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Charles Tiayon
September 11, 2024 10:13 PM
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By adopting WANA to describe the vast interconnected geographical region, we can better honor its rich diversity and the people who call it home. The shift from MENA to WANA is more than just a name change. It represents a broader movement toward decolonizing our language and perspectives. Posted 11 September 2024 13:49 GMT A copy of Muhammad Al-Idrisi's world map by ‘Alî ibn Hasan al-Hûfî al-Qâsimî's from 1456. The original map dates back to 1154. South is at the top of the map. Image from Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. The term “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) has long been used to describe a vast and diverse region stretching from Morocco in the west, to Iran in the east. However, the term’s Eurocentrism has been criticized, and in recent years we have seen a growing momentum to replace MENA with terms like SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) or WANA (West Asia and North Africa). As part of our mission of amplifying voices from across the globe, and in recognition of the importance of language, at Global Voices we have decided to adopt the term WANA instead of MENA as a way to challenge such outdated and colonial terminologies. This shift reflects an increasing awareness of colonial legacies and a desire to dismantle them across the globe. Decolonizing language and terminology to speak about the world and its peoples is part of this process. ‘Middle of where, east of what?’ “Middle East” is a term rooted in European colonialism, coined in the 19th century. It reflects a Eurocentric view, placing Europe at the center of the world map and labeling the regions to its east according to their distance from that center. Using Middle East perpetuates this colonial mindset by continuing to frame the region through that lens. The addition of “North Africa” to create MENA does little to address this issue, as it still links two regions — one described based on its own continental geography and the other based on its relation to Europe — under a single umbrella that fails to recognize their distinct identities and historical experiences. An Arabic debate? In Arabic, the term used to describe the region varies and often depends on political contexts. The most commonly used is in fact “الشرق الأوسط,” which translates directly to the Eurocentric “Middle East.” Though other terms like “غرب آسيا” meaning “West Asia,” are sometimes used as a decolonial choice in academic and political discourse, they are not nearly as commonly used as “Middle East.” West Asia is however mostly encountered in United Nations reports, as well as sporting events or regional championships. The other commonly used terms are “الوطن العربي,” translated as “the Arab Homeland,” or “العالم العربي,” translated as “the Arab World,” that are frequently used to emphasize the shared linguistic, cultural, and historical ties among Arab peoples in the 22 states that form the Arab League. This contested terminology excludes both the non-Arabic speaking states in the broader WANA region, but, most importantly, the many non-Arab groups who form an intrinsic part of the region’s diverse peoples, such as Kurds, Amazighs, Armenians, Assyrians and many others. “Muslim World” is another term often used to describe a wider region, which in turn excludes the many non-Muslim groups who exist within this geography, and many Muslim groups who are outside it. Though Arabic debates about language use in relation to identity, geography, and decolonization are happening, they remain less influential in their mainstream impact than their counterparts in English. The same can be said about other major languages such as French, Spanish or even Mandarin who continue to predominantly use terms equivalent to “Middle East” instead of more geographically accurate terms like West Asia. Nonetheless, debates, even if limited, are happening. Why SWANA or WANA? One of the key arguments for adopting SWANA or WANA is the geographic accuracy these terms provide. “Southwest Asia” and “West Asia,” like “North Africa,” are geographical descriptions of a region, positioning it within its continental context. These terms de-center the European perspective and instead focus on the region’s own geography. The use of WANA has gained traction among decolonial scholars and activists who seek to challenge the Eurocentrism or Orientalism carried by terms like MENA, Arab world, Muslim world, etc. used to describe these vast and diverse regions. The purely geographical designation of SWANA or WANA is able to acknowledge the diversity within these regions, as well as the proximity and connections between its parts. These geographical terms allow for a more nuanced understanding of identity, one that is not limited by colonial or cultural categorizations. By adopting WANA to describe the vast interconnected geographical region, we can better honor its rich diversity and the people who call it home.
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
The 56th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards is now open for entries. Translators from around the world are invited to submit English editions of contemporary Korean literature before the end of August.
"...The 56th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards is now open for entries. Translators from around the world are invited to submit English editions of contemporary Korean literature before the end of August.
Since 1970, The Korea Times has promoted the global reach of Korean literature. It seeks not only to translate acclaimed literary works but also to nurture aspiring literary translators. The annual competition calls for submissions in two categories -- fiction/drama and poetry.
Supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and KB Financial Group, the Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards categories are:
Grand Prize in Fiction/Drama: 7 million won (around 166,000 baht)
Grand Prize in Poetry: 4 million won
Commendation Awards: 2 million won for both categories
Kevin O'Rourke Award: 1 million won to an entry from either category
Applicants may send a translation of 1) a work of fiction (a novel, novella or short story) or a play, or 2) 10 poems by the same writer. Applicants should submit only one entry in either category. Translations should be sent before Aug 31.
Last year, Wingshun Pang won the Grand Prize in Fiction for translation of Kim Cho-yeop's short story Why Don't The Pilgrims Come Back, while Julie Sohn received the Grand Prize for the translation of Choi Seung-ho's poetry collection The Snowman Suicide Incident.
Korea is home to a plethora of literary works. The Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards reflects Korea's push for internationalisation across diverse fields. With Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature 2024, Korean literature has achieved the highest international acclaim. The Vegetarian was her first novel to be translated into English. It received the International Booker Prize in 2016, which helped expand Han's readership worldwide.
For more details, visit koreatimes.co.kr.:
THANA BOONLERT
Please credit and share this article with others using this link: https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/social-and-lifestyle/3067162/korean-literature-translation-awards-seeks-entries. View our policies at http://goo.gl/9HgTd and http://goo.gl/ou6Ip. © Bangkok Post PCL. All rights reserved.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/social-and-lifestyle/3067162/korean-literature-translation-awards-seeks-entries
#metaglossia_mundus
"“Barron’s China” has been relaunched this month, seeking to help global investors understand the complex Chinese wealth and investment ecosystem.
By PA/TPN, in Asia, World, Economy
This arrangement shifts a 2018 translation deal with the business outlet Caixin, which also ensures that Chinese-speaking investors can get the best and most reliable information in their native language.
In collaboration with TMTPost, Dow Jones will be producing the publication, promising to be a bridge connecting China and the world, a fulcrum for the globalisation of Chinese
https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2025-07-12/translation-deal/99215
#metaglossia_mundus
"In defence of translation
Given the obvious power difference between Welsh and English, and our long colonial relationship, is it right or wrong to translate English works into Welsh?
We’ve been extremely pleased with the overall reception we have had since setting up Melin Bapur at the end of 2023 and launching in February 2024.
Dozens of our customers have gone out of their way to give us great feedback and the support we’ve had from Welsh institutions like Radio Cymru and nation.cymru has been great; even better has been the way talented authors and translators like Anna Gruffydd, Mary Burdett-Jones, Ian Parri, Peredur Glyn, Sharon Morgan and Richard Crowe have approached us and paid us the enormous compliment of entrusting us with publishing their work.
Nevertheless I have been fascinated to note the occasional more negative comment we have received as well – nothing genuinely nasty or insulting, thankfully, but some comments specifically arising from our decision to publish Welsh translations of English books like The Hobbit, The Time Machine, The Call of Cthulthu, The Vagina Monologues and the like – these comments have questioned either the value or the appropriateness of such things, and particularly, accusing us of somehow undermining the publication of original literature in Welsh.
It’s a fair question to ask. Given the obvious power difference between Welsh and English, and our long colonial relationship, is it right or wrong to translate English works into Welsh?
Arguments against
Based on the comments we’ve received it seems that the arguments against translation from English, broadly speaking, are that:
1) people will buy and read translations instead of original books by Welsh writers, thereby harming Welsh authors;
2) there’s no point as Welsh speakers generally can read English anyway, so they won’t want to read translations.
Keen observers will note that these two arguments are contradictory: if nobody wants to read them then how can they harm Welsh writers?
Regardless, it’s pretty easy to disprove the second point with the fact that people do buy and read these books. This argument is based on a misunderstanding of why people buy and read books (in Welsh or otherwise), which probably arises from a prejudice against translation as a process and an assumption that reading a text that has been translated is an experience that is on some essential level inferior.
Holes
This is not, however, how most people actually think. Needless to say we don’t know everything about all our customers, but I would be willing to bet that the majority have already read these books in English, especially Yr Hobyd; they want them in Welsh not because they think that a Welsh version will be better (or worse), but because it will provide a different sort of experience. If anything the fact they already know the book is the whole point.
But we’ll come back to that, after addressing the idea that these books threaten or harm original writing in Welsh.
The idea seems to be that readers will choose to buy and read Tolkien or Lovecraft or Eve Ensler instead of Welsh authors; therefore we are hurting them by publishing these books.
The translated works and H. P. Lovecraft
This argument might make sense on first glance, but the more you think about it, the more holes appear.
The argument seems to take it for granted that the demand for books in Welsh is some kind of fixed quantity: that buying and reading any one book in Welsh means one doesn’t buy or read another book in Welsh. Publishing, under this assumption, is a zero-sum business.
This might be true of some products, like, say, washing powder: if I buy one brand I don’t need to buy another.
But reading isn’t like that. Even it were, this argument betrays a lack of confidence in the value and appeal of the same original Welsh books it purports to defend.
Do we really think that the only reason people read original Welsh books is that they can’t get translations of the books they really want to read? And that – in order to protect original writing in Welsh – we need to restrict readers’ access to other books in Welsh, in case they might prefer them?
I believe that there is more value to Welsh literature than that!
Opening doors
Of course in reality, Welsh books already have to compete with Tolkien, J. K. Rowling and the rest, regardless of whether or not they’re available in Welsh; just as they compete with the television and social media and Netflix and the gym and everything else people choose to do in their spare time.
In fact Welsh readers already read Tolkien, but before we brought out Yr Hobyd they were doing it in English.
Sure, bring out a new book in Welsh (whatever it is) and it might mean someone doesn’t read another book in Welsh. But it might also mean they read one fewer book in English, or that they spend less time doing something else, and more time reading in Cymraeg. The book Yr Hobyd is probably most likely to push off someone’s reading list is The Hobbit!
(I’ve been accused of Thatcherism for making this argument!)
And this brings us to the point of publishing these books, which is the very real possibility that they are actually bringing people into reading in Welsh who wouldn’t otherwise do it.
Many of our customers have contacted us to say exactly this; many of them are learning Welsh and want the book as an exercise to improve their Welsh (which of course is another great reason why it’s important we have these books).
Younger readers, too, or other fluent speakers who don’t currently read at all in Welsh, but want to, yet don’t feel the current offer in Cymraeg caters for them, or don’t know where to start, or worry that they’ll struggle to understand and want the crutch of a familiar book.
Gateway
Of course there’s no guarantee these people will go on to read another book in Welsh, but even if they don’t, we’ve helped them to read a book in Welsh they would not otherwise have read, which is surely valuable in itself.
If this is just the start, then better still. The other half of our mission with Melin Bapur is to republish the (original) Welsh literature of the past, and to use the translations as a ‘gateway’ into this exciting world.
Perhaps I haven’t convinced you, but that’s ok: you don’t have to buy our translations (no doubt that’s me being Thatcherite again?), but do check out the original Welsh books that represent about three quarters of Melin Bapur’s offer!
It’s possible to overstate the argument, and I don’t wish to be misunderstood: something extremely valuable would be lost if the only Welsh books available were translations.
I want to see original Welsh writers supported too, and this is one of the reasons we don’t compete with the traditional Welsh publishing industry for Books Council grants (which don’t seem to be offered for translations anyway).
But the current situation, where virtually nothing is published in translation for adults, is so far away from this nightmare scenario that it is if anything too far in the opposite direction.
Publishing popular stories are what normal, healthy, living languages do, and our reluctance to do so in Welsh seems to speak more of our own insecurities than anything else.
There is more than enough room in Wales for the occasional Hobyd – after all, they’re famously quite small!"
Adam Pearce, Editor, Melin Babur Books
12 Jul 2025
https://nation.cymru/feature/in-defence-of-translation/
#metaglossia_mundus
"China publishes Han-Tibetan version of major dictionary
XinhuaJuly 12, 2025
China attaches great importance to the use of the Tibetan language, as evidenced by the recent publication of a key bilingual dictionary.
On Friday, the Han-Tibetan version of the Modern Chinese Dictionary, compiled and translated over 13 years, was jointly published by China Tibetology Publishing House and The Commercial Press, according to the ethnic and religious affairs commission of Qinghai Province.
Against the backdrop of rapid social development, Tibetan people have shown a growing desire to learn the national standard Chinese (Han language) while also preserving their own. However, authoritative and user-friendly Han-Tibetan reference books have been scarce, prompting Qinghai -- a province with a large Tibetan population -- to launch the translation project.
The three-volume dictionary has over 70,000 Chinese entries and 200,000 Tibetan entries, totaling more than 10 million characters. While featuring vocabulary, explanations and example sentences with concise, accurate and practical translations, it also integrates word forms and meaning transformations in line with Tibetan grammatical rules.
This dictionary serves as an authoritative language tool in Tibetan-inhabited areas, providing valuable resources for education and cultural exchange and contributing to China's efforts in promoting ethnic exchanges and integration, according to the commission.
http://www.china.org.cn/2025-07/12/content_117975656.shtml
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Nashwa Nasreldin on why Arabic literature translators are needed now more than ever
Editor and author translated Sheikh Zayed Book Award winner Abdelrashid Mahmoudi's After Coffee, among other works
Nilosree B
July 11, 2025
Nashwa Nasreldin believes the work of translators in literature is now more urgent than ever.
"The opportunity now lies in uplifting the work and voices of translators based in the Middle East, who have less access to the support networks than we do living in the West," says the translator, editor and author with a mission.
Born in Kuwait to Egyptian parents, Nasreldin, who currently lives in Suffolk in the UK, continues: “Recently, we held our inaugural workshop for emerging translators in Gaza, run by the ArabLit platform, with each session led by experienced professional literary translators - some of the best in the field of Arabic/English literary translation.
"We need more translations to drown out the voices of those who try to rewrite our stories," she tells The National. "There has been an outpouring of literature from and about Gaza and Palestinians more broadly since October 7, 2023. This shows a recognition in the important role literature plays in recording, reporting, archiving and legacy-making."
Nasreldin's translated many works into English, including After Coffee by Egyptian author and academic Abdelrashid Mahmoudi, who won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2014.
Being tasked to translate Mahmoudi's book was a big moment for her as her first solo book project, she says.
“I really enjoyed Mahmoudi’s book when I read it in Arabic. For me, literary quality is an important factor when I come to choose a project given that you have to inhabit the book's world so intensely in the process of translating it."
Her work has since take her around the world, including to the Jaipur Literature Festival in February – where she spoke about her struggles and the importance of translators.
Nasreldin's career as a translator began when she studied Moroccan writer Mohammed Bennis’s work as a part of her master's course work at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in the US.
“I studied Bennis and produced an in-depth study of his writings on translation. At this time, I also met writer and translation-advocate Maureen Freely, who was a guest lecturer, and who introduced me to the British Centre for Literary Translation and their emerging translator mentorship. When I moved to the UK in 2013, I applied and was awarded the mentorship, which then propelled my career.”
Nasreldin is currently translating two short books that she says she's very passionate about.
A Brawl in Jahannam is a novella by award-winning Libyan author Mohammed Alnaas, whose debut novel, Bread on Uncle Milad's Table, won the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It’s a satiric retelling of events that the narrator claims took place in the 1990s in a small Libyan village named Jahannam, which literally translates to hell.
The other book is Side Entrance to the House by Omani writer Amal Alsaeedi, in which the author’s ancestral house serves as a vehicle to unearth memories and images of childhood and youth, triggering philosophical reflections on her troubled relationships with her husband, parents and siblings.
"These books represent a new generation taking bold literary risks, reinterpreting classical Arabic styles," says Nasreldin.
But making a living as a translator is not easy, and many in the field are forced to find several sources of income, she adds.
"I split my time working as a writer, an editor and a translator," she says. "Like most emerging translators, initially the challenges lay in making a name for oneself in a very competitive industry – and this was back when there were fewer Arabic literary translators than there are now. At the time, it was also difficult to compete with translators who didn't have an Arab-sounding name, as publishers would often assume we were less proficient in English."
That became less of an issue in recent years, thanks to a demand for diversity that has helped tip the scales more towards equity, she adds.
"But the disparity still exists, especially amongst Arab publishers and authors who still believe that a so-called 'native English speaker' would have a stronger grasp in English than a translator who was raised bilingual, as I was.
"In the field of Arabic literature in translation, we only have a handful of prizes including the renowned Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and the newer Bait AlGhasham DarArab Translation Prize. Also, the ArabLit Short Story Prize is particularly impactful as it supports writers who may not have had the opportunity to publish book-length work.”
But the publishing industry as a whole is changing, albeit slowly.
"The work of translators are increasingly recognised, thanks to social media campaigns like the #namethetranslator, which seeks to ensure that translators are named alongside their work," Nasreldin says.
"There are dozens of excellent Arabic translators working in the field today. A group of us communicate regularly on mailing lists, where we discuss translation quandaries, share opportunities, celebrate successes and band together when there is a need to address a threat to our rights as creators – especially with the unregulated rise of mechanical translation, having a supportive community matters.
"I think, we will see a rise in translations of Arabic literature from the Middle East and North Africa region as more translators are trained and gain confidence in an industry that had been relatively opaque previously," she adds."
https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/books/2025/07/11/nashwa-nasreldin-on-why-arabic-literature-translators-are-needed-now-more-than-ever/
#metaglossia_mundus
"EC suspected own translator to be alleged Russian spy, report states
Carl Deconinck
A translator who was present at closed-door top meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in late 2024 was suspected by the European Commission of being an alleged Russian spy.
