Metaglossia: The Translation World

"Bilingualism is Driven by a Single Neurological “Grammar Engine”
New study finds a common neural system builds a language across languages

NYU researchers have found that bilingualism is not powered by separate grammar engines in the brain, but, rather, by a common neural system that works across languages. Above: A restaurant in Silves, Portugal. Photo credit: Mary Salen/Getty Images
It’s not uncommon for bilingual speakers to mistakenly apply the grammatical rules of one language while speaking the other—for example, saying “I have 20 years” instead of “I am 20” when asked about their age.

Some may wonder if these language mashups are evidence of deeper neurological distinctions among languages: If you speak English and Spanish, for instance, do you have an English “grammatical engine” that learns and applies English rules and a Spanish one that learns and applies Spanish rules?

A new study by a team of New York University scientists finds that, in fact, bilingualism is not powered by separate grammar engines in the brain, but, rather, by a common neural system that works across languages.

“Our research suggests that brains have a single grammatical engine that fuels all of the languages we speak—rather than separate engines for each one,” explains Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, an assistant professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and the senior author of the study, which appears in JNeurosci. “We show that the same brain patterns support grammar in English and Spanish, indicating that human language may be built from neural computations that transcend any one language.”

While previous research has found neurological commonality across speakers of different languages and other NYU research has explored “bilingual brains,” less clear is how the brain builds grammar across languages in bilingual speakers.

To address this, Blanco-Elorrieta and Xuanyi Jessica Chen, an NYU doctoral student and the paper’s first author, used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track brain activity millisecond-by-millisecond while Spanish-English bilingual speakers transformed both English and Spanish words into grammatically correct forms. For instance, participants would hear a singular form of a word (“boat” [English] or “barco” [Spanish]) and were asked to say the plural version of the term (e.g., “boats” or “barcos”).

We show that the same brain patterns support grammar in English and Spanish, indicating that human language may be built from neural computations that transcend any one language.

Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
Assistant Professor of Psychology
The researchers also tested how participants responded to both cognates—words in different languages that share a similar meaning, spelling, and pronunciation because of their common linguistic roots—and “pseudowords” (made-up words such as “paple”).

This method, which reached beyond existing words in English and Spanish, was aimed at determining if the same neural mechanisms apply when novel words enter our vocabulary.

The findings showed that the brain relies on a shared neural mechanism for grammar across languages, even when words differ in sound or structure. Moreover, the same neural system also applied to completely novel words (i.e., pseudowords), further suggesting that the brain implements grammar as a reusable computation—or universal language template—rather than deploying multiple language-specific rulebooks.

“The results provide some of the clearest neural evidence to date that grammatical computations are shared across languages in bilingual speakers,” says Blanco-Elorrieta, who previously teamed up with Chen to create a calculator to measure multilingualism. “More broadly, because the brain appears to use a common neural system across languages, our findings offer new insight into how we communicate and learn new languages.”

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-Grant 2446452) and the National Institutes of Health (R00 DC019973-01)."
Original publication date: Jun 15, 2026
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2026/june/bilingualism-is-driven-by-a-single-neurological--grammar-engine-.html
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#metaglossia_mundus

"Organisée par l’Association des traducteurs de Chine (ATC), la 44e édition du Séminaire de traduction chinois-français s’est tenue le 12 juin à Beijing avec le soutien de l’Université de commerce international et d’économie (UIBE), qui célèbre cette année le 75e anniversaire de sa fondation.

La cérémonie d’ouverture a réuni Gao Anming, rédacteur en chef du Groupe de publication internationale de Chine (CIPG) et vice-président exécutif ainsi que secrétaire général de l’ATC, Chen Deqiu, vice-président de l’UIBE, ainsi que Huang Yulong, président de l’Institut de traduction du CIPG et vice-président de l’ATC.

Plus de 40 experts et traducteurs ont participé au séminaire. Ils représentaient notamment l’Institut de recherche sur l’histoire et la littérature du Parti communiste chinois (PCC), le ministère chinois des Affaires étrangères, le ministère chinois des Ressources naturelles, l’Agence de presse Xinhua, China Media Group (CMG), le CIPG, l’Université des langues et de culture de Beijing, l’Université des études internationales de Beijing, l’UIBE et d’autres universités.

Les participants ont procédé à un échange approfondi sur les équivalents français de plus d’une centaine de termes chinois, couvrant des domaines aussi variés que la politique, la diplomