets and evaluation benchmarks for what specialists call “low resource” languages, those that lack robust digital corpora for machine learning.
It’s not just a question of grammar or vocabulary. “The meaning often lies in the implication,” says Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa. “In isiXhosa, the words are one thing but what’s being implied is what really matters.” Marivate co-leads Masakhane NLP, a pan-African collective of AI researchers that recently developed AFROBENCH, a rigorous benchmark for evaluating how well large language models perform on 64 African languages across 15 tasks. The results, published in a preprint in March, revealed major gaps in performance between English and nearly all African languages, especially with open-source models.
Similar concerns arise in the Arabic-speaking world. “If English dominates the training process, the answers will be filtered through a Western lens rather than an Arab one,” says Mekki Habib, a robotics professor at the American University in Cairo. A 2024 preprint from the Tunisian AI firm Clusterlab finds that many multilingual models fail to capture Arabic’s syntactic complexity or cultural frames of reference, particularly in dialect-rich contexts.
Governments step in
For many countries in the Global South, the stakes are geopolitical as well as linguistic. Dependence on Western or Chinese AI infrastructure could mean diminished sovereignty over information, technology, and even national narratives. In response, governments are pouring resources into creating their own models.
Saudi Arabia’s national AI authority, SDAIA, has built ‘ALLaM,’ an Arabic-first model based on Meta’s LLaMa-2, enriched with more than 540 billion Arabic tokens. The United Arab Emirates has backed several initiatives, including ‘Jais,’ an open-source Arabic-English model built by MBZUAI in collaboration with US chipmaker Cerebras Systems and the Abu Dhabi firm Inception. Another UAE-backed project, Noor, focuses on educational and Islamic applications.
In Qatar, researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, have developed the Fanar platform and its LLMs Fanar Star and Fanar Prime. Trained on a trillion tokens of Arabic, English, and code, Fanar’s tokenization approach is specifically engineered to reflect Arabic’s rich morphology and syntax.
India has emerged as a major hub for AI localization. In 2024, the government launched BharatGen, a public-private initiative funded with 235 crore (€26 million) initiative aimed at building foundation models attuned to India’s vast linguistic and cultural diversity. The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and also involves its sister organizations in Hyderabad, Mandi, Kanpur, Indore, and Madras. The programme’s first product, e-vikrAI, can generate product descriptions and pricing suggestions from images in various Indic languages. Startups like Ola-backed Krutrim and CoRover’s BharatGPT have jumped in, while Google’s Indian lab unveiled MuRIL, a language model trained exclusively on Indian languages. The Indian governments’ AI Mission has received more than180 proposals from local researchers and startups to build national-scale AI infrastructure and large language models, and the Bengaluru-based company, AI Sarvam, has been selected to build India’s first ‘sovereign’ LLM, expected to be fluent in various Indian languages.
In Africa, much of the energy comes from the ground up. Masakhane NLP and Deep Learning Indaba, a pan-African academic movement, have created a decentralized research culture across the continent. One notable offshoot, Johannesburg-based Lelapa AI, launched InkubaLM in September 2024. It’s a ‘small language model’ (SLM) focused on five African languages with broad reach: Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, isiZulu and isiXhosa.
“With only 0.4 billion parameters, it performs comparably to much larger models,” says Rosman. The model’s compact size and efficiency are designed to meet Africa’s infrastructure constraints while serving real-world applications. Another African model is UlizaLlama, a 7-billion parameter model developed by the Kenyan foundation Jacaranda Health, to support new and expectant mothers with AI-driven support in Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu.
India’s research scene is similarly vibrant. The AI4Bharat laboratory at IIT Madras has just released IndicTrans2, that supports translation across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Sarvam AI, another startup, released its first LLM last year to support 10 major Indian languages. And KissanAI, co-founded by Pratik Desai, develops generative AI tools to deliver agricultural advice to farmers in their native languages.
The data dilemma
Yet building LLMs for underrepresented languages poses enormous challenges. Chief among them is data scarcity. “Even Hindi datasets are tiny compared to English,” says Tapas Kumar Mishra, a professor at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in eastern India. “So, training models from scratch is unlikely to match English-based models in performance.”
Rosman agrees. “The big-data paradigm doesn’t work for African languages. We simply don’t have the volume.” His team is pioneering alternative approaches like the Esethu Framework, a protocol for ethically collecting speech datasets from native speakers and redistributing revenue back to further development of AI tools for under-resourced languages. The project’s pilot used read speech from isiXhosa speakers, complete with metadata, to build voice-based applications.
In Arab nations, similar work is underway. Clusterlab’s 101 Billion Arabic Words Dataset is the largest of its kind, meticulously extracted and cleaned from the web to support Arabic-first model training.
The cost of staying local
But for all the innovation, practical obstacles remain. “The return on investment is low,” says KissanAI’s Desai. “The market for regional language models is big, but those with purchasing power still work in English.” And while Western tech companies attract the best minds globally, including many Indian and African scientists, researchers at home often face limited funding, patchy computing infrastructure, and unclear legal frameworks around data and privacy.
“There’s still a lack of sustainable funding, a shortage of specialists, and insufficient integration with educational or public systems,” warns Habib, the Cairo-based professor. “All of this has to change.”
A different vision for AI
Despite the hurdles, what’s emerging is a distinct vision for AI in the Global South – one that favours practical impact over prestige, and community ownership over corporate secrecy.
“There’s more emphasis here on solving real problems for real people,” says Nawale of AI4Bharat. Rather than chasing benchmark scores, researchers are aiming for relevance: tools for farmers, students, and small business owners.
And openness matters. “Some companies claim to be open-source, but they only release the model weights, not the data,” Marivate says. “With InkubaLM, we release both. We want others to build on what we’ve done, to do it better.”
In a global contest often measured in teraflops and tokens, these efforts may seem modest. But for the billions who speak the world’s less-resourced languages, they represent a future in which AI doesn’t just speak to them, but with them."
Sibusiso Biyela, Amr Rageh and Shakoor Rather
20 May 2025
https://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2025.65
#metaglossia_mundus
As trees across campus shed the last of their autumn leaves, a new species of tree blossomed in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Its trunk and branches were papier-mâché, and its colorful leaves displayed various versions of a single poem. Students created the tree as a part of Introduction to the Art of Translation, a class about the theory of translation taught by Marella Feltrin-Morris, professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
"The translation tree, created by the students in Introduction to the Art of Translation, has been planted in the Office of International Student and Scholar Services, open for additional translations of the Italian poem, “Soldati.”
As trees across campus shed the last of their autumn leaves, a new species of tree blossomed in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Its trunk and branches were papier-mâché, and its colorful leaves displayed various versions of a single poem. Students created the tree as a part of Introduction to the Art of Translation, a class about the theory of translation taught by Marella Feltrin-Morris, professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
The tree is an artistic representation of the Italian poem “Soldati,” or “Soldiers,” written by nobel-prize winning poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. The tree trunk contains the original poem, with students’ translations written on paper leaves hanging from the branches.
Though the tree initially consisted only of translations created in the class, Feltrin-Morris and her students hope to encourage community members from across to contribute to the project. On Nov. 14, students from the class set up a table in Textor Hall to promote the tree, inviting people passing by to marvel at its beauty and aid its growth. On Dec. 3, the tree was relocated to the Office of International Student and Scholar Services, where international students will be able to add their own translations.
For years, Feltrin-Morris dreamed of creating the tree, but said she felt daunted by her lack of artistic skill. This year, thanks to the enthusiasm of her students, she is finally bringing her vision to life. She enlisted Senior Lio Grogan to assemble the model using twigs from real trees and old newspapers. Though Grogan said they never imagined being this involved in the process, they are pleased with their role in the project.
“Having a visual representation of multiculturalism and multilingualism is very rewarding,” Grogan said. “It’s always fun to see how people interpret things through art [and] language.”
The project aims to increase the visibility of translation, a field that Feltrin-Morris said is often taken for granted.
“The translator is not simply conveying information,” Feltrin-Morris said. “They’re also helping understand a different culture.”
Communicating the nuances of “Soldati” is particularly challenging. The four line, eight word poem is famous across Italy for its brevity and poignant message. Ungaretti wrote the piece in 1918 while fighting in World War I. The poem compares soldiers to autumn leaves, hanging to life precariously, waiting to drop one by one. The subject matter gave the Translation Tree seasonal relevance — its construction coincided with the height of Fall and Veterans Day. And though the constant imminence of death felt in wartime is a uniquely traumatic experience, the impermanence of mortality is universally relatable.
“I think that the reason why the poem has survived for so long is that it speaks to a sense that we all share at one time or the other,” Feltrin-Morris said. “Not that we think that we’re dying from one moment to the next, but that we feel this sense of insecurity. This certainly speaks to the political situation, the world situation, but even when we think of our own mental health. How do we give voice to that sense of insecurity?”
Feltrin-Morris said she also sees autumn leaves as a metaphor for translation itself. The layout of the tree represents the ephemerality of the medium.
“No translation is ever going to be final,” Feltrin-Morris said. “No translation is ever going to be the one. There’s always going to be something else. We appreciate a text, not just through one translation, but through many translations.”
The leaves on the tree can be seen with each student’s translations of the poem, highlighting the interpretive nature of translation. (Kai Lincke)
The imperfection and impermanence of the field is what makes the class both frustrating and fascinating. By understanding translation as an art form, students learn to see it as a circle of life, rather than a linear process.
One fundamental of the class is the understanding that so much of language can never truly be translated. The course devotes an entire project to “untranslatable words” — words that are so specific in their meaning and cultural context they cannot easily be transferred from one language to another. Students are often asked to translate documents charged with specific emotional significance; Grogan’s current assignment is to translate a death certificate.
Junior Chloé Pénot, a student in the class, said she appreciates the nuances of the discipline.
“In this class, you realize that there is no perfect translation,” Pénot said. “Nothing can be perfect because between languages, there’s no means of communicating exactly phrases, nuances, pictures, all of that.”
Each student enriches the class with their unique language knowledge. Students in the class speak Cantonese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili. Over the years, Feltrin-Morris estimates that the class has included 25 different languages.
This year, roughly half the class speaks Spanish, making it the most common language for translations on the tree. Of all the Spanish translations of “Soldati,” no two were exactly alike, varying based on dialect or interpretation of the poem.
Sophomore Xavier Newby, a Spanish major and one of the nine Spanish-speaking students in the class, said he was surprised and inspired by the diversity of Spanish translations.
“A lot of the time with poetry, especially if you don’t have the author of the poem in front of you, it’s up to your interpretation of what that poem means to you personally,” Newby said. “Capturing all of the different interpretations in a language other than the original when you aren’t the author yourself is really difficult.”