She was caught taking notes, French newspaper Le Monde reported on July 11, which was strictly forbidden in such confidential high-level meetings.
The incident reportedly took place on December 19, 2024, during a European Council meeting in Brussels, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in attendance.
It happened one month after the election of US President Donald Trump, who had campaigned on ending the Ukrainian war quickly. European leaders were looking for a shared stance on Ukraine to ensure any potential peace deal would not be detrimental to the country.
Belgian authorities were informed of the findings of the internal investigation the EC had and they would now have to decide what course of action to take, if any, regarding the case.
It was Czech interpreters who reportedly noted the allegedly suspect translator taking notes.
They reported it to security services, who caught her doing so. They seized all her materials and escorted her off the premises, Le Monde reported.
On the same day, an investigation was opened, while her accreditation was revoked and she was no longer allowed to enter EC buildings.
The translator, described as “Ms I” by the French newspaper, was reportedly born to Russian parents. She worked as interpreter, for 20 years as a freelancer for NATO, the EC and the French ministries of defence and foreign affairs.
“Ms I trained at the Institute of Translators, Interpreters and International Relations in Strasbourg after earning degrees in English, foreign literature and psychology in Kyiv in 2002,” Le Monde stated.
In a reaction to its report, the EC admitted: “An incident involving note-taking, which is prohibited by our code of conduct, did indeed occur during the December 19, 2024 meeting.
“Ukrainian interpretation was necessary for this meeting because of President Zelensky’s participation. The notes were confiscated. After a careful review of the facts, it was decided to no longer use the interpreter’s services,” Le Monde wrote.
While her work for the French Government was limited, when contacted by Le Monde, French authorities reportedly said they would “draw all the necessary consequences from this incident”.
The General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), though, responsible in particular for counter-espionage, said it had not received any information about the case.
Despite the December incident, the woman in question remained listed as an accredited interpreter for NATO, the French Permanent Representation to the European Union and the French ministries, according to Le Monde.
Ukrainian embassies in France and Brussels reportedly did not allow her to be present during visits of Zelensky for some time, claiming she allegedly maintained professional relationships with Russian authorities.
In a reaction to Le Monde, the translator said she was “very surprised to be approached about a matter of no interest”. She argued that her continued work with NATO and French ministries proved this was simply a misunderstanding.
She refused to comment on the note-taking incident, stating: “Everything to do with my work as an interpreter is covered by confidentiality and my entire professional life has been marked by respect for professional ethics alone.”"
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/07/ec-suspected-own-translator-to-be-alleged-russian-spy-report-states/
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Interpreters for Morgan County Fair concerts will be on a raised platform on the west side of the stage, to the right when viewing from the crowd.
Courtesy of the Morgan County Fair
The Morgan County Fair is introducing ASL interpreters at its concerts, with the goal of expanding access for deaf and hard-of-hearing concert-goers.
Study Suggests Lyrics Have Gotten Simpler Over Time
Two ASL licensed interpreters will alternate throughout the fair's concerts today and Saturday, providing interpreter services live during the concerts.
The goal is to provide better access to the fair and fair entertainment for everyone in the community.
Fair Board President Gary Hadden said this is something they have wanted to do but were not sure where to start with the process. This year, they were able to work with the artists' managers and booking agencies, as well as members of the Deaf community, to make a plan to provide interpreting services.
"We have had requests for an interpreter and so we asked our artist managers and booking agencies to see what we need to do and what the requirements were to meet their approval and provide the service," Hadden said.
The interpreters will be on a raised platform on the west side of the stage, to the right when viewing from the crowd. They will be visible from both the Big Ticket area and the general admission area, so those needing the service do not have to purchase one of the higher-cost tickets.
When the call was put out for interpreters, there are many who volunteered, Hadden said.
"As a not-for-profit organization, we received a lot of volunteers," Hadden said. "We sought out people willing to volunteer, some were licensed and some were not."
To meet requirements, the interpreters have to be licensed.
Kate Van Valey, an office assistant for the fair and a teacher at Illinois School for the Deaf, helped develop the plan and connect the fair to resources available in the community.
"We are on a journey to meet the needs of the community," Van Valey said. "It's a growth process."
Support for the process has been positive, Van Valey said.
"We had members of the Deaf community share their ideas and their response has been really positive and they have been encouraging people to come, knowing that they'll have access," she said.
The interpreters providing services have experience interpreting music, which is different from interpreting standard conversation, Van Valey said.
"There is a shortage of interpreters, especially ones who are comfortable performing in front of a large crowd with music," Van Valey said. Those interpreting music use their entire bodies and facial expressions to help translate the music and lyrics.
The fair board worked with the entertainment agencies to provide resources to the interpreters to help improve the experience for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Several measures are being put into place, including a set list and a direct feed into the concert to help avoid outside noise that could cause problems for the interpreters.
"If the performer is ad-libbing, the interpreter can hear that better and provide that," Van Valey said. "With the direct vocals in their ear, they have better access to that portion and not just the songs. Their engagement is better accessed."
The effort is something they hope to expand, improve and continue into future years, Hadden said.
"This is our first year, so we are asking people to be patient as we are learning as well," he said.
July 11, 2025
Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree
REPORTER
https://www.myjournalcourier.com/news/article/morgan-county-fair-asl-interpreters-20764456.php
#metaglossia_mundus
Did you know? The Translating Division of the Office of Language Services provides translation services in some 140 language combinations
"The Translating Division of the Office of Language Services provides translation services to the Department of State, the White House, and other U.S. Government agencies. We assist in handling the foreign-language components of the written record of diplomacy: correspondence, treaties, reports, speeches, course materials, briefing slides, biographical sketches, conference agenda, media items, laws, and forms. The team of staff translators, assisted by a corps of vetted contractors, offer their services in some 140 language combinations. LS translators work closely with negotiators when certifying that foreign language versions of treaties and international agreements have the same meaning as the English—a painstaking process that requires attention to nuance and the ability to separate linguistic issues from policy differences. Typically, several rounds of certification are needed to achieve substantive conformity.
A translation project may also be a website, a set of subtitles, a desk-top published brochure, an embedded .pdf image, a handwritten sworn statement, or an audio transcript. Helping the Translating Division cope with the demands of these formats is a team of Translation Project Managers who coordinate each assignment, from initial intake to final delivery, and who will help with all your logistical concerns. U.S. Government agencies can request assistance with translating projects by emailing the Translating Division.
Are you interested in working for us? Please visit our Information for Freelance Linguists page. In the Translating section, you will find information about translating for the Office of Language Services, as well as translation test guidance. Permanent direct-hire interpreter and translator positions are very rare. When available, openings for staff positions will be published on the USAJobs website.
To request translation (written) assistance for documents and agreements, please e-mail the Translating Division."
https://www.state.gov/about-us-ols/translating
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Run For The Bibleless flag off
The Church in Kenya has been called upon to support the translation of the Bible into lesser-known languages, a project spearheaded by Bible Translation and Literacy (BTL).
Speaking during the 5th edition of the “Run for The Bibleless” event held at Mama Ngina Waterfront in Mombasa, BTL’s Board Chair, Kendi Ogamba, highlighted the ongoing need for communities to access the scriptures in their native languages.
Ogamba emphasized the high costs associated with Bible translation and urged the Church to contribute to this cause through the charity walk, “Run For The Bibleless.”
“We shall continue with the Run For The Bible until all communities receive the scriptures in their own language.” Ogamba said.
Founded in 1981, BTL is a Christian-based organization dedicated to Bible translation and sustainable literacy development programs for small language groups in Kenya and beyond.
To date, the organization has completed and dedicated six full Bibles and twelve New Testament translations. Currently, BTL is working on eleven translation projects across the country, including those for the Ribe, Jibana, Kambe, Kauma, and Rabai languages, primarily in the coastal region.
The “Run for the Bibleless” initiative, started in 2007 in Nairobi, expanded to Mombasa in 2021. The event now takes place in five major cities in Kenya: Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Eldoret, and Machakos.
BTL’s Board Chair, Kendi Ogamba (right), President of the Court of Appeal (second right), and others.
The President of the Court of Appeal, Daniel Musinga, noted that the funding gap left by missionaries should no longer be felt.
“It’s important for every community in the country to receive the Bible in their language. Kenyans can play a vital role in funding this project.” Musinga said.
Musinga further remarked that translating the Bible into local languages would assist the judiciary in fulfilling its mandate, as many rural residents struggle to communicate in either English or Kiswahili.
“These translations will help eliminate the language barriers experienced in courts,” he explained.
He also encouraged parents to allow their children to learn and use their mother tongues, expressing concern over instances where children, like Mutiso, do not speak their native Kamba language, despite evidence that children under the age of ten years can learn multiple languages.
BTL provides various literacy programs focused on developing language materials in mother tongues and training teachers and supervisors.
Currently, BTL’s literacy initiatives are undertaken within the Duruma, Digo, Pokomo, Orma, and Waata languages.
The organization has received recognition from UNESCO and the Directorate of Adult and Continuing Education for its significant contributions to literacy development"
Raymond Zaka
July 13, 2025
https://www.kbc.co.ke/church-in-kenya-urged-to-support-bible-translation-efforts/
#metaglossia_mundus
"By Janette Toral
July 13, 2025
EDUCATION is undergoing a significant transformation with the rise of artificial intelligence. Classrooms are beginning to test and use AI-powered tools. Students are turning to chatbots not just for brainstorming, but also for writing, summarizing, and analyzing. This raises a vital question for educators: When AI can generate content and assess performance, what remains uniquely human in the learning process?
I recently had the opportunity to speak at MoodleMoot Philippines 2025, where digital learning advocates gathered to explore how AI is transforming education. I emphasized the importance of keeping the human in the loop, especially when we use technology. While AI can assist and accelerate the learning process, it is human judgment, context, empathy, and ethics that must ultimately guide it.
AI can help personalize learning, offer real-time feedback, provide language translation, support learners with disabilities, and automate content generation. These benefits, however, come with challenges that educators can no longer overlook.
Many AI experts warn that certain entry-level jobs may soon become scarce. Tasks such as research, transcription, scheduling, basic content writing, and social media management are increasingly being handled by AI systems. These tasks once served as stepping stones for young professionals to build critical thinking, effective communication, and decision-making skills.
The question now becomes: How can schools prepare students for a future where these traditional starting points may no longer exist?
Rather than shielding learners from AI, education must empower them to rise beyond its limitations. The focus should shift toward developing distinctly human skills that machines cannot replicate. These include the ability to solve problems collaboratively, reason ethically across cultures, communicate persuasively, build strong one-to-one and group relationships, and lead with vision and compassion. These traits will help define the human edge in an AI-saturated environment.
Keeping the human in the loop also means guiding both educators and learners in the responsible and intentional use of AI. The goal is not to replace teachers but to enrich the learning experience. Educators play a key role in reviewing and contextualizing AI-generated content, teaching students to ask meaningful questions, and verifying the credibility of AI outputs. They can also integrate AI literacy into subjects such as digital citizenship or media ethics.
For students, AI should serve as a starting point, not a final answer. By practicing how to rewrite chatbot-generated content for clarity, credibility, or empathy, students strengthen their communication skills. They also gain critical insight when comparing responses from different tools and identifying potential biases or errors.
Some schools are taking a proactive approach by developing their custom AI chatbots trained using local curriculum, school values, and preferred instructional styles. These models, similar to tools like Khanmigo, are designed to encourage questioning rather than simply delivering answers. This promotes deeper understanding while giving schools the ability to monitor usage, refine content, and align technology with educational objectives.
To truly prepare students for success, institutions must go beyond digital literacy and begin fostering AI resilience. This means helping learners adapt, reskill, and thrive in a world where automation is rapidly evolving. Curriculum development should emphasize project-based learning, real-world simulations, mentoring, creative entrepreneurship, and scenario-based training using AI tools. These experiences help students demonstrate originality, take accountability, and exercise leadership, all of which remain irreplaceable by machines.
As I emphasize in my book “Smarter with AI,” we must strike a balance. The future is not a choice between humans and machines. It is about using AI to elevate our human strengths: creativity, compassion, and critical thinking.
We must not only teach students how to use AI; we must teach them how to lead with it."
https://www.manilatimes.net/2025/07/13/business/sunday-business-it/rethinking-learning-as-ai-redefines-the-first-job/2148233
#metaglossia_mundus
"Inch Press launches new zine to bring Armenian literature to English-speaking readers
International Armenian Literary AllianceJuly 12, 2025 Last Updated: July 12, 2025
Fiction writer, essayist and translator Garen Torikian
Inch, a new quarterly literary zine, launches with a mission to bring Western Armenian literature to English-speaking readers through high-quality literary translation. Each issue is devoted to a single story—carefully chosen and thoughtfully translated—allowing readers to focus on its full emotional and cultural range.
Founded by writer and translator Garen Torikian, Inch is dedicated to presenting Armenian stories in all their multifaceted depth: satirical, surreal, lyrical and everything in between. “So much Armenian literature exists beyond the historical or tragic lens through which it’s often filtered. I started Inch to share stories that are sharp, funny, strange, intimate—stories that reveal how richly varied Armenian writing is.”The debut issue features a sharp, satirical piece by Yervant Odian, a tale of delusion and trickery, revolving around the creation of a new dictionary. True to Inch’s mission, the translation doesn’t merely replicate the story across languages: it creates a space where translators are visible and valued as literary artists, bringing their interpretive choices and cultural insight to the forefront.
“While I have been moved while reading and translating other works of Armenian literature, I cannot say I have often been entertained in the most basic sense of the word,” says translator Jennifer Manoukian. “Armenian literature does not always need to be heavy or didactic. It can also bring some laughter and lightness to a reader’s day. Odian’s work does just that.”
Supported by a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Inch publishes both celebrated and emerging voices, with the aim of fostering connection within the Armenian diaspora and beyond.
Garen Torikian is a fiction writer, essayist and translator from Western Armenian into English. His writing has appeared in Wasafiri, Guernica, Electric Literature, Nexus, Potomac Review and SPEAK. In 2021, he edited Mo(a)t, an anthology of contemporary Arabic stories in translation. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in April 2022, and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia."
https://armenianweekly.com/2025/07/12/inch-press-launches-new-zine-to-bring-armenian-literature-to-english-speaking-readers/
#metaglossia_mundus
Large language models don’t “think” like humans—but their internal mechanisms rely on data structure and embeddings rather than any single human language.
"What Language Does an AI “Think” In? Unpacking How Language Models Process Thought
Large language models don’t “think” like humans—but their internal mechanisms rely on data structure and embeddings rather than any single human language.
By
The Tech Journal
Published about 18 hours ago • 3 min read
When you ask an AI to compose a story in English or translate Italian text into French, it may feel as if the model is “thinking” in that language. But unlike humans, large language models (LLMs) don’t possess consciousness or inner speech—instead, their “thoughts” arise from statistical patterns across massive multilingual datasets. Understanding how they operate can clarify their strengths, limitations, and what truly goes on under the hood.
No Inner Voice: Statistical Patterns, Not Thought
LLMs like GPT, Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT are neural networks trained on vast volumes of text. They learn to predict the next word or token based on context, building token embeddings and linguistic statistical correlations—not an inner monologue. These embeddings position tokens in a high-dimensional space where semantic and syntactic relationships emerge automatically during training.
Unlike humans, who might think in their native language or even a mixture of languages, LLMs process input purely as mathematical vectors. They don’t shift between languages internally—they handle everything as multilingual patterns learned from data. There is no “hard-coded” English or Italian inside the model—what exists is a web of learned relationships across languages.
Multilingual Harmony: One Universal Space
Many LLMs are trained on multilingual text, enabling sophisticated cross-language capabilities like translation. They do this not by switching between language modules, but by mapping text from different languages into a shared embedding space. For example, the English sentence “Hello, world!” and the Italian “Ciao mondo!” often end up with overlapping internal representations—allowing the model to translate seamlessly.
This shared representation relies on the weak Sapir–Whorf principle, which suggests that language shapes cognition without determining it completely. In LLMs, language shapes their internal geometry but does not confine or define it. This parallels the view of linguists like Boroditsky, who argue that language influences perception but doesn’t strictly limit thought .
Embeddings: The Model’s Memory and “Mind”
Think of word embeddings as the building blocks of an LLM’s “mind.” Each token—whether letter, word, or symbol—gets positioned in a multidimensional space. Training adjusts these positions so embeddings capture meaning and context. Over layers, the model transforms inputs via attention mechanisms, culminating in predictions of next tokens.
When you ask the model a question in Spanish, internally it retrieves embeddings and context that correspond to that input. The entire process stays within the embedding space—there is no literal Spanish voice in its head. Instead, language is patterns in vector space rather than spoken words or inner dialogue.
Key Differences: AI vs. Human Thought
Human thinking often involves inner speech, conceptual representation, and introspection. In contrast, LLMs operate on:
1. Statistical Pattern Recognition: They learn relationships and correlations between tokens but don’t have meaning or intent.
2. Embedding Geometry: Language lives in a vector space representing proximity and relationships between concepts.
3. Multilingual Fusion: Multiple languages get integrated into the same space, enabling translation and cross-lingual reasoning.
4. Black Box Reasoning: While researchers use techniques like attribution graphs to analyze token flow and influence, interpreting how exactly models arrive at decisions remains challenging .
How Researchers Peek Inside the AI “Mind”
Although LLMs are often criticized as “black boxes,” researchers are developing tools to gain insight. Anthropic, for example, uses attribution graphs that visualize how tokens influence each other during generation. These graphs help trace how a model builds a sentence token by token, revealing hidden interactions within the network . While they don’t show inner monologue, they begin to illuminate causal chains of prediction across embeddings and layers.