Newby said that a translator must decide which aspects of the poem must be prioritized and which must be sacrificed. Should they preserve the rhyme scheme, or emphasize strong word choice? Should they clarify the message, or maintain syllable count?
Each translation hanging from the tree alters the poem in a different way. Some students changed the order of the words for clarity. Others changed the placement of line breaks, altering the structure of the piece.
Though Grogan said they often feel daunted by the expansive task of translation, they said they have learned to see the beauty of its imperfection.
“When you’re translating poetry, you might as well become a poet yourself,” Grogan said. “Because you are essentially rewriting the poem … It’s very much an artistic medium.”"
By Meital Fried, Contributing Writer
December 5, 2025
https://theithacan.org/65264/life-culture/art-of-translation-class-utilizes-poetry-to-spread-its-roots/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
""Les Bouquiottes d'lai Castafiore" : un album de Tintin en patois bourguignon de l'Auxois voit le jour
Fanny Gelb
8 décembre 2025
"Les Bouquiottes d'lai Castafiore", comprenez "Les Bijoux de la Castafiore". Pour la première fois, un album de Tintin en bourguignon de l'Auxois voit le jour. Nicolas Poussy est originaire de Mont-Saint-Jean (Côte-d'Or). Pour ce fan de Tintin, il était naturel de lier ses racines à sa passion.
Est-ce que "Les Bouquiottes d'lai Castafiore", ça vous parle ? C'est la traduction de l'album de Tintin "Les Bijoux de la Castafiore" en bourguignon de l'Auxois ! Le vint-et-unième album des Aventures de Tintin, histoire mythique du dessinateur belge Hergé, est traduit dans ce patois de Côte-d'Or. Une initiative de Nicolas Poussy, un tintinophile - un fan de Tintin - originaire de Mont-Saint-Jean. Il a entendu ses grands-parents parler l'Auxois durant toute sa jeunesse. Alors cet album c'est pour continuer à faire vivre cette langue.
Dans la commune de Mont-Saint-Jean, à une dizaine de kilomètres de Pouilly-en-Auxois, la charmante maison en pierre de Nicolas Poussy est en plein travaux...
Dans la maison de Nicolas Poussy, il est difficile de faire un pas sans tomber sur un bibelot à l'effigie d'un personnage de l'univers de Tintin. © Radio France - FG
L'album des "Bouquiottes", comme on peut le simplifier, tenait à cœur à Nicolas Poussy. Le but : faire vivre le patois, aujourd'hui presque plus parlé, grâce à sa passion de Tintin. "C'est Tintin qui amène le patois à la maison. Quand je vois sur des marchés des enfants qui ont cinq ans et qui reconnaissent les titres mais qui disent qu'ils ne comprennent rien. Ils se demandent si c'est de l'anglais, alors que, non, c'est du patois, ça remet une couche de transmission d'un patrimoine", s'enthousiasme encore Nicolas Poussy.
Nicolas Poussy a commencé la traduction tout seul de son côté, il y a cinq ans. "Il y avait certains termes que j'avais entendu dans ma jeunesse. C'était assez intuitif. Après, il a fallu faire des recherches avec de la littérature en patois." Mais sans dictionnaire, le plus compliqué a été la conjugaison. "Si on veut de l'homogénéité, on va se faire un peu sa propre graphie. Par exemple, le mot "semblable". Ici, on dit " semblabiye". On entend le "-bieu". C'est pas évident de traduire ça, de le faire sentir dans l'album. Alors on a mis un "-y" pour l'illustrer."
...
L'album est le petit dernier des BD traduites dans 51 langues régionales. C'est souvent "Les Bijoux de la Castafiore" qui est choisi, explique Robert Sillen, directeur juridique chez Casterman. "C'est une aventure qu'on peut imaginer facilement en France. Elle ne se déroule pas à l'étranger. Donc c'est plus logique que les personnages parlent la langue régionale.""
https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/culture-loisirs/les-bouquiottes-d-lai-castafiore-un-album-de-tintin-en-patois-bourguignon-de-l-auxois-voit-le-jour-2657648
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Pacific islanders on Tokelau celebrate full translation of Bible in their language
By Chris Eyte Dec 5, 2025
The translation of the Bible into Tokelauan involved experts such as Ioane Teao, (pictured, left, with Dr. Stephen Pattemore) who dedicated over 23 years to the work, and Rev. Tui Sopoaga, who chaired the translation committee. United Bible Societies LinkedIn
Pacific islanders on the small island nation of Tokelau have received the first complete Bible translation in their local heart language of Tokelauan.
Announcing the accomplishment on social media on Dec. 3, the United Bible Societies (UBS) hailed the news as a “historic milestone for one of the world’s most remote island nations.”
About 1,500 people live across the three isolated atolls Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo of the island nation located between Hawaii and New Zealand, and in the southern part of the ocean. Most of the islanders are Christians and their dialect is historically in the oral tradition rather than a written form.
“This achievement is a testament to the power of partnership and the perseverance of God’s people. It shows what can happen when translation, community, and faith come together,” said Neels Janse van Rensburg, Chief Executive Officer of Bible Society New Zealand (BSNZ).
“What makes this moment especially meaningful is the journey behind it,” explained the UBS.
“For a language that has been largely oral, this translation required deep collaboration with the community, careful linguistic work, and 26 years of patient partnership. We are grateful to everyone in Tokelau, the Bible Society New Zealand (BSNZ), and the wider global Bible translation community who contributed to this milestone.”
A launch of the complete Bible translation took place on the Fakaofo Atoll on Oct. 27. It coincided with Tokelau Language Week in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The BSNZ team visiting Tokelau for the launch were honored at a parliamentary sitting with an official “thank you” alongside a cultural evening of song and dance presented by the people from the three tropical coral atolls.
A “Toluma” traditional gift given to the BSNZ team comprised a wooden container used by the Tokelauans when canoe fishing at sea. It traditionally holds valuables and the caught fish, and is cleverly designed to float towards land should the canoe capsize.
Tokelau community leader and former Ulu-o-Tokelau (Tokelaun head of government), Kelihiano Kalolo, described the new Bible translation as “a very big event,” which also served to remind people of the importance in both preserving and strengthening the language.
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“It will be good for the development of the spiritual life of people that will lead to harmonious living in the villages,” he said.
The work started as a structured project in 1996 with the launch of a translators’ workshop, following a “dream that had been for decades prior,” according to the UBS. The mission worked with BSNZ to make it a reality.
“Over the following decades, teams of translators, linguists, and advisors worked diligently to bring scripture to life in Tokelau’s own words,” added the UBS release.
“The task was monumental—not least because Tokelauan had long been an oral language, with early translators first needing to develop consistent written forms and grammar before translation could begin.”
The translation team included Ioane Teao who dedicated 23 years to the work and Rev. Tui Sopoaga, who chaired the translation committee.
They worked with Stephen Pattemore, BSNZ’s now-retired translation director, and eventually performed the final verse check in 2019.
Clare Knowles, Abi Das, and Daniel Harrison guided the final stages of typesetting, design, and publication, ensuring the Bible would be ready in time for the long-awaited celebration, according to the UBS.
Rensburg paid tribute to colleagues from UBS for their hard-working efforts in the project.
“UBS provided earlier translation advisory and consultancy services in the pioneering years of the project, technical tools, such as Paratext, and strategic guidance that were essential to this project’s success,” said van Rensburg.
The history of the translation originated with the idea of a Tokelauan Bible in the late 1960s when a number of Tokelauans migrated to New Zealand. Samoan Bibles served earlier generations but the new Tokelauans arriving in the country were not fluent in Samoan. They worshiped in their own language in the 1980s but there remained a prevailing need for Bibles that would make the Word of God accessible in their heart language.
“The need for Scripture in their native language became urgent,” stated the UBS.
Meetings about the issue took place in 1991 between the Pacific Islanders Presbyterian Church in Grey Lynn and Porirua, both suburbs in New Zealand. Consultations were also facilitated across Auckland, Hutt Valley, Rotorua, and Taupo.
A delegation subsequently visited Tokelau in 1994 to obtain approval for the translation project. The local government and church groups gave support and the project officially began in June 1996 under the Tokelauan Society for the translation of the Bible, in partnership with BSNZ and UBS.
“The Bible’s arrival represents a linguistic and cultural rejuvenation,” stated the UBS.
“For generations, Tokelauans have relied on the Samoan Bible for Old Testament readings and the portions available to them in Tokelauan. In 1999, the Gospel of Mark was published, and four years later, the Four Gospels were released. In 2009, the New Testament was launched with a celebration at Pahina Church.
“For the first time now in 2025, God’s Word in full can be read, heard, and cherished in Tokelauan.”"
https://www.christiandaily.com/news/pacific-islanders-on-tokelau-celebrate-full-translation-of-bible-in-their-language
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"While classic folk horror relies on a basic recipe—an isolated setting, a landscape that feels hostile, or at best indifferent but uncomfortably alert, ossified rituals against an unspoken, watchful threat, beauty that invokes dread, paganism and not-fun festivals, insular communities a little too keen on conformity—in translation, we can taste the terrors particular to other cultures and other landscapes.
Here’s a reading list of translated fiction that will make you quiver, shiver, and think twice about crossing invisible lines.
Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream (trans. Megan McDowell)
South America has given us much contemporary body, ecology and folk horror, and I’m still not over Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (trans. Megan McDowell). A little boy sits by a dying woman’s bedside, interrogating her about how she got there, and pushing her to remember “the worms,” a hidden danger. Years before, he almost died after drinking poisoned river water, then an Argentine folk ritual saved his life—but maybe not his soul.
The deep horror here is environmental, and this is a perfect example of slow, atmospheric mood-setting that lulls you into a false sense of security. A whole lot of not very much happens—until you suddenly find yourself creeped out of your skin...
Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Alejandro Magallanes, The Book of Denial (trans. Lawrence Schimel)
Not folk horror in the strictest sense but one that gets right under your skin and means to claw its way out is a stunning graphic novel, or perhaps more aptly, an illustrated performance: The Book of Denial by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda & Alejandro Magallanes (trans. Lawrence Schimel) uses the Mexican Dia de los Muertos as a jumping-off point for—in its own words—”the worst story in the world.”
A little boy discovers how inexplicably cruel the real world can be—has been—to children, when he pages through the book his father is writing and begins to comprehend that the real monsters—people—are with us every day. “How can you see letters without wanting to read them?”—curiosity as one of the staple drivers of horror plots.
Zuzana Ríhová, Playing Wolf (trans. Alex Zucker)
Over to Europe and Playing Wolf by Zuzana Ríhová (trans. Alex Zucker), a vivisection of a yuppie couple who move to a remote Czech village as a cure for their troubled marriage, to find that the villagers are not exactly wholesome and also seriously disinclined to welcoming the newcomers.