Practical Consequences of Language Modeling
Since LLMs encode multiple languages in the same space, they can:
-Translate without explicit translation modules.
-Perform cross-lingual tasks like multilingual classification or question answering.
-Exhibit biases based on data representation—ideological, gender, or political biases are captured in embeddings .
While they don’t “think in English” when answering in French, the internal similarity of embeddings ensures coherent, contextually accurate outputs in any supported language.
Final Takeaways
AI language models don’t experience thoughts in human tongues. Instead, they manipulate vectors—mathematical abstractions representing words and concepts across languages. Their “reasoning” is probabilistic and learned across massive datasets, not a silent voice in a particular language.
Still, breaking the model into multilingual embedding spaces and analyzing token flows offers valuable insight into how they process information. As AI advances, a better understanding of embedding structures and interpretability techniques like attribution graphs will be key to assessing reliability, bias, and trustworthiness in language models."
https://vocal.media/01/what-language-does-an-ai-think-in-unpacking-how-language-models-process-thought
#metaglossia_mundus
"China publishes Han-Tibetan version of major dictionary
Source: XinhuaEditor: huaxia2025-07-12 18:32:15
XINING, July 12 (Xinhua) -- China attaches great importance to the use of the Tibetan language, as evidenced by the recent publication of a key bilingual dictionary.
On Friday, the Han-Tibetan version of the Modern Chinese Dictionary, compiled and translated over 13 years, was jointly published by China Tibetology Publishing House and The Commercial Press, according to the ethnic and religious affairs commission of Qinghai Province.
Against the backdrop of rapid social development, Tibetan people have shown a growing desire to learn the national standard Chinese (Han language) while also preserving their own. However, authoritative and user-friendly Han-Tibetan reference books have been scarce, prompting Qinghai -- a province with a large Tibetan population -- to launch the translation project.
The three-volume dictionary has over 70,000 Chinese entries and 200,000 Tibetan entries, totaling more than 10 million characters. While featuring vocabulary, explanations and example sentences with concise, accurate and practical translations, it also integrates word forms and meaning transformations in line with Tibetan grammatical rules.
This dictionary serves as an authoritative language tool in Tibetan-inhabited areas, providing valuable resources for education and cultural exchange and contributing to China's efforts in promoting ethnic exchanges and integration, according to the commission."
https://english.news.cn/20250712/2d5fb1b3d0944f30a24690d868067e9c/c.html
#metaglossia_mundus
"Le Petit Prince prend désormais une nouvelle dimension avec une traduction intégrale en vendéen. Un travail minutieux pour ne pas perdre la poésie du roman original.
Par Romane Rousseau
Publié le 12 juil. 2025 à 14h28
« Crayonne-mu ine ouaille » pour « dessine-moi un mouton »… Le célèbre livre Le Petit Prince, le plus traduit derrière La Bible, se met désormais intégralement au patois vendéen.
Le P’tiot Prince est un projet mené par Jacques Ouvrard, traducteur : « Fin 2024, j’ai écrit Bédame, un ouvrage qui regroupe des termes et expressions en patois vendéen. Nous sommes allés le proposer à la librairie Looc. C’est là qu’on nous a dit que ça pourrait être une bonne idée de traduire Le Petit Prince. »
« Deux univers très différents »
Une tâche parfois rude, le patois vendéen étant un dialecte davantage rural et moins propice à la poésie. « Le Petit Prince a une part de philosophie » explique Claire Pého, éditrice à la Louve des Bois. « C’est tendre, délicat. En le traduisant, il faut garder l’esprit du texte, même avec ce vocabulaire et ces expressions terre-à-terre. On a confronté deux univers très différents. »
Des souvenirs et un héritage
En se replongeant dans ce dialecte, Jacques Ouvrard s’est remémoré de nombreux souvenirs d’enfance, où le patois était commun.
Vidéos : en ce moment sur Actu
« J’ai vécu dans le sud de la Vendée, à la Taillée. À l’école, nous parlions français, mais lorsque l’on jouait dans la cour de récréation, c’était du patois. Avec ma famille, mes grands-parents ou mes cousins, nous parlions également vendéen. C’est très important pour moi de transmettre un peu de cet héritage ».
Une journée dédiée au Petit Prince
Le roman d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry sera mis à l’honneur le 22 juillet, date de la sortie du livre de Jacques Ouvrard. À l’occasion, Léon Dubois, artiste photographe spécialiste de l’écrivain français, donnera une conférence à 16h à la salle des mariages de la mairie centrale des Sables-d’Olonne.
À 18h, le livre Le P’tiot Prince sera officiellement présenté à la librairie Looc. Jacques Ouvrard sera présent pour expliquer son travail, faire une lecture bilingue (français et vendéen) ainsi que pour dédicacer son œuvre..."
https://actu.fr/pays-de-la-loire/les-sables-d-olonne_85194/une-edition-du-petit-prince-traduite-en-vendeen_62902959.html
#metaglossia_mundus
Words frequently used by ChatGPT, including “delve” and “meticulous,” are getting more common in spoken language, according to an analysis of more than 700,000 hours of videos and podcasts
"ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation
Words frequently used by ChatGPT, including “delve” and “meticulous,” are getting more common in spoken language, according to an analysis of more than 700,000 hours of videos and podcasts
BY VANESSA BATES RAMIREZ EDITED BY ALLISON PARSHALL
After its release in late 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Since then the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has significantly affected how we learn, write, work and create. But new research shows that it’s also influencing us in ways we may not be aware of—such as changing how we speak.
Hiromu Yakura, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, first noticed differences in his own vocabulary about a year after ChatGPT came out. “I realized I was using ‘delve’ more,” he says. “I wanted to see if this was happening not only to me but to other people.” Researchers had previously found that use of large language models (LLMs), such as those that power ChatGPT, was changing vocabulary choices in written communication, and Yakura and his colleagues wanted to know whether spoken communication was being affected, too.
The researchers first used ChatGPT to edit millions of pages of e-mails, essays, and academic and news articles using typical prompts such as to “polish” the text or “improve its clarity.” Next, they extracted words that ChatGPT repeatedly added while editing, such as “delve,” “realm” and “meticulous,” dubbing these “GPT words.” The team then analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes from before and after ChatGPT’s release to track the use of GPT words over time. They compared the GPT words with “synthetic controls,” which were formed by mathematically weighting synonyms that weren’t frequently used by the chatbot—such synonyms for “delve,” for example, could include “examine” and “explore.”
The team’s results, posted on the preprint server arXiv.org last week, show a surge in GPT words in the 18 months after ChatGPT’s release. The words didn’t just appear in formal, scripted videos or podcast episodes; they were peppered into spontaneous conversation, too.
“Empirical Evidence of Large Language Model’s Influence on Human Spoken Communication,” by Hiromu Yakura et al. Second version of preprint posted to arXiv.org on June 30, 2025, modified and restyled by Amanda Montañez
“The patterns that are stored in AI technology seem to be transmitting back to the human mind,” says study co-author Levin Brinkmann, also at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In other words, a sort of cultural feedback loop is forming between humans and AI: we train AI on written text, it parrots a statistically remixed version of that text back to us, and we pick up on its patterns and unconsciously start to mimic them."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatgpt-is-changing-the-words-we-use-in-conversation/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Linguation Sets New Standards in Certified Translations
MUNICH, BAYERN, GERMANY, July 11, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Linguation.com, founded in 2019, is redefining how certified translations are delivered across Europe. With a fully digital platform, the company streamlines the entire process – from document upload to delivery – offering a fast, user-friendly experience without compromising on quality.
Certified Translations from Sworn Experts
Linguation collaborates with a broad network of court-sworn specialist translators. This ensures that every certified translation meets the legal and formal requirements of public authorities, universities, and institutions – whether for birth certificates, employment references, or marriage documents.
Focus on Security and Innovation
To meet growing demands for digital trust, Linguation has launched a verification feature that allows translated documents to be authenticated online. This supports customers in completing official procedures faster, especially in increasingly digital public administrations.
A Clear Mission
“Our goal has always been to combine translation expertise with the convenience of digital services,” says a company spokesperson. “We want to make it as easy as possible for people to get official documents translated properly and on time.”
More Information
Further details and instant quotes are available at: www.linguation.com
Daniela Engels
Linguation
EIN Presswire
Jul 11, 2025, 9:15 AM ET
https://www.wlns.com/business/press-releases/ein-presswire/830441869/linguation-sets-new-standards-in-certified-translations/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Nothing Gets Lost in Translation’ – Why Creativity in APAC Needs a Language-First Approach
Po Kay Lee of Forsman & Bodenfors Asia and Hannes Ben of Locaria on language, creativity, and technology in Asia’s marketing landscape
by BIA Staff
July 9, 2025
Po Kay Lee & Hannes Ben during their chat at Sport Beach
Stagwell brought Sport Beach back to Cannes for its third year, featuring an expanded lineup of athletes and sponsors. The beachfront activation hosted a diverse program of panels and speakers across four days at the festival.