Some disturbing local rituals and sinister noises outside their cottage later, the couple’s young son vanishes, in this sly, sharp tale with a nod to fairy tales about hunters and hunted.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (trans. Ebba Segerberg)
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (trans. Ebba Segerberg) concerns a bullied Swedish boy befriended by another lonely soul—a vampire living as a young girl. Lindqvist confidently relocates the dread and isolation of a rural hamlet to a comfortless brutalist housing estate, and his supernatural creature—in the wrong time and place—is as tragic as it is chilling.
Halldor Laxness, Under the Glacier (trans. Magnus Magnusson)
A young naif is sent to a remote Icelandic locale to investigate the rumors of a priest gone rogue in Nobel prize-winner Halldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier (trans. Magnus Magnusson). Our narrator arrives at the foot of Snaeffels volcano, prosaically, by bus—but, in the end, hightails it back “hoping that I would find the main road again.”
The local version of Christianity is doctrinally suspect, the community leader engages him in cryptic, circular conversation, and the femme fatale is a woman straight out of the sagas—so far so Wicker Man—but Laxness’s jeu d’esprit novella is both a spoof and deeply serious, satiric and philosophical, not horror-ful but very charming in a quietly absurd, rather Scandinavian way..."
https://lithub.com/chilling-lit-six-novels-in-translation-that-blend-folktales-and-horror/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Le Goethe-Institut Tunis, en partenariat avec la maison d’édition Pop Libris Editions et la librairie Al Kitab, organise une rencontre entre littérature et musique autour de la traduction tunisienne du roman “Der Steppenwolf-Le Loup des steppes- du romancier, poète, peintre et essayiste allemand Hermann Hesse, devenue “El Dhib”, une œuvre culte réinventée dans une langue vivante, rugueuse et intime.
La rencontre, qui aura lieu le 14 décembre 2024 à la librairie Al Kitab-Mutuelleville, se déroulera en présence du traducteur et écrivain Dhia Bousselmi, ainsi que de l’éditeur de Pop Libris, Sami Mokadam, qui, dans un débat littéraire, évoqueront les défis, les choix et les audaces de cette traduction singulière: comment transposer la folie, la solitude, le jazz et la philosophie dans les mots de la rue tunisienne ?
La soirée sera ponctuée d’un concert littéraire avec le comédien Mohamed Grayaa, qui prêtera sa voix au loup, accompagné à la contrebasse par Wassim Berrhouma, donnant à voir une performance qui fait vibrer les mots."
https://www.webmanagercenter.com/2025/12/06/557243/hermann-hesse-en-tunisien-debat-autour-de-la-traduction-singuliere-del-dhib-der-steppenwolf-par-pop-libris-et-al-kitab/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The greatest difficulty for international students isn’t the language barrier, academic writing or even demanding classes, but a full-time ambassadorship they never signed up for...
Duke Vo did not expect the constant need to explain his culture, the history of his country, and to deal with people’s misconceptions about them. This constant ambassadorship, he says, causes more stress than learning a new language.
“I wish my country were known more for all the other things, like beautiful nature, culture and great food,” Vo adds.
Vo sees himself as an ambassador for his country, a responsibility he takes seriously.
“I was taught since I was young by my teachers that if you go to other countries as tourists or students, you are representing the country,” Vo explains.
This advice weighs heavily on Vo, “It is a big responsibility, especially if you do something bad and then people associate your country for what you just did,” Vo said
Common concern
His concerns are common at MRU’s Global Student Lounge.
The space, a vibrant, peer-driven university service staffed by students, provides a dedicated space for all students to meet, study, and engage in social and cultural activities...
According to the MRU Annual Report, in the 2024-2025 academic year, MRU welcomed 81 international exchange students. Since Spring 2024, the lounge has supported more than 350 students through onboarding and community-building initiatives.
These programs were delivered by two student volunteers and 28 trained volunteers.
Christine Jensen, an international education intern, acknowledged how her work demanded a shift in perspective.
“I ask questions rather than make assumptions because so often we are wrong,” she said.
“The best way that I can think of is to just do a lot of listening – asking questions that assume nothing crucial, such as ‘What do you do during Christmas back home?’ because that question itself forces the asker to define home,” she added.
Listening and resilience
Ultimately, the role of an ally demands intentional self-correction, placing the burden of cultural education on yourself rather than the student.
“It’s about listening and being willing to leave your pride behind, being okay with being wrong,” Jensen adds.
Despite these significant struggles, students find resilience in the community. Vo advises incoming students to take advantage of the support systems available to them...
Overall, the core struggle for international students is not finding their voice, but finding a listener. The actual resolution lies with the host community.
As Jensen has learned, the best way to support a stranger is not to ask them to explain their history, but to show that you are willing to learn and listen."
https://calgaryjournal.ca/2025/12/07/the-language-barrier-isnt-the-hardest-part-try-explaining-your-culture-to-a-stranger/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"AI Conference Unveils Uganda’s First Multilingual Language Model to Support African Languages
7 December 2025
The 2025 AI for African Languages Conference... focused heavily on East Africa’s diverse linguistic landscape and the work required to bridge the “low-resource” gap that limits access to AI tools for many African languages.
A major highlight was the official launch of Sunflower, Uganda’s first multilingual large language model, developed by Sunbird AI. The model was unveiled by Dr. Aminah Zawedde, permanent secretary of the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, and John Quinn, research director at Sunbird AI.
Sunflower can understand and communicate in more than 30 Ugandan languages, enabling translation, summarization, and question answering in local contexts. It was trained using books, radio archives, and community data to reflect authentic Ugandan speech patterns. The model outperforms global AI systems in 24 of 31 tested languages.
Dr. Zawedde described the launch as “not just a technological achievement but a cultural one,” saying it demonstrates the need to ensure that African languages are not excluded from modern digital platforms. She urged students and innovators to develop tools that eliminate language barriers and make technology more inclusive for Ugandans.
During a panel discussion, Dr. Joyce Nabende, director of the Makerere Centre for Artificial Intelligence, highlighted the societal importance of language technologies. She said natural language tools could support citizens in real-world situations, such as improving access to justice for those who cannot communicate in English within legal systems...
The conference invited submissions and discussions across a wide set of natural language processing themes, including:
Data collection and annotation for low-resource African languages
Machine translation and cross-lingual learning
African speech technologies
Ethical considerations and bias in AI systems
NLP applications for social good in education, healthcare, agriculture, and cultural preservation
Large language models for multilingual understanding
Uganda has more than 40 living languages and a linguistic diversity score of 0.928. That diversity represents both cultural strength and technological complexity. Conference discussions and the Sunflower launch show how African-led innovation can help modern AI systems become more representative and accessible.
The AI for African Languages Conference reaffirmed a shared vision: building a digital future where technology understands every African voice.
The initiative is a partnership between the Makerere University Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, and is supported by the International Development Research Centre and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office."
https://iafrica.com/ai-conference-unveils-ugandas-first-multilingual-language-model-to-support-african-languages/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding will hold an international symposium titled "Translation and Artificial Intelligence" Tuesday morning, featuring experts and specialists from Qatar and several Arab countries to discuss the challenges posed by artificial intelligence in the field of translation.
The symposium forms part of the cultural program accompanying the announcement and honoring of the winners of the eleventh edition of the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding, scheduled for the same evening.
The event will feature three main presentations.
The first, titled "Smart Tools and Open-Source Lexical Resources for Translation and Arabization", will be delivered by Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Director of the Ibn Sina Laboratory for Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence at both Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Birzeit University in Palestine.
The second presentation, titled "Translation and Artificial Intelligence: Knowledge and Academic Gaps in the Arab Context", will be given by Dr. Ghassan Mourad, researcher in language computation, artificial intelligence, and digital media at the Lebanese University.
The third presentation, "Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Translation: Identity of Meaning or Struggle of Wills", will be delivered by Tunisian translator and researcher Abdelhaq Azmouri, Director-General of Ab'ad Center for Futures Studies in Washington.
His talk will address AI's capacity to process philosophically open-ended texts and highlight the epistemological and cultural limitations of machine translation compared with human translation.
As part of the cultural program accompanying the award ceremony, two closed workshops will also be held on "Recommendations to Support Translation between Arabic and Each of German and Albanian." The workshops will feature leading translators and experts working between Arabic and both Albanian and German, and will discuss the challenges facing translation among these languages while exploring practical ways to enhance exchange and support the growth of translation in these linguistic spheres.
The eleventh edition marks a milestone in the award's continuous evolution as it enters its second decade, expanding its cultural impact and updating its tools and areas of work to keep pace with global transformations in the field of translation.
For the first time, the award has adopted three of the world's most widely spoken languages - English, German, and Turkish - alongside two lesser-used languages, Albanian and Thai.
This step reflects the award's commitment to bridging influential global languages with local languages that require greater support to strengthen their presence in translation to and from Arabic.
This year's edition has seen a notable increase in the number of nominations across all approved languages, including Turkish, which was added to the honored languages only three years ago - an indication of the award's growing influence and rising credibility in cultural and academic circles.
The award's total value amounts to two million US dollars, distributed across two categories: translation of individual books in the two main languages, and lifetime achievement awards in both the main and secondary languages."
https://m.thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/06/12/2025/international-symposium-on-translation-and-artificial-intelligence-next-tuesday-in-doha
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Why do we struggle to translate words when we don’t experience the concept?
If you are fluent in any language other than English, you have probably noticed that some things are impossible to translate exactly. A Japanese designer marvelling at an object’s shibui (a sort of simple yet timelessly elegant beauty) may feel stymied by English’s lack of a precisely equivalent term. Danish hygge refers to such a unique flavour of coziness that entire books seem to have been needed to explain it.
Portuguese speakers may struggle to convey their saudade, a mixture of yearning, wistfulness and melancholy. Speakers of Welsh will have an even harder time translating their hiraeth, which can carry a further sense of longing after one’s specifically Celtic culture and traditions.
Imprisoned by language
The words of different languages can divide and package their speakers’ thoughts and experiences differently, and provide support for the theory of “linguistic relativity”.
Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this theory derives in part from the American linguist Edward Sapir’s 1929 claim that languages function to “index” their speakers’ “network of cultural patterns”: If Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won’t. Yet Sapir also went a step further, claiming language users “do not live in the objective world alone […] but are very much at the mercy” of their languages.
This stronger theory of “linguistic determinism” implies English speakers may be imprisoned by our language. In this, we actually cannot experience hygge—or at least, not in the same way that a Danish person might. The missing word implies a missing concept: An empty gap in our world of experience.
Competing theories
Few theories have proven controversial. Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf famously claimed in 1940 that the Hopi language’s lack of verb tenses (past, present, future) indicated its speakers have a different “psychic experience” of time and the universe than Western physicists. This was countered by a later study devoting nearly 400 pages to the language of time in Hopi, which included concepts such as “today”, “January” and— yes— discussions of actions happening in the present, past and future.