Sport Beach is Stagwell’s dedicated space at Cannes Lions, bringing together athletes, marketers, and creatives to explore the intersection of sports, culture, and business. It leverages sport as a gateway to the broader conversations driving the business landscape community, globalization, fandom, and more. And there were workouts, too.
At this year’s event, Forsman & Bodenfors Asia President Po Kay Lee and Locaria CEO Hannes Ben discussed the power of language, the importance of creative integrity, and the evolving role of technology in Asia’s fast-changing marketing landscape.
Lee has seen the event evolve, but 2025, she says, stood out.
“We’ve had an incredible lineup at Sport Beach. It feels more connected. Love it.”
It’s not just the festival that’s evolving, so is the way global brands approach language and culture, particularly in APAC, added Ben.
Complexity is what makes Asia so interesting. Clients often want to find commonalities, and they do exist, in behaviors and attitudes. But not always in language.
“The complexity of language in Asia makes traditional translation, and even transcreation, insufficient in many cases.”
Finding the Common Thread in a Complex Region
Lee noted that cultural and linguistic diversity is what makes Asia one of the most compelling regions for creative work, but also one of the most challenging.
“Complexity is what makes Asia so interesting. Clients often want to find commonalities, and they do exist, in behaviors and attitudes. But not always in language,” she said.
She also emphasized the importance of balancing globally resonant ideas with deep local relevance.
“We need incredible insights that are universal and can spark a big, creative idea. But if that idea gets lost in translation, it loses its impact entirely,” said Lee.
“Beyond cultural insights and human truths, language shapes how a message truly lands with its audience. Capturing local nuance is essential and a great example is our work for global beauty brand SK-II in China and Japan.”
“We worked with Locaria to turn a simple translation into a script that resonated with the local market. Even for the simplest assets, the right words will deliver real impact.”
Lee added that language isn’t simply part of the delivery — it’s at the heart of the entire ideation process.
“In Asia, having a language-first lens on some of our work is super important. When we work with partners who can ideate with us in the original language, those ideas become so much more authentic.”
Sport Beach 2025
Early Collaboration = Stronger Creative
For marketers in this complex, diverse region—home to an abundance of cultural nuance across dozens of countries—authenticity comes not only from language expertise but also from a deep understanding of timing.
“The best partnerships are built on tight collaboration. We love it when we can bring in our localization and transcreation partners early, during ideation,” said Lee.
“That’s when you help shape the idea from the ground up, rather than reverse-engineering it later to fit different markets.”
By its very nature, the creative process is inherently iterative, especially when applied across borders. It evolves as more cultural perspectives and regional nuances are brought in.
“The key is working together to preserve the core integrity of the idea, while letting it flex where needed,” said Lee.
We know humans are never going to disappear from creativity or language.
Speed, Culture, and the Right Kind of Tech
The discussion turned to technology, a hot topic across the Croisette. While AI was the headline act at Cannes, both leaders agreed that tech is only valuable if it strengthens creative outcomes.
“We know humans are never going to disappear from creativity or language,” said Ben.
“But we are developing tools that can support them more effectively.”
As an example, Ben pointed to Locate, Locaria’s proprietary localization platform.
“It brings together the full process, research, transcreation, and versioning, into a single system.”
“It’s powered by tech, but human-led from a strategic perspective. That means more speed and more effectiveness, without sacrificing nuance.”
Lee echoed the sentiment, emphasizing the role of technology in driving meaningful outcomes.
“Things are moving fast, and we’re open to all of it. But what really matters is when tech enables better creativity, better insights, and a more culturally authentic end product. That’s what we’re after.”
Craft That Travels
The spontaneous conversation between the pair highlighted the larger point that in a region as diverse as APAC, it’s no longer enough to assume a creative idea will carry through language and culture intact.
Crafting ideas that travel means embedding cultural and linguistic thinking at every stage, from insight to execution.
Stagwell contributed to the creation of this article."
https://www.brandinginasia.com/nothing-gets-lost-in-translation-why-creativity-in-apac-needs-a-language-first-approach/
#metaglossia_mundus
"One of the world’s most historically important texts is to be translated, analysed and made widely available thanks to a global collaboration involving language experts at the University of Exeter.
At 6,000 pages in length, the Spanish-language General Estoria (GE) is the largest universal history ever written in Europe, and attempts to summarise the entire history of humankind.
Now, a partnership led by the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (UBCO), and supported by Exeter’s Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, will translate the 13th century epic into English and preserve it in digital format.
It has been funded by a grant of more than $2.1 million from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It was announced this week by the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions.
“This exciting project is the culmination of a close working relationship with UBCO, which includes three jointly-funded catalyst grants,” says Dr Katie Brown, Co-Director of the project, and Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies. “As well as making the ‘General e gran estoria’ freely accessible to new audiences, this project will demonstrate the possibilities of large-scale, interdisciplinary, multicultural collaboration across the Humanities.”
The GE was commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile, who ruled Spain from 1252 to 1284. It was an effort to record the entire history of humans, from the origins of the world as narrated in the Bible up to the time the work was commissioned.
It was the first work of its type in a language other than Latin and includes the social and cultural history of the world, as well as its political history. Its authors also spanned multiple religions at a time when prevailing historical texts were usually written by Christians alone. It is housed in the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid.
“While this is one of the world’s most unique and important texts, it is unfortunately not widely known,” says Professor Francisco Peña, Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBCO, and project director. “Many relevant texts written in medieval Spain have disappeared. Through our efforts, we hope to change that and preserve this valuable piece of literature forever.
“The text hasn’t been well understood to date because it’s impossible for a single scholar to tackle a project of this size and complexity. So, in the spirit of how the GE was written, we’ve assembled this team from across the globe to tackle it together.”
UBC Okanagan
The project, Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: A Digital Edition of the General e Grand Estoria (DEGE)’, includes 55 scholars and practitioners from 18 partner organizations across Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Colombia and Tunisia. Professor Francisco Gago-Jover, of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, is the third co-director along with Prof Peña and Dr Brown.
It will run until 2032 and generate no less than 28 student internships for Exeter, four per year. Each will receive CA$5000 funding and one week of intensive training and cultural immersion in La Rioja.
Dr Brown will be responsible for overseeing training and mentoring across the project, and with the interns, will create the first full English translation of Book 1 of the GE, as well as educational resources for use in Spanish language learning.
Exeter academics, including Professor Michelle Bolduc, Professor Tom Hinton, Dr Loreto Romero and Dr Rebekah Welton, will also be involved once the project moves towards public engagement.
“These Partnership Grants are very rarely offered to projects in the Humanities, so that speaks to its great potential to preserve a unique piece of cultural history and inspire future generations,” adds Dr Brown. “It’s also testament to the fantastic partnership between our universities dating back to when Prof Peña first visited the University of Exeter in 2019.”
To find out more, please visit the project website."
https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/languages-cultures-and-visual-studies/university-to-work-with-global-partners-on-unique-translation-project/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Professional Ethics in Conference Interpreting - Relevance in uncertain times
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 03, 2025 | 04:00 PM - WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 03, 2025 | 07:30 PM
ORGANISER : CDP,
TYPE: OUTREACH
LOCATION : OECD HQ PARIS 2 RUE ANDRÉ PASCAL PARIS 75016 FR
Join AIIC's Staff Interpreters' Committee (CdP) at the OECD for a discussion on professional ethics and their relevance in our current day and age.
How do we apply the principles that have guided interpreters for over 70 years in the face of Artificial Intelligence, polarized political discourse, and declining multilateralism?
What ethics (and ethical) tools do the next generation of conference interpreters need?
Is ethics in interpreting becoming less relevant - or is it more vital than ever?
Following what promises to be a fascinating afternoon discussing these weighty questions, the OECD and CdP are pleased to invite participants to relax and connect over a glass or two in the Salon des Nations."
https://usa.aiic.org/client/event/roster/eventRosterDetails.html?productId=754&eventRosterId=8
#metaglossia_mundus
"Abstract: Love is a universal phenomenon, yet indigenous conceptualizations of love exist by the thousands in languages worldwide. In this paper, the authors propose that sharing linguistic knowledge (explicit semantic and implicit pragmatic) and cultural knowledge (explicit etic and implicit emic) of indigenous love concepts through intercultural dialogue can liberate people’s understanding of love “imprisoned in English” (Wierzbicka, 2013) from an indigenous psychology perspective. The authors propose an “Equivalent Indigenous Concept Model” for the intercultural understanding of love in Mandarin Chinese (爱; ai) and Ukrainian (кохаю; kohayu). In this study, two graduate students (a Chinese and a Ukrainian) enrolled in an Intercultural Understanding Pedagogy seminar at a leading Japanese research university discussed their indigenous conceptualizations of love. Results of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) based on the students’ intercultural communication (in English) suggest that, at the semantic and etic levels, both 爱 and кохаю represent profound emotions in romantic relationships. However, at the pragmatic and emic levels, 爱 functions as emotional ties that connect the individual, family, and nation, with an emphasis on commitment and responsibility. In contrast, кохаю primarily describes romantic love, specifically applicable to romantic partners, and emphasizes its sacredness. The scope, historical roots, and expressions of love concepts—as well as the dynamic and bittersweet nature of love and its relationships with marriage and family—are discussed from Chinese and Ukrainian socio-cultural perspectives. These findings support the proposition that equivalent indigenous concepts such as 爱 and кохаю represent a universal phenomenon – love, in this case – yet are likely expressed and experienced differently in specific cultural contexts."
Fan Yang a,
David Dalsky b
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102237
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147176725001002
#metaglossia_mundus
"Intercultural sensitivity, challenges, and perceived value in multicultural group work among third-year medical students at Alexandria university, Egypt (2023–2024)
Marium Mahmoud Abdulla & Aida Mohey Mohamed Ali
BMC Medical Education volume 25, Article number: 1038 (2025) Cite this article
Abstract
Background
With the advent of globalization, intercultural sensitivity (ICS) is a vital skill, particularly for medical students. At the Alexandria Faculty of Medicine (AFM), third-year domestic (Egyptian) and international students in the national program have been separated throughout all the years due to logistical challenges. This study aimed to assess the ICS of third-year national program students, identify its correlates, explore multicultural student groups (MCSG) work-related challenges, and evaluate the perceived value of multicultural group work.
Methods
A cross-sectional study using quota-convenience sampling was conducted among third-year national program medical students at AFM to proportionally represent domestic and international students. Participants completed an online questionnaire covering: general characteristics, the Arabic-translated version of: the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS), MCSG work-related challenges, and perceived value of intercultural group work. Statistical analyses included Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, and Spearman’s tests to examine associations between ICS and various factors.
Results
Among the 272 participants (170 domestic, 102 international), generally high levels of ICS were reported. Higher ICS was significantly associated with being an international student, higher English proficiency, multilingualism, and prior intercultural exposure (P < 0.05). Domestic students reported more MCSG-related challenges and a greater perceived value in multicultural group work (P < 0.05).
Conclusion
Third-year AFM students reported high ICS overall. Domestic students anticipated more MCSG work-related challenges yet perceived greater value in intercultural group work. Given the non-random sampling, findings may not be generalizable beyond the study population. The educational institution should foster opportunities for intercultural interactions among students, both within and outside the classroom."
Open access
Published: 11 July 2025
https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-025-07597-7
#metaglossia_mundus
A freelance interpreter was dismissed after taking notes during a closed-door Zelenskyy meeting, raising suspicions of Russian espionage.
"Caught in translation: EU interpreter fired for alleged Russian spying
A freelance interpreter was dismissed after taking notes during a closed-door Zelenskyy meeting, raising suspicions of Russian espionage.
Magnus Lund Nielsen Euractiv Jul 9, 2025 18:51 2 min. read News
An interpreter working for the European Commission has been dismissed over suspicions of spying for Russia, after allegedly taking notes during a high-level meeting in Brussels last December, Le Monde reports.
At a closed-door meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and EU heads of state and government, a Ukrainian interpreter was caught taking notes – an act strictly prohibited in such a context, according to a report by Le Monde.
Leaders were discussing Ukraine’s battlefield posture and ongoing European military support in the wake of US President Trump's re-election the month before.
Czech interpreters reportedly observed the interpreter taking notes. Commission officials then entered the booth, seized the notes, and expelled her from Commission premises.
An internal Commission investigation has since concluded. Belgian authorities will decide whether to pursue the case further and assess if the incident is part of a broader Russian espionage operation.
Le Monde identified the interpreter as Ms M, a dual French and Ukrainian national. Of Russian descent, she has lived in Ukraine for several years. Together with her sister, she has freelanced as an interpreter for EU institutions, French ministries, and NATO for over two decades.
The European Commission confirmed the incident. “The notes were confiscated. After a careful examination of the facts, it was decided to no longer use the interpreter’s services,” a spokesperson told Le Monde.
Ms M remains formally listed as an interpreter with NATO, the French Permanent Representation in Brussels, and several French ministries. French authorities have stated they will “draw all the necessary consequences of the incident.”
The interpreter has been blacklisted by Ukrainian authorities, who suspect her of maintaining professional ties with Russian officials.
When questioned by Le Monde, Ms M responded that her work is bound by confidentiality and insisted she has always upheld "respect" for the ethical standards of her profession.
The case surfaces as Brussels continues to reel from a separate wave of lobbying and corruption scandals involving alleged influence operations linked to Chinese tech giant Huawei.
(aw)"
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/caught-in-translation-eu-interpreter-fired-for-alleged-russian-spying/
#metaglossia_mundus
"Translator Kim Jung-ah completes decade-long Dostoevsky translation project
By Park Sae-jin
Posted : July 9, 2025, 19:26 Updated : July 10, 2025, 17:15
SEOUL, July 09 (AJP) - Translator Kim Jung-ah held a press conference in central Seoul on Monday to announce the publication of her Korean translation of "The Brothers Karamazov." With its release, she completed solo Korean translations of four major novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," "Demons," and "The Brothers Karamazov." The project took more than ten years from start to finish.
Kim is the first South Korean translator known to have completed full-length translations of all four works on her own. The total page count exceeds 6,600. Speaking to AJP, Kim said, "He's been the compass of my life. I've lived the last ten years as if we were connected by an umbilical cord."
She began with "Notes from Underground" around 2010, but started focusing on the major novels in 2018. Kim holds degrees from Seoul National University and Illinois State University, and also runs the fashion brand Space Nool. She did most of her translation work in the early morning hours, often beginning at 2 a.m. and continuing until just before heading to the office.
"'The Brothers Karamazov' drained me emotionally," she said. "There were nights I sobbed while translating certain passages. But it was in those moments I felt closest to Dostoevsky's view of humanity, not as fallen or broken, but as compassionate beings capable of redemption."
The physical toll was significant. During work on "The Idiot," she began translating while standing due to chronic back pain. "At one point, a doctor told me not to cry during work," she said. "But how do you read 'Karamazov' and not cry?"
One of her priorities was to correct what she identified as more than one hundred mistranslations in earlier Korean editions. "I wanted to stitch the Korean version together with care, as if I were repairing a beloved's sweater," she said. "I tried to offer something qualitatively different."
The books are now available in standard paperback editions. "The Brothers Karamazov" has also been released in a special leather-bound edition, limited to 300 copies.
Kim refers to Dostoevsky as "Teacher Do" and considers herself his lifelong student. "He's the most human of all writers. Fully ninety percent of my life was shaped by him," she said.
She has been nominated for Russia's Pushkin Medal, an award that recognizes individuals who promote Russian literature and culture abroad.
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com"
https://m.ajupress.com/view/20250709192359130
#metaglossia_mundus
UK-based GlobeScribe is charging $100 per book, per language for use of its services, but translators say that nuanced work can only be produced by humans
"AI translation service launched for fiction writers and publishers prompts dismay among translators
UK-based GlobeScribe is charging $100 per book, per language for use of its services, but translators say that nuanced work can only be produced by humans
Ella Creamer
Tue 8 Jul 2025 18.11 BST
An AI fiction translation service aimed at both traditional publishers and self-published authors has been launched in the UK. GlobeScribe.ai is currently charging $100 per book, per language for use of its translation services.
“There will always be a place for expert human translation, especially for highly literary or complex texts,” said the founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, which specialises in crime and thrillers. “But GlobeScribe.ai opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”
GlobeScribe conducted “extensive blind testing” of its tool. Native speakers reviewed GlobeScribe translations alongside human-translated versions of texts without being told which method had been used. “The feedback consistently showed that readers could not reliably distinguish between them,” according to a company statement. “In some cases, reviewers even felt the AI-assisted versions were closer in tone and fidelity to the original English manuscript.”
However, prominent translators along with a translators’ organisation have expressed concern over the initiative.
GlobeScribe “may claim to unlock global access for fiction, but their approach sidelines the very people who make literature resonate across cultures,” said Ian Giles, chair of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association. “Suggesting that AI can match, or even surpass, the nuanced work of human translators on behalf of authors is flat-out wrong.”
“The best literary translations offer more than simple accuracy, more than literal fidelity to the words making up the sentences,” said Polly Barton, writer and translator of works including the bestselling Butter by Asako Yuzuki from Japanese to English. “They are engaging with the context from which the book has come, and reproducing the pacing, atmosphere, emotional timbre, rhythm, and all the other, less superficially obvious factors that ultimately determine how fulfilling and rich the reading experience is.”
Deepa Bhasthi, whose translation of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp from Kannada into English won this year’s International Booker prize, said that “there are many words in Kannada that contain whole cultural worlds in them, where there is as much hidden or implied within a cultural context as is conveyed in literal meaning. And that needs a human being, with an understanding of these visible and invisible worlds, to translate such words”.