I even heard of “50 Inuit words for snow?” Whorf again. Although the number he actually claimed was closer to seven, this was later said to be both too many and too few. (It depends on how you define a “word”.)
More recently, the anthropological linguist Dan Everett claimed the Amazonian Pirahã language lacks “recursion”, or the capacity to put one sentence inside another (“{I trust {you’ll come {to realise that {my theory is better.}}}}”). If true, this would suggest that Pirahã differs in the exact property that Noam Chomsky has argued to be the principal defining property of any human language.
Once again, Everett’s claims have been argued both to go too far and not far enough. The cycle would appear to be endless, such that two excellent recent books on the topic have adopted almost diametrically opposite perspectives—even down to the opposite wording of their titles!
Language as a comfortable house
There is truth in both perspectives. At least some aspects of human languages must be identical or nearly so, since they are all used by members of the same human species, with the same sorts of bodies, brains and patterns of communication. Yet recent increases in understanding of the world’s Indigenous languages have taught us two important additional lessons. First, there is far more diversity among the world’s languages than previously believed. Second, differences are often related to the patterns of culture and environment in which languages are traditionally spoken.
For example, in many Himalayan languages, an expression like “that house” comes in three flavours: “that-house-upward”, “that-house-downward” and “that-house-on-the-same-level”—a reflection of the mountainous area these speakers live in. When their speakers migrate to lower-elevation regions, the system may shift from “upward/downward” to “upriver/downriver”. If there is no large enough river present then the distinction may disappear.
In Indigenous Aslian languages of peninsular Malaysia, there are large vocabularies referring to finely-distinguished natural odours. This is an index of the richly diverse foraging environment of their speakers. Studies of small, tightly-knit communities like the Milang of northeastern India have revealed how languages can require speakers to mark their information source: Whether a statement is the general knowledge of one’s social group, or is arrived at through a different type of source—such as hearsay, or deduction from evidence.
Speakers of languages with such “evidentiality” systems can learn to speak languages—like English—without them. Yet native language habits turn out to be hard to break. One recent study showed speakers of some languages with evidentiality add words like “reportedly” or “seemingly” into their statements more often than native English speakers. Human languages may not be a prison their speakers cannot escape from. They may be more like comfortable houses one finds difficult to leave. Although a word from another language can always be borrowed, its unique cultural meanings may always remain just a little bit out of reach.
-The Conversation
Mark W Post
Post is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney.
December 7, 2025
https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/12/07/impossible-translations
https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/12/07/impossible-translations
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Moose Cree First Nation has released the fourth edition of its community-developed dictionary.
This latest edition marks more than a decade of work to help revitalize the unique Moose Cree “L” dialect — a language now spoken fluently almost exclusively by elders.
The project, which began in 2012, has grown into a 34,000-word dictionary available both in print and online. The newest edition adds roughly 10,000 new entries, updated grammatical tables, additional sample phrases, and continues to be funded entirely by Moose Cree First Nation.
“We’re pretty proud of the fact that this initiative is fully funded by Moose Cree, with no outside funding,” said executive director Mark Butterfly. “We’re trying to re-establish our Cree language.”
Butterfly, who grew up speaking Cree on the land, said many community members lost the language over the generations as English became dominant in homes and in school.
“I can understand almost 90 per cent of Cree, but I can speak maybe 35 to 40 per cent,” he said.
Despite the decline in fluent speakers, he said interest among young people is growing. Community-led language circles often fill quickly, with residents gathering weekly on their own time to practice.
Built from scratch
Director of language and cultural programs Geraldine Govender has led the dictionary project since its inception. Speaking from Kapuskasing, where she had travelled for the northern book launch, she said the new edition reflects years of steady expansion.
“We started our dictionary project in 2012 with about 6,000 words,” Govender said. “Each edition grew from there.”
Govender was hired by Moose Cree in 2006 — even before funding existed — to begin building a language department. Over the years, she said she was unable to secure government support for core operations, leaving the community to finance salaries, editing, design, printing, and now digital development.
“That’s why Moose Cree continued to pay for the costs,” she said. “The leadership felt this was really important.”
Moose Cree First Nation has released the fourth edition of its community-developed dictionary. Supplied photo/Mark Butterfly
The Moose Cree dialect is one of six major Cree dialects and is unique across Canada for its “L” pronunciation. In Moose Cree, “L” replaces sounds such as “th,” “y,” and “n” used in other dialects. This sound change is unique to Moose Cree and doesn’t appear across all Cree-speaking communities.
With most fluent speakers now over 65, Govender said the language is endangered.
“Our elders are the experts, and there are fewer and fewer fluent speakers every year,” she said. “That’s why we need to do whatever we can to revitalize the language.”
Govender said language instruction in schools is no longer intensive enough for students to become conversational speakers.
“Some classes only get half an hour a day,” she said. “Children are learning nouns, like the word for ‘goose,’ but they’re not learning how to use it in a sentence. They’re not learning to speak.”
To counter this, her department continues to develop tools, run immersion programs, and host language-learning circles.
With the newest edition out, work now shifts to producing audio files for every entry, an effort already 9,000 words in. The digital dictionary is being updated continuously, she said.
Govender said seeing the project continue for more than a decade has been personally meaningful.
“Our language defines who we are,” she said. “If you don’t have that part, there’s a void. People feel that.”..."
Marissa Lentz-McGrath
https://www.timminstoday.com/local-news/young-people-want-to-learn-new-edition-released-of-community-developed-dictionary-11547831
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Interpreters Unlimited Wins Gold for Service Excellence in Best in Biz Awards 2025
12-04-2025 05:34 PM CET |
Interpreters Unlimited (IU), a San Diego based family owned language service provider specializing in foreign language interpretation, American Sign Language and document translation, has been awarded Gold in the Small or Medium Business Service of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards 2025, the only independent business awards program judged exclusively by prominent reporters and editors from top tier media outlets in North America.
This marks a very proud moment for the longtime leader in language access solutions, further solidifying its place among the most innovative and impactful service providers in the country. This year's awards drew entries from thousands of organizations, from rising startups to global household names, making IU's Gold recognition one of the most competitive and meaningful achievements in the program's 15 year history.
Best in Biz judges praised company growth, innovation, and community impact, noting that winners in this milestone year exemplified not just strong business performance, but a clear and measurable positive influence on clients, employees, and the communities they serve.
IU's selection as the top service provider in the Small or Medium Business Service of the Year category reflects a remarkable stretch of accomplishments spanning 2024 and 2025. The company expanded into nearly a dozen new cities and counties, secured contracts with three new state governments, added four major school districts, and earned new partnerships with federal and military agencies nationwide. IU also launched a robust Language Access Plan service line to help public agencies meet evolving equity, compliance, and accessibility requirements.
The company's hybrid Human + AI translation model, developed in partnership with Diya Health and supported by new OPI, VRI, and AI leadership, has improved speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency, helping clients deliver language access more effectively during a time of rising demand and limited budgets.
The past two years have also brought other notable recognition. IU was named one of America's Top 100 Small Businesses by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and earned a place on Slator's Language Service Provider Index Top 100 list in both 2024 and 2025. Locally, IU leaders and staff were honored by the San Diego Business Journal across several categories, including Fastest Growing Companies, CEO of the Year Finalist, and Leaders of Influence in Advertising, PR & Marketing.
Beyond business achievements, Interpreters Unlimited continues to place philanthropy at the center of its identity. The company supports a wide range of nonprofit partners, from PATH (People Assisting The Homeless), Survivors of Torture International, and Endangered Species International to Junior Achievement, Ronald McDonald House, and Alzheimer's & Dementia Resource Center. IU also contributes an extraordinary amount of complimentary language services each year, including its long standing role providing multilingual access for the NORAD Tracks Santa Program. For 2025, IU is expanding its real time interpreter access from 8-9 major languages to over 200 languages for the entire 24 hour Christmas Eve phone hotline event, making it more accessible than ever.
"We are incredibly proud to receive Gold in Best in Biz Awards 2025," said IU CEO Shamus Sayed. "This award reflects the heart of who we are, an organization built on service, responsibility, and a commitment to making communication accessible for every person we touch. Our team shows up every day with purpose, and this recognition belongs to each of them."
This 15th annual Best in Biz Awards was judged by writers and editors from top tier publications including Forbes, Inc., Associated Press, Consumer Affairs, New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and Wired. Their independent evaluation process remains one of the most respected in the awards landscape.
A full list of Best in Biz Awards 2025 Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners can be found at: www.bestinbizawards.com/2025-winners...";
https://www.openpr.com/news/4299543/interpreters-unlimited-wins-gold-for-service-excellence-in-best
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Judicial Council to Consider Ways to Increase the Availability of Court Interpreters
....
SAN FRANCISCO—The Judicial Council at its December 12 business meeting will consider a study on the future of the court interpreter workforce and how best to meet the needs of the state’s nearly 6.4 million limited-English-proficient (LEP) residents and potential court users.
The study highlights critical gaps in meeting the language needs of LEP court users. Findings reveal that while Spanish interpreter needs are generally met, significant shortages persist in other languages.
Factors affecting interpreter availability include difficulty in passing the required court interpreter examinations, a retiring workforce, geographic constraints, and competition from other industries.
The study’s findings call for action by multiple groups, including recommendations to the Legislature, as well as considerations for the council, the courts, and experienced court interpreters. The guidance includes:
Continue funding for interpreter services
Extend workforce pilot programs
Expand career pathways and education through apprenticeship and mentorship programs
Review examination standards and content
Increase use of video remote interpreting
..."
By Blaine Corren
Dec 5, 2025
https://newsroom.courts.ca.gov/news/judicial-council-consider-ways-increase-availability-court-interpreters
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"If educators want their students to hone the skills of respectful debate across cultural boundaries, these eight tips – including planning and agreeing definitions – offer a place to start
University course design and delivery
Student engagement
Internationalisation at home
Feature article
Europe
Daphne Vallas
University of Westminster
3 Dec 2025
Do you get hot under the collar when some ignorant fool fails to see things your way on topics you deem of great importance? Of course not. In academia, we pride ourselves on expressing carefully measured opinions rooted in logic and based on facts.
And yet, when I hear a colleague respond to students’ complaints about the quality of their teaching, or lack thereof, with an authoritative “Learn to teach? What for? I know everything there is to know in my discipline. The students are lucky to have me”, my measured opinion deserts me, in favour of a cutting response. A French proverb recommends that you twist your tongue seven times before speaking to avoid faux pas – a work in progress for many, including myself.