Asked about GlobeScribe’s testing method, Barton said that being a native speaker of a language “doesn’t necessarily equip one to judge all translations from that language with total authority”. Bhasthi added that “we are not told what kind of texts they were given, what kind of readers the test subjects were”.
GlobeScribe co-founder Betsy Reavley and Fred Freeman.
View image in fullscreen
‘AI tools should be embraced’ … GlobeScribe co-founder Betsy Reavley and Fred Freeman. Photograph: Elodie Giuge Photography
GlobeScribe’s founders said that while they “recognise that parts of the industry are understandably cautious about what AI might mean for the arts”, they “believe these tools are here to stay and that they should be embraced thoughtfully and responsibly”. They added that AI could enhance creativity and help professional translators “increase their productivity and output”. The founders “are clear that this is not about replacing human translators”.
Julia Sanches – the translator of works including Boulder by Eva Baltasar from Catalan into English – said: “Even though I don’t think Globescribe can translate the kinds of literary texts I translate, I am gloomy about the emergence of all these new AI ‘translation’ services. They give the appearance that translation is instant, which devalues my labour, and also that it is mediocre, which could make ‘good enough’ the new standard for the literary arts. And that’s a disservice to both authors and readers.”
“This doesn’t just end with translation,” said Barton. “Maybe translators are at the frontline of people being put out of work by AI technologies, but soon there will be more and more jobs threatened to be wiped out in this way. It lies in our hands to decide whether or not we want this to happen.”
https://share.google/U59Pgc6NHTJWCmYQu
#metaglossia_mundus
"L’examen du Code de la route traduit en langue des signes dès cet été
Par Mr M. -9 juillet 2025
C’est officiel : dès l’été 2025, l’examen du Code de la route sera traduit en langue des signes pour permettre aux personnes sourdes et malentendantes de bénéficier d’une aide pour passer leur examen.
Avoir un handicap peut être un frein pour passer un examen. C’est le cas du Code de la route, qui n’était jusqu’ici pas adapté aux personnes en situation de handicap auditif. En France, on compte 6 à 7 millions de personnes déficientes auditives, dont des sourds profonds, des sourds d’une oreille et des malentendants.
Chaque année, près de 4 000 candidats qui passent l’examen du Code de la route sont atteints de surdité ou de troubles sévères de l’audition, selon des chiffres du ministère de l’Intérieur rapportés par 20 Minutes. En plus de cela, 80% des personnes sourdes sont « en grande difficulté face au français écrit » comme l’explique Karine Fouet, professeure spécialisée à l’Institut national de jeunes sourds (INJS) de Paris.
En effet, la lecture s’apprend principalement par l’écoute, raison pour laquelle les personnes sourdes et malentendantes peuvent avoir des difficultés à lire. Ainsi, il peut être impossible de passer l’examen du Code de la route, qui demande de lire rapidement des questions et des réponses dans un temps limité.
Chaque année, 4 000 candidats ayant des problèmes auditifs passent l’examen du Code de la route. Photo : Pexels
Jusqu’à présent, un seul dispositif était mis en place pour faciliter l’accès aux personnes sourdes et malentendantes à l’examen du Code de la route. Ces dernières devaient demander la présence d’un interprète en langue des signes dans la salle d’examen, mais cette procédure était souvent longue et complexe.
L’examen du Code de la route sera traduit
Pour faciliter les démarches des personnes en situation de handicap auditif, la Sécurité routière a annoncé le 3 juin dernier la traduction de l’examen du Code de la route en langue des signes française (LSF).
« Faciliter l’accès au permis de conduire, c’est un puissant levier d’insertion pour la mobilité des personnes en situation de handicap. La traduction des questions du code de la route en langue des signes s’inscrit dans cette démarche globale de facilitation du parcours des candidats au permis de conduire, sans jamais transiger sur la qualité de la formation et des attendus en termes de sécurité sur la route », a déclaré Florence Guillaume, déléguée interministérielle, dans un communiqué de presse de la Sécurité routière.
Les personnes sourdes ou malentendantes auront accès à une traduction de l’examen en langue des signes. Photo : Pexels
Dorénavant, les personnes qui en font la demande pourront passer leur examen dans les bureaux d’éducation routière (BER). Des diapositives adaptées, dans lesquelles un interprète de la langue des signes est filmé, seront mises à disposition afin de traduire directement les questions et les réponses.
« Ce qui va changer, c’est qu’il y aura peut-être plus de disponibilités au sein des BER parce qu’il n’y aura plus la présence du traducteur. Donc ça va en même temps également réduire le coût du permis pour les candidats », a déclaré Céline Jallet, membre du pôle en charge de la gestion des examens du permis de conduire, à Handicap.fr.
Aider les personnes en situation de handicap
L’objectif de cette réforme est de faciliter l’accès au Code de la route pour les personnes en situation de handicap auditif afin de garantir « l’égalité des chances pour tous les candidats », selon Florence Guillaume.
Ces dernières années, plusieurs mesures concrètes ont été mises en place pour faciliter les démarches des personnes en situation de handicap. Pour passer l’examen du Code de la route, un temps supplémentaire peut être accordé si besoin. La Sécurité routière a également créé une carte qui recense toutes les auto-écoles aménagées qui aident les personnes sourdes ou malentendantes à passer leur permis de conduire.
– Lisa Guinot"
#metaglossia_mundus
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''By adopting WANA to describe the vast interconnected geographical region, we can better honor its rich diversity and the people who call it home.
A copy of Muhammad Al-Idrisi's world map by ‘Alî ibn Hasan al-Hûfî al-Qâsimî's from 1456. The original map dates back to 1154. South is at the top of the map. Image from Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
The term “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) has long been used to describe a vast and diverse region stretching from Morocco in the west, to Iran in the east. However, the term’s Eurocentrism has been criticized, and in recent years we have seen a growing momentum to replace MENA with terms like SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) or WANA (West Asia and North Africa).
As part of our mission of amplifying voices from across the globe, and in recognition of the importance of language, at Global Voices we have decided to adopt the term WANA instead of MENA as a way to challenge such outdated and colonial terminologies.
This shift reflects an increasing awareness of colonial legacies and a desire to dismantle them across the globe. Decolonizing language and terminology to speak about the world and its peoples is part of this process.
‘Middle of where, east of what?’
“Middle East” is a term rooted in European colonialism, coined in the 19th century. It reflects a Eurocentric view, placing Europe at the center of the world map and labeling the regions to its east according to their distance from that center.
Using Middle East perpetuates this colonial mindset by continuing to frame the region through that lens. The addition of “North Africa” to create MENA does little to address this issue, as it still links two regions — one described based on its own continental geography and the other based on its relation to Europe — under a single umbrella that fails to recognize their distinct identities and historical experiences.
An Arabic debate?
In Arabic, the term used to describe the region varies and often depends on political contexts. The most commonly used is in fact “الشرق الأوسط,” which translates directly to the Eurocentric “Middle East.” Though other terms like “غرب آسيا” meaning “West Asia,” are sometimes used as a decolonial choice in academic and political discourse, they are not nearly as commonly used as “Middle East.” West Asia is however mostly encountered in United Nations reports, as well as sporting events or regional championships.
The other commonly used terms are “الوطن العربي,” translated as “the Arab Homeland,” or “العالم العربي,” translated as “the Arab World,” that are frequently used to emphasize the shared linguistic, cultural, and historical ties among Arab peoples in the 22 states that form the Arab League. This contested terminology excludes both the non-Arabic speaking states in the broader WANA region, but, most importantly, the many non-Arab groups who form an intrinsic part of the region’s diverse peoples, such as Kurds, Amazighs, Armenians, Assyrians and many others. “Muslim World” is another term often used to describe a wider region, which in turn excludes the many non-Muslim groups who exist within this geography, and many Muslim groups who are outside it.
Though Arabic debates about language use in relation to identity, geography, and decolonization are happening, they remain less influential in their mainstream impact than their counterparts in English. The same can be said about other major languages such as French, Spanish or even Mandarin who continue to predominantly use terms equivalent to “Middle East” instead of more geographically accurate terms like West Asia. Nonetheless, debates, even if limited, are happening.
Why SWANA or WANA?
One of the key arguments for adopting SWANA or WANA is the geographic accuracy these terms provide. “Southwest Asia” and “West Asia,” like “North Africa,” are geographical descriptions of a region, positioning it within its continental context. These terms de-center the European perspective and instead focus on the region’s own geography.
The use of WANA has gained traction among decolonial scholars and activists who seek to challenge the Eurocentrism or Orientalism carried by terms like MENA, Arab world, Muslim world, etc. used to describe these vast and diverse regions.
The purely geographical designation of SWANA or WANA is able to acknowledge the diversity within these regions, as well as the proximity and connections between its parts.
These geographical terms allow for a more nuanced understanding of identity, one that is not limited by colonial or cultural categorizations. By adopting WANA to describe the vast interconnected geographical region, we can better honor its rich diversity and the people who call it home."
#metaglossia_mundus