Let’s teach students to disagree well
Don’t fear conflict in the classroom: foster respectful discussion instead
Four ways to help students develop critical thinking skills
It is easy to become polarised in any debate. We want our viewpoints to be heard, validated and reinforced because they make complete sense to us. We don’t mind them being challenged because, after all, isn’t this what debate is about? But when our conversation partners show no sign of understanding what we mean, we get grumpy. The multicultural classroom is a fertile environment for debate that can polarise unexpectedly and leave educators and students unsure how to react.
Debating respectfully is a skill. It is not innate. It can be acquired and honed. And that requires help and guidance.
In the multicultural classroom, many students will not have engaged with critical thinking in their home country, school culture or family environment. Or, more accurately, they have, but not in ways we as their teachers expect or understand. Educators too can struggle to reconcile their own culture with that of the country where they teach, as well as their students’ culture, especially when the end game is to take everyone’s opinion into account.
So, what can we do? Here are eight tips to help students and educators debate in a multicultural context.
1. Agree on what culture means
Culture should be considered in its widest sense. A multicultural class does not solely comprise international students. Many home students will have multicultural backgrounds, awareness of diverse cultural perspectives and multiple languages. Sonya Nieto and Patty Bode’s definition of culture as consisting of “the values, traditions, worldview and social and political relationships created, shared and transformed by a group of people bound together by a common history, geographic location, language, social class, religion or other shared identity” would be a great starting point for a discussion with your students.
2. Test your own bias
Reflect on how you view your discipline – its relevance, appeal and accessibility for students. We all have biases, conscious or unconscious, regarding the discipline we teach. Students will have them too. These often relate to culture.
Set up an activity for the class to discuss biased commonly held views on your discipline, such as “adulthood is too late to learn a language” or “learning Latin is useless”. This helps identify potential biases, informs your teaching and enhances students’ awareness of each other’s perceptions.
3. Challenge your assumptions about behaviours
Students are not universally in agreement on how a respectful debate should play out, and neither are educators. Avoid relying on assumptions about the students’ prior experience (ie, “they know the drill, they’ve done plenty of debates at school”) or maturity (“they are old enough to behave”). For many, there is nothing wrong with shouting or calling other people idiots. Again, this includes educators.
4. Encourage students to co-create a charter
Think back to a challenging experience you had with a class debate that went pear-shaped. Make a list of what went wrong and use this as a basis to establish guidelines with the class. Set up a group activity to write a charter for respectful debate. Provide a basic charter as an exemplar to help shape the document. Explain that the class will need to discuss the rules as a group to ensure that debate remains respectful and balanced. Highlight and discuss your institution’s values and ethos as part of the charter design.
5. Plan the debate
Prepare for debate as part of your lesson planning. Carefully craft your questions and reach out to colleagues for advice and inspiration. Think about what may cause friction – anticipated problems – and how you would deal with this – anticipated solutions.
We lead by example and students can learn from the way we manage a difficult situation. They can also benefit from seeing how educators can purposefully create opportunities for them to explore multiple perspectives, and express opinions in a safe and inclusive environment through careful lesson planning.
6. Define critical thinking and echo chambers as part of your teaching
Critical thinking can have very different meanings depending on your cultural background. In some cultures, critical thinking and echo chambers are cut from the same cloth, as questioning or disagreeing with established norms is discouraged. These terms need to be defined through class discussion to clarify course expectations.
Embed activities with a dedicated focus on critical thinking skills development in your teaching, rather than rely on students taking optional critical thinking modules or their prior experience.
7. Consider the effects of multilingualism on class communication
Language and culture walk hand in hand. When communicating in an additional language, as opposed to your native one, interaction can come across as polarised. Underneath the use of English as lingua franca is multilingual thinking.
For many speakers of languages other than English, a blunt “no, that’s wrong” or “absolutely not” are the appropriate answers to express disagreement, whereas the norm in the UK might be to say, “that’s interesting but I’m not sure I agree with that”. While both messages mean the same thing, one might be considered more confrontational or aggressive and therefore less respectful. The same applies to how loudly we speak and the body language we use.
8. Promote cultural competence
Many students and educators have first-hand and daily experience of intercultural communication, whereby they navigate diverse cultural norms. There are often exercises in respectful debate throughout the day! Encourage your class, and yourself, to draw on these experiences and share strategies everyone uses to remain respectful in the face of adversity.
Celebrate cultural competence and remind your students that it is a precious gift. It helps to develop empathy, creativity, adaptability, collaboration and conflict resolution (all desirable employability skills) and opens the door to global citizenship.
Daphne Vallas is senior lecturer in academic professional development at the University of Westminster."
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/how-foster-debate-multicultural-classrooms
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Language is rooted in culture and even shapes our thoughts. Eloquency maybe a sign of recycling other's thought. So let's embrace the awkward pause, searching for our own words.
"How would you describe mac-and-cheese to the Japanese?
Posted December 3, 2025
Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Key points
Bilingualism enriches the brain, but it also brings natural hesitations and gaps in fluency.
Language shapes perception, identity, and even the thoughts we believe are our own.
Words we speak fluently may reflect inherited and borrowed ideas. Genuine thinking can result in pauses.
Let's embrace speech hesitation: it can be reflect authenticity, originality, and deep thinking.
A recent large-scale study showed that speaking more than one language can protect the brain for age-related changes. Although the study did not directly examine brain mechanisms, scientists have long theorized that managing multiple languages develop extra language centers, engages the brain’s executive system, and may even be associated with larger hippocampus volume.
I grew up in Japan, so English (what I currently use daily) is my second language. Perhaps these findings should make me a bit happy, but there are downsides to being bilingual. I have not fully mastered English, and I am now forgetting some of my Japanese. My Japanese friend tells me that my Japanese sounds a bit strange. I often now struggle to find the right words in both languages. Especially, when I try to think and speak, my speech becomes halting, full of pauses. It is a bit embarrassing, and as I became more self-conscious, I also grew more reluctant to speak my mind.
Yet after reading this study (and after pondering this issue for a long time), I’ve come to a different conclusion: it is okay not to be eloquent. It is okay not to dazzle anyone with effortless oratory.
Language and Thought
One of the founding figures of structuralism, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, argued that words and language are not as neutral or objective as we assume. Language is a system of symbols, and its meaning is culturally shaped. In English, the word sheep refers to the animal, whereas in French, the word mouton includes both the live animal and its meat. (English uses a separate word, mutton, for the meat). So when a French speaker hears the word mouton, they might imagine a savory dish; but when an English speaker hears sheep, they’re more likely to picture a soft, woolly animal. The closest translational word can evoke entirely different associations. Saussure’s point was that language is arbitrary—what a word means depends not on some inherent truth but on how that society uses and interprets it.
Building on this idea, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic relativity) proposes that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and interpret the world. For example, in English, we have distinct words for “blue” and “green.” In Korean, a single word can cover both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see the difference, but they may see blue as a shade of green. In contrast, Russian distinguishes between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and studies show that Russian speakers can more quickly differentiate between those two shades. Language, in other words, shapes perception.
The abilty fo discern color may differ based on language describing the colorsSource: hh5800/iStock
Before moving to the US, I was first exposed to American culture during my internship at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa. The American staff, far from home, welcomed me warmly and delighted in cultural exchange, especially swapping food traditions. One day, they offered me something called mac-and-cheese — they could not believe I never had it in my life, and I suddenly became the center of attention as I lifted my fork.
I was a bit skeptical of its bright orange color, but I decided to plunge in. As the creamy, cheesy soft pasta melted in my mouth, I screamed,
“This is the best food I’ve ever had in my life!”
Later, they even delighted more in showing the box, and I could not believe it came from a box, which only costed 79 cents! Needless to say, after moving to the US, I often served my daughter and her friends quick mac-and-cheese dinners (with broccoli, of course).
Later, I tried to describe mac-and-cheese to my Japanese friends but found it almost impossible. Sure, I could translate the ingredients, even describe the taste and preparation. But the idea of mac-and-cheese didn’t exist in Japanese. There was no cultural reference point for the nostalgic comfort, the bright orange color, the childhood memories that Americans attach to it. The word mac-and-cheese carries not just its technical meaning, but a shared emotional and cultural experience. Without the word, the world it represents also doesn’t fully exist.
Reaching for the "Right" Word
Beyond physical things like animals or food, language also shapes how we understand abstract concepts—like freedom, justice, kindness, and morality.
“We have the right to be free.” “War is bad.” “We need to respect the law and the constitution.”
When these phrases come out of our mouth smoothly with conviction, we think we’re expressing our own values. But are we?
We like to imagine that our thoughts come from a stable, inner self—that we use language as a tool to express our minds. But is that sequence, correct?
What if language doesn’t just express thought, but actually creates it?
When we speak fluently and confidently, we assume we are articulating deeply held beliefs. But often, we’re repeating words and phrases we learned from others, from TV, in books, in school and at home. We don’t invent our own language; we inherit it. And in borrowing words, we may also be borrowing the thoughts, perspectives, assumptions and values embedded in them.
Cognition Essential Reads
How to Dress for Who You Want to Become
Our New Cognitive Manifesto
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “what we find words for is already dead in our hearts.” In other words, by the time we articulate something, it has already passed through filters—of memory, of interpretation, of culture. He believed that the spoken word was already one step removed from the living experience it tried to capture. The moment we give something a name, we freeze it in place, stripping it of its fluidity. In that sense, a spoken word is already dead.
Ironically, the moments when I struggle for words—when I pause, repeat myself, stammer and try to reach for the right words maybe the time when I am most authentic. The hesitation is not a failure of language; it maybe evidence of that I’m actually thinking.
I used to see my speech hesitation as an embarrassment. Now I accept it as who I am. Perhaps it is a sign of honesty: when the words come slowly, at least they are truly my own. And maybe, in turn, that is also helping the brain. So here is to embracing the hesitation, the stumble, and grasping to find our words."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/breaking-good/202512/when-you-dont-have-the-words-yet
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Appel à communications : " Traduction littéraire et liberté d'expression : peut-on tout traduire ?"
Pour les traductologues comme pour les traducteurs et traductrices, le mot « liberté » est familier : il forme depuis longtemps un couple dialectique avec « fidélité », désignant la latitude que s’accorde la personne qui traduit pour répondre aux attentes du public cible. Mais cette « liberté » n’embrasse pas toutes les libertés : s’ajuster à un lectorat signifie aussi composer avec ses contraintes. Elle peut même conduire à se plier aux limites de la liberté d’expression. C’est ce paradoxe que ce colloque voudrait explorer en examinant la manière dont la traduction se heurte à des mécanismes de censure et d’autocensure. La pratique se déploie en effet dans des rapports de force et des configurations socio-politiques qui déterminent ce qui peut être dit, publié et circuler d’une langue à l’autre. Le traducteur se trouve au carrefour de multiples formes de régulation : censure étatique, autocensure, pressions idéologiques et économiques qui façonnent le répertoire des textes traduits et les stratégies de traduction elles-mêmes. Les régimes politiques peuvent instrumentaliser ou réprimer la traduction, faisant du traducteur ou de la traductrice tantôt un agent de contrôle, tantôt un passeur clandestin de textes dissidents. La traduction peut-elle ainsi devenir un moyen de faire circuler les idées et les mots que l’on ne peut écrire dans les publications originales ? Dans le prolongement de la réflexion éthique sur la responsabilité du traducteur à l’égard de la « lettre » et du « vouloir-dire » du texte à traduire, il apparaît nécessaire d’interroger les dimensions éthiques et politiques de la liberté d'expression en traduction : les traducteurs sont-ils responsables des mots qu’ils traduisent, des discours qu’ils font circuler dans une nouvelle langue-culture ? Quelle autonomie peuvent-ils revendiquer face aux diverses formes de prescription ? Comment résistent-ils, s’accommodent-ils ou participent-ils aux mécanismes de censure ?
Ce colloque mené dans le cadre de la Chaire COLIBEX sur les enjeux contemporains de la liberté d’expression se propose d’examiner les tensions entre traduction et liberté d'expression dans une perspective à la fois théorique et pratique. Cette rencontre accueillera aussi bien des contributions de traductologues, que des témoignages de traducteurs et traductrices confrontées à ces enjeux dans leur pratique professionnelle. Qu’il s’agisse de la traduction de textes politiquement sensibles, de la négociation avec les instances éditoriales, des stratégies de contournement de la censure, ou des dilemmes éthiques posés par la traduction de discours de haine ou de propagande, cette rencontre vise à croiser les regards théoriques et les expériences de terrain pour mieux comprendre comment la traduction littéraire s’articule aux questions de liberté d’expression, de résistance et de responsabilité dans l’espace public transnational.
Axes thématiques
Axe 1 : Pratiques traductives et témoignages
Cet axe accueille des contributions de praticiens et praticiennes relatant leur expérience concrète face aux questions de liberté d’expression : traduction de textes dissidents, négociations avec les éditeurs et éditrices, stratégies de traduction face à des passages sensibles, démarches d’intervention ou d'effacement. Les témoignages réflexifs sur la pratique traductive en contexte contraint sont particulièrement bienvenus.
Axe 2 : Censure, autocensure et circulation transnationale des textes
Cet axe interroge les mécanismes explicites et implicites qui contraignent ou interdisent la traduction de certains textes : censure étatique, pressions éditoriales, autocensure des traducteurs et traductrices, non-traduction stratégique. Les contributions pourront porter sur des études de cas contemporains, sur les politiques de traduction sous les régimes autoritaires ou illibéraux, ou sur les modalités de résistance et de contournement développées par les traducteurs et éditeurs.
Axe 3 : Éthique de la traduction et responsabilité du traducteur et de la traductrice
Comment le traducteur négocie-t-il sa liberté d’expression face aux textes qu’il traduit ? Cet axe explore les dilemmes éthiques posés par la traduction de contenus controversés, violents ou idéologiquement marqués. Il interroge également la notion de fidélité et d’hospitalité langagière dans un contexte où traduire peut donner voix à des discours problématiques ou au contraire faire entendre des voix censurées.
Modalités de soumission
Les propositions de communication en français (environ 3000 à 5000 signes, espaces compris) devront comporter :
Un titre provisoire
Un résumé
Une biobibliographie de l’auteur ou de l’autrice
Les propositions sont à envoyer avant le 1er février 2026 à l’adresse suivante : traductionliberte@gmail.com
Calendrier
01 février 2026 : Date limite d’envoi des propositions
28 février 2026 : Notification d'acceptation
31 mars 2026 : Programme définitif
18-19 juin 2025 : Colloque...
Responsable :
La chaire COLIBEX
Url de référence :
https://libexpress.hypotheses.org/appels
Adresse :
Sorbonne Université"
https://www.fabula.org/actualites/131363/traduction-litteraire-et-liberte-d-expression-peut-on-tout-traduire.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Can your AI adapt to multiple cultures? If not, it might underperform—or worse.
In the race to deploy large language models and generative AI across global markets, many companies assume that “English model → translate it” is sufficient. But if you’re an American executive preparing for expansion into Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or Africa, that assumption could be your biggest blind spot. In those regions, language isn’t just a packaging detail: it’s culture, norms, values, and business logic all wrapped into one. If your AI doesn’t code-switch, it won’t just underperform; it may misinterpret, misalign, or mis-serve your new market..."
BY Enrique Dans
https://www.fastcompany.com/91448973/can-your-ai-adapt-multiple-cultures
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
There are fewer than 100 speakers of the Arapaho language today — all of whom are above the age of 70. Researchers hope to preserve their voices.
"My early work focused on documenting the Arapaho language. Past linguists working with Native languages typically focused on traditional storytelling, as well as audio-recorded data.
But my interest in anthropology led me to focus on conversation and everyday interaction. I also recorded on video to capture social settings, gestures, and sign language. And to better understand the role of the language in daily use, I worked to become a good speaker myself.
I have compiled my documentation into a database that contains over 100,000 sentences of natural Arapaho speech. All of this has been transcribed, translated into English, and accompanied by detailed linguistic analysis.
The database is further supported by an online learning site and an online dictionary of around 25,000 entries. They are among the largest such resources for an Indigenous language, though resources do exist for other languages, such as Yurok.
From documentation to curriculum
In response to the Arapaho people’s goal of language revitalization, my own work has shifted from documentation to assisting teachers, students and curriculum developers. The database turns out to have great value in this area.
Adult learners can watch the videos along with the Arapaho transcriptions, English translations, or both, and review the detailed grammatical analysis.
Screenshot of Arapaho Text Database: single image from a video-taped conversation, with accompanying linguistic labeling.
However, it is quite difficult for young learners to immediately benefit from listening to natural discourse. That’s why carefully graded curricula are crucial. Unlike for commonly taught languages such as French or Spanish, materials for most Native American languages are just being developed.
Arapaho can be challenging to learn because its structure is quite different from English. Many small chunks of meaning are combined to produce long, complex words.
For example, an English speaker can start with “happy” and produce “un-happi-ness.” Arapaho speakers typically add three, four or even five prefixes, and multiple suffixes, as well. A speaker can say the word “niibeetwonwoteekoohunoo” — which has six separate meaningful chunks. This translates to English, “I want to go and drive to town.”
There is little value in memorizing such complex words, just as English learners don’t memorize entire sentences. Instead, Arapaho learners need to understand the separate parts and how they combine.
Previous efforts have succeeded in teaching children to speak basic Arapaho. The challenge now is to keep improving their Arapaho language abilities, using a graded curriculum that continues through all school levels.
The database can identify and label the individual chunks of words and assign meanings to each chunk. A beginner’s dictionary of 1,300 entries has been created by calculating the overall frequency of base words in the 100,000 sentences, and then selecting only the most common ones.
The list has been broken down further to produce target vocabulary for each grade level. Smaller chunks of prefixes and suffixes are also measured, and sequential grammar-learning goals can be produced based on frequency and complexity.
A draft Arapaho learning sequence has been created, with 44 stages. It is now possible for the first time to produce a full, progressive language curriculum for Arapaho. The next step is to develop more curricular materials and train teachers to use them.
The sequence of 44 stages is now being introduced at Wyoming Indian Elementary School, the first school on the Wind River Reservation to pioneer dual-language classrooms.
Limitations of technology
Technology is not a magic bullet, however. Only Native people can save their languages, by choosing to learn and speak them.
Because artificial intelligence works using large language models, it needs billions of words of discourse to be trained effectively in a language.
No Indigenous language has nearly that amount of data, so the capacity of AI to address Native language endangerment is limited. Moreover, many Indigenous communities are wary of AI due to concerns over data sovereignty and cultural property rights."
The author, Andrew Cowell: ... success in helping revitalize Native languages depends on researchers building long-term relationships with Native peoples and, ideally, speaking Native languages. Only then can new technologies be applied most productively.
Article originally published on The Conversation."
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/online-database-for-indigenous-languages
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
" Translation Prize Shortlist Highlights the Year’s Best Japanese Books Published in English
A prizewinning novel from the perspective of a disabled woman, a family story with a 1970s setting, a classic mystery, and a memoir of life with a pet cat have earned their translators nominations for the 2025 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize.
Read in other languages
English 日本語 简体字 繁體字 Français Español العربية Русский
Four Books and Translators Nominated
The shortlist for the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize was announced on December 1, including both fiction and nonfiction translated from Japanese into English. This year, the prize—run by the foundation in association with the Society of Authors—considers books published in Britain between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025. The results are due to be announced in February 2026; the translator of the winning title will receive £3,000 and the runner-up £1,000.
In the third year of the award, all four of the nominated translators appear for the first time on the shortlist. Hunchback is translated by Polly Barton from Ichikawa Saou’s 2023 novel about the sexual desires of a severely disabled woman. Ichikawa’s work won the Akutagawa Prize, and the translation was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Mina’s Matchbox is Stephen Snyder’s sixth book-length translation of a work by Ogawa Yōko. The narrator Tomoko looks back on her childhood in the 1970s with her fragile, book-loving cousin Mīna.
The Little Sparrow Murders, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, is the sixth of Yokomizo Seishi’s classic mysteries featuring the detective Kindaichi Kōsuke to appear in English. This installment sees links between a children’s song and a series of murders. Mornings with My Cat Mii (Mornings Without Mii in some markets) is translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori from a 1999 memoir by the poet and writer Inaba Mayumi about the 20-year relationship with her cat.
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize Shortlist (2025)
Hunchback translated by Polly Barton from Hanchibakku (2023) by Ichikawa Saou
Mina’s Matchbox translated by Stephen Snyder from Mīna no kōshin (2006) by Ogawa Yōko
The Little Sparrow Murders translated by Bryan Karetnyk from Akuma no temari uta (1959) by Yokomizo Seishi
Mornings with My Cat Mii translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori from Mī no inai asa (1999) by Inaba Mayumi
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize is one of nine Society of Authors translation prizes for 2025.
(Originally published in English. Banner photo © Natalie Thorpe.)
Books Culture Dec 2, 2025
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/bg900574/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Language Mixing Scale scores across studies. Credit: Behavioral Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.3390/bs15101371
Parents in bilingual and multilingual families can wrestle with when and how to expose infants and toddlers to words in different languages. However, a new paper from the Concordia Infant Research Lab shows that language mixing does not harm a child's ability to learn words.
In fact, switching languages, even mid-sentence or to introduce a single word, is considered both a common and flexible way to communicate in multilingual homes.
"We found that language mixing is often an intentional strategy rather than something parents do subconsciously," says Ph.D. student Alexandra Paquette, the study's lead author.
"There was no strong evidence that vocabulary size was tied to language mixing. We found that children were able to successfully navigate two languages, even when they appeared in the same sentence. Parents don't need to worry that mixing harms their child's ability to learn new words."
Franglais begins at home
The study, published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, looks at data from almost 400 Montreal children being raised in bilingual homes. The Canadian metropolis benefits from a linguistically diverse population. French and English are both societal languages, meaning large portions of the population speak one or both. The city's linguistic makeup is also enriched by its significant immigrant population, who speak multiple heritage languages. The most common are Spanish, Arabic and Italian.
The researchers analyzed two groups: French-English bilingual families and families who speak a heritage language along with English and/or French. Parents completed detailed questionnaires about how often they mixed languages, their reasons for doing so and how much of each language their child heard. They also documented their children's understanding and use of words.
The results show that language mixing is common, but its frequency varies depending on the family's linguistic background. French-English parents tended to mix less than heritage-language parents, likely because both societal languages are well supported in Montreal. Heritage-language parents mixed more often, especially borrowing English or French terms while speaking their heritage language.
Parents of all backgrounds said they switched languages for several reasons: they could not find the right word in English, French or their heritage language; no good translation was available; or they wanted to introduce a new word to their child. Parents in French-English families with older toddlers were more likely to deliberately mix languages to encourage language development.
The researchers point out that language mixing had almost no effect on a child's vocabulary score in either French-English or English- or French-heritage language families. Even if parents mixed often, children knew the same number of words.
A unique linguistic environment
Montreal's particular makeup as a city with two status languages supplemented by many heritage languages shapes how parents raise their bilingual children. Language mixing is a byproduct of a cultural context in which language mixing is common in daily life in both English and French communities.
"This project shows us how flexible children are when it comes to language development," says co-author Krista Byers-Heinlein, a professor in the Department of Psychology.
"Rather than confuse children, language mixing can be a real teaching tool that parents have in their toolbox. Parents are strategic about it, and our research finds that it is either neutral or beneficial when it comes to vocabulary.""
by Patrick Lejtenyi, Concordia University
edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-language-negative-effect-toddlers-vocabulary.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"L’historien sénégalais Mamadou Fall appelle à réhabiliter les savoirs, expériences et cultures endogènes souvent enfermés dans des catégories folklorisantes et restés à la marge de la production mondiale des connaissances.
“Nos savoirs, expériences et cultures endogènes sont restés à la marge de la production mondiale des connaissances, souvent enfermés dans des catégories folklorisantes. Il est temps d’inverser ce mouvement”, a-t-il plaidé.
Le professeur Fall prononçait la leçon inaugurale de la première édition du Festival ouest africain des arts et de la culture (Ecofest), qui se poursuit jusqu’au au 6 décembre prochain, sur le thème “Mutations et crises politiques en Afrique de l’Ouest : que peut faire la culture ?”
L’historien sénégalais a par ailleurs appelé à “sortir de l’ethos occidental, du monopole du regard occidental sur les cultures africaines”.
“Trop longtemps, nos langues, nos rituels, nos mythes, nos proverbes et nos arts ont été réduits à des documents ethnographiques, objets d’études plutôt que sources légitimes de savoirs, de droits, de philosophie ou de science”, a-t-il déploré.
Selon lui, une partie des élites africaines largement occidentalisées a négligé ou sous-estimé ces héritages, les lisant comme des résidus d’un passé dépassé.
Or, indique professeur Fall, cette problématique “est cruciale”, et se tient en cette question : “Comment les sociétés et les élites africaines ont-elles manqué des rendez-vous avec leur propre production de sens, d’esthétique, de valeur et de savoir pour s’installer dans des formes d’aliénation qui ont alimenté le sous-développement, la marginalisation et les conflits ?”.
Mamadou Fall, spécialiste d’histoire contemporaine, estime que les mécanismes externes de production de connaissances ont façonné le récit dominant dans certaines régions du monde notamment en Afrique.
Pour inverser les choses, il préconise de changer de paradigme en refusant de considérer ”la culture comme seulement un objet de contemplation esthétique, un supplément d’âme que l’on convoque à l’heure des cérémonies”.
La culture “est la matrice vivante de l’identité collective et l’espace où se négocient depuis des siècles des équilibres entre humain, environnement et sacré”, souligne le coordinateur du projet “Histoire générale du Sénégal”. `
Selon lui, “la culture doit être reconnue comme un lieu de production de sens et de valeur, un marché structuré avec des actifs, des titres et des marques collectives. Elle doit aussi comporter une banque de la créativité où se déposent et se valorisent des capitaux immatériels”.
Il en appelle ainsi à former une nouvelle génération de “refondateurs de nos cultures”, après les périodes de l’engagement culturel dans les années 1930, de l’engagement politique des indépendances et celle de l’engagement des développementalistes des années 1980.
“Cette génération des refondateurs des cultures doit recentrer la production culturelle sur les lieux où se produisent le sens, le sacré, le beau et le bon dans le quotidien des communautés, car le levier culturel est si puissant dans la vie communautaire comme dans les relations internationales”, explique-t-il.
Pour ce faire, 19 leviers peuvent être considérés comme “priorités stratégiques”, dont celui qui doit inciter à “assumer l’unité et la diversité des cultures ouest-africaines en les pensant comme un patrimoine vivant, pas comme un décor”.
Il préconise aussi de réinstaller dans les raisonnements quotidiens la dimension du talent et de l’histoire partagée.
“Les épistémologies du Sud invitent à écrire nos histoires à partir de nos propres temporalités, de nos propres périmètres, et non plus seulement comme une suite d’épisodes reliés aux grands moments de l’histoire urbaine”, affirme Mamadou Fall.
FKS/BK"
Dakar, le 2 déc (APS)
https://aps.sn/un-historien-invite-a-rehabiliter-les-savoirs-endogenes/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
The French company Mistral AI has new models designed to run on everything from the cloud to your phone.
"French developer Mistral AI is releasing a new set of language models designed to bring high-end AI capabilities to more people, regardless of where they are, how reliable their internet access is, or what language they speak.
The company on Tuesday announced a new large language model, called Mistral Large 3, intended for broad, general-purpose uses. Think ChatGPT or Gemini. The other models come in a range of sizes and capabilities and are built for use on devices themselves. These smaller models can run on laptops, smartphones, in cars or on robots, and can be tuned to perform specific tasks.
All of the models are open source and open weight, meaning developers who use them can see how they work and tweak them to fit their needs. "We very deeply believe this will make AI accessible to everyone, put the AI in their hand, basically," Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist at Mistral AI, said in an interview.
Mistral AI, founded by former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers, is not as big of a name in the US as rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, but it is better known in Europe. Along with models available for researchers and companies, it offers a chatbot called Le Chat, which is available via browser or in app stores.
AI models designed to be multilingual
Lample said the company has a goal with its new set of models to provide high-end, frontier AI capabilities that are open source and accessible. Part of that has to do with language. Most of the popular AI models in the US are built primarily to be used in English, as are benchmarking tools that compare the capabilities of models. And while those models are capable of working in other languages and translating, they may not be quite as good as the benchmarks suggest when used in non-English languages, Lample said.
Mistral AI wanted its new models to work better for speakers of all languages, so it increased the amount of non-English training data in proportion to English data. "I think people usually don't push too much on the multilingual capabilities because if they do, they will also deteriorate a little bit the performance on the popular benchmarks that everybody sees," Lample said...
In addition to the general-purpose Mistral Large 3 model, with its 675 billion total parameters, there are three smaller models called Ministral 3 — 3 billion, 8 billion and 14 billion parameters — each of which comes in three varieties, for a total of nine. (A parameter is the weight or function that tells a model how to handle its input data...)
The three varieties of the smaller models break down this way: one base model that can be tweaked and adjusted by the user, one fine-tuned by Mistral to perform well, and one built for reasoning spends more time iterating and processing a query to get a better answer."
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/these-new-ai-models-are-built-to-work-anywhere-in-many-languages/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The European Union Delegation to Belarus is hiring a temporary worker – Interpreter/Translator and Information Officer (six-month contract) in the Delegation’s Political, Economic, Press and Information Section.
Under this post, the recruited person will be attributed functions depending on the needs of the Delegation. The successful candidate will serve under the supervision and responsibility of the Head of Political, Economic, Press and Information Section, providing support, expertise and assistance mostly in interpretation/translation and media monitoring.
The salary will depend on relevant and verified employment experience.
The expected start date will be 1 February 2026.
The candidate should have a right to residence and work in Belarus; University degree in linguistics, social sciences, political sciences or related fields; experience in the field of interpretation and translation from Russian and Belarusian into English and vice versa; and excellent command of English, Belarusian and Russian languages.
The deadline for applications is 7 December..."
https://euneighbourseast.eu/opportunities/eu-delegation-to-belarus-looking-for-temporary-translator-and-information-officer/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Launch of PLaMo Translate for Use in the Government AI Project "Gennai"
Overview of the Launch
The Digital Agency has decided to provide government employees with access to PLaMo Translate, developed by Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN), under the generative AI environment (project named “Gennai”).
Internal use within the Digital Agency will launch in December, with a rollout to other ministries and agencies planned from 2026 onward.
Advancing the Use of Generative AI in Government
In order to advance Government AI, the Digital Agency is currently deploying the project Gennai across ministries and agencies. This initiative aims to create an environment where government employees can safely utilize generative AI in their daily work, while ensuring proper security for information systems.
In particular, the use of large language models (LLMs) developed and provided by domestic companies, such as PFN's “PLaMo Translation,” optimized for specific Japanese expressions and writing styles found in government documents (hereinafter referred to as “domestically developed AI system”), is essential for promoting the safe and secure use of generative AI while ensuring the reliability of government operations.
Through collaboration with domestic companies and related entities, the Digital Agency will advance the development of an environment in which domestically developed AI systems, trained on high-quality dataset containing Japanese culture and practices and rich in Japanese language, can also be actively utilized, with the aim of both generating effective use cases of domestically developed AI systems in administrative operations and establishing a continuous cycle for improving their accuracy.
(Reference) Outline and Features of “PLaMo Translate”
This domestically developed large language model is entirely designed in Japan, from its architecture to training, and specializes in Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese translation. Unlike models based on existing overseas systems, it generates fluent and natural Japanese translations with minimal repetition, omissions, or inconsistent wording, even for long texts. Optimized for a variety of styles and contexts, including conversational text, news articles, and academic papers, it delivers coherent and natural translations. The model can also effectively handle the specific vocabulary and phrasing often found in government documents, ensuring accurate and readable output across all text types."
Published:
Dec 2, 2025
https://www.digital.go.jp/en/news/b27d1af7-c231-4ab3-ad78-fc5408d44504
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"La retraduction en régime populaire : contraintes et pratiques
Colloque international
Les 28-29 mai 2026, Université Paris Nanterre
salle de séminaire 2, bâtiment Max Weber
Projet scientifique
Dorothée Cailleux, Enrico Monti, Lucia Quaquarelli, Licia Reggiani
Comité d’organisation
Lucia Chiavassa, Giacomo Gaggiassi, Sara Giuliani, Jean-Baptiste Godon, Nerida Woodhams Bertozzi
Comité scientifique international
Hélène Buzelin, Dorothée Cailleux, Chiara Denti, Adrien Frenay, Sara Giuliani, Delia Guilarro Arribas, Valeria Illuminati, Mathilde Lévêque, Enrico Monti, Lucia Quaquarelli, Licia Reggiani, Elisa Marazzi, Fabio Regattin.
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Inscrit dans le projet international « Fabriques de la traduction » (CRPM, Université Paris Nanterre) et organisé en collaboration avec le FICLIT de l’Université de Bologne et l’ILLE (UR 4363) de l’Université de Haute-Alsace, le colloque REPOP. La retraduction en régime populaire entend explorer les pratiques, les enjeux et les contraintes de la retraduction dans le champ de la littérature populaire et de grande consommation.
Le colloque vise à analyser et à questionner la façon dont les opérations de retraduction – c’est-à-dire de nouvelles traductions d’un texte déjà traduit – répondent à des stratégies de légitimation littéraire, de promotion éditoriale et à des contraintes narratives, commerciales et juridiques. Il entend également interroger la manière dont les différentes pratiques retraductives participent à la remise en cause d’un imaginaire de la traduction comme pratique seconde et dérivée, de nature éphémère, arbitraire et vieillissante.
Se saisir des productions de grande consommation par le prisme des processus de retraduction est une manière d’œuvrer à une meilleure compréhension des circulations de récits par-delà les frontières linguistiques et culturelles. Cela offre également une perspective privilégiée pour élargir le champ de la retraduction au-delà de la littérature canonique, vers une multitude de formes peu ou pas légitimées, destinées à un public adulte ou jeune (fictions policières, romans sentimentaux, bandes dessinées, romans graphiques, fantasy, mangas, romans-photos, sagas historiques, albums illustrés, etc.).
Nous sollicitons des approches pluridisciplinaires, combinant théorie et histoire de la traduction, histoire de l’édition, sociologie, études culturelles, littéraires, génétiques…, qui prennent en compte les conditions matérielles et culturelles du processus retraductif.
À partir d’un corpus de littérature de grande consommation, les propositions pourront aborder, entre autres, les points suivants (sans restriction linguistique, géographique ou temporelle) :
● retraduction comme dispositif de légitimation et canonisation littéraire ;
● retraduction et contraintes narratives (ré-sérialisation, reclassement et repositionnement narratif) ;
● retraduction et contraintes juridiques et commerciales ;
● retraduction comme stratégie éditoriale ;
● caducité, vieillissement et obsolescence de la traduction ;
● subjectivité et visibilité des voix retraductives (paratextes) ;
● réception des retraductions, entre acclamation et résistance ;
● retraduction dans le système médial et transmédial ;
● réédition, révision, retraduction : enjeux et différences ;
● approches génétiques de la retraduction (archives éditoriales) ;
● approches quantitatives et bibliométriques ;
● retraduction et redéfinition de l’imaginaire traductif.
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Les propositions (200 mots + notice bio-biblio) sont à envoyer à :
● dcailleux@parisnanterre.fr
● enrico.monti@uha.fr
● lquaquarelli@parisnanterre.fr
● licia.reggiani@unibo.it
Date limite pour l’envoi des propositions : 15 février 2026.
Communication d’acceptation : 28 février 2026.
Publication prévue : en volume ou revue en 2027.
Responsable :
Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires Multilingues - Université Paris Nanterre
Url de référence :
https://crpm.parisnanterre.fr/axes-de-recherches/tradpop
Adresse :
Université Paris Nanterre"
https://www.fabula.org/actualites/131325/repop-la-retraduction-en-regime-populaire-contraintes-et-pratiques.html
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Traduction œcuménique de la Bible (TOB)
"Quelque 100 biblistes se sont attelés à la révision de la Traduction œcuménique de la Bible (TOB) francophone. Un chantier passionnant long de cinq ans. Jean-Claude Verrechia, son coordinateur, explique pourquoi et comment il faut parfois réviser la Bible.
La première partie de la Traduction œcuménique de la Bible (TOB) a été publiée en 1972. Trois ans plus tard, l’Ancien Testament est venu compléter le Nouveau Testament. Dès 1988, une mini-révision a été décidée, notamment dans le but d’harmoniser certains livres et de corriger quelques coquilles. Une intervention très partielle. Puis, en 2010, les deutérocanoniques orthodoxes ont été ajoutés. Mais jusqu’à présent, aucune vraie révision n’a eu lieu. “La TOB n'est plus à jour. La langue française évolue, il y a eu de nouvelles découvertes scientifiques et le regard des chercheurs a évolué”, résume Jean-Claude Verrechia, coordinateur de la révision. “La TOB est un ouvrage très utilisé, une référence. Elle sert également de base à beaucoup de traductions, il est donc nécessaire d’avoir une TOB au top”, commente Ana Aurouze, une des cinq éditrices des éditions Bibli’O. “La théologie est une science en constante remise en cause..."
Par Cathy Gerig
02/12/2025
https://www.reforme.net/religion/pourquoi-et-comment-reviser-la-tob/
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"Harnessing AI to Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages
Introduction
The world’s linguistic diversity is under threat. According to UNESCO, over 40% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally are endangered, with many at risk of disappearing forever. As globalization and the dominance of major world languages like English, Mandarin, and Spanish continue to grow, the race is on to preserve the unique cultural treasures embodied in these minority tongues before they are lost to future generations.
Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are providing powerful new tools in the fight to save endangered languages. From high-tech documentation efforts to community-driven language revitalization programs, AI is playing a critical role in reversing the tide of linguistic extinction. In this article, we’ll explore some of the innovative ways that AI is being leveraged to preserve the world’s endangered languages.
The Power of AI in Language Preservation
At the heart of the endangered language crisis is a lack of comprehensive data. Many minority and indigenous languages have never been thoroughly documented, with no written grammars, dictionaries, or recorded oral histories available. This lack of linguistic data makes it extremely challenging to develop the educational resources, language-learning tools, and computational applications needed to support language revitalization efforts.
This is where artificial intelligence is creating a significant transformation. Advanced speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms are enabling the rapid digitization and documentation of endangered language materials at unprecedented scales. Researchers are deploying AI-powered audio and video recording devices to capture spoken language data from fluent elders, while AI-assisted transcription and translation tools are allowing this data to be efficiently processed and annotated.
One pioneering example is the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS University of London. This initiative has used AI-powered recording devices and transcription software to build a vast digital archive of endangered language materials, including over 4,000 hours of audio and video recordings in more than 300 languages. By automating the data collection and processing workflow, the ELDP has been able to significantly accelerate the documentation of these at-risk tongues.
Similarly, the Wikitongues project has leveraged AI-powered speech recognition to create an online repository of crowdsourced video recordings of people speaking over 1,000 different languages. This growing digital library allows linguists, educators, and community members to access authentic language data and collaborate on preserving their linguistic heritage.
Revitalizing Endangered Languages with AI
Beyond just documenting endangered languages, AI is also playing a crucial role in revitalizing them. Intelligent language-learning chatbots, for instance, are being developed to provide interactive, conversational practice for endangered language speakers, particularly younger generations who may not have had the opportunity to learn from fluent elders. These AI assistants can be customized with culturally relevant content and designed to encourage frequent use, helping to foster intergenerational transmission of endangered languages.
In New Zealand, the Te Hiku Media organization has created an AI-powered language app called “Te Reo Hāpai” that teaches conversational Māori through interactive games and lessons. Similarly, in Canada, the FirstVoices initiative has developed a suite of mobile apps powered by AI speech recognition that allow Indigenous language learners to practice their skills through voice-enabled activities.
Multilingual AI systems are also proving useful for language preservation, as they can facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different endangered languages. For example, the Universal Dependencies project is using AI-driven multilingual natural language processing to create vast datasets of syntactically annotated text in over 100 languages, including many at-risk minority tongues. This linguistic data can then be leveraged to build machine translation systems, educational resources, and other computational tools to support endangered language communities.
Ethical Considerations
Of course, the integration of AI into language preservation efforts also raises important ethical and practical considerations. There are valid concerns about data privacy, intellectual property rights, and the potential for AI-powered tools to be misused or to inadvertently cause harm to vulnerable language communities. Careful design, rigorous testing, and close collaboration with local stakeholders are essential to ensure that AI is deployed responsibly and equitably in this domain.
Conclusion
The urgent need to preserve the world’s endangered languages has never been more pressing. With over 40% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally now classified as at-risk, the race is on to document, revitalize, and transmit these vital cultural artifacts to future generations before they disappear forever.
Fortunately, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies is providing powerful new tools to aid in this critical effort. From automated language documentation and digitization to interactive AI-powered language learning apps, the integration of AI into language preservation initiatives is transforming the landscape of endangered language conservation.
As we continue to explore the remarkable potential of AI to support endangered language communities, it will be essential to do so in a responsible and ethical manner – one that prioritizes the needs, rights, and cultural autonomy of these vulnerable linguistic groups. Only then can we truly harness the full power of AI to safeguard the rich diversity of human expression and ensure that no language is left behind.
You may also like: AI and the Revival of Extinct Languages
FAQ
Q1. What is AI’s role in endangered language preservation?
A1. AI is revolutionizing endangered language preservation through technologies like automated language documentation, AI-powered language learning apps, and multilingual AI systems that facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different minority languages.
Q2. What are some examples of AI-powered language preservation initiatives?
A2. Examples include the Endangered Languages Documentation Programmed at SOAS University of London, the Wikitongues project, the Te Reo Hāpai Māori language app in New Zealand, and the First Voices initiative in Canada.
Q3. What ethical considerations arise with using AI for language preservation?
A3. Key concerns include data privacy, intellectual property rights, and the potential for AI tools to be misused or cause unintended harm to vulnerable language communities. Careful design, rigorous testing, and close collaboration with local stakeholders are essential.
Q4. How can AI help reverse the tide of linguistic extinction?
A4. By automating and streamlining the documentation, revitalization, and transmission of endangered languages, AI technologies are providing new hope for safeguarding the rich cultural diversity embodied in the world’s minority tongues.
Q5. What is the current state of endangered language preservation globally?
A5. According to UNESCO, over 40% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken globally are currently endangered, with many at serious risk of disappearing forever due to factors like globalization and the dominance of major world languages."
#metaglossia_mundus: https://itmunch.com/harnessing-ai-to-preserve-endangered-languages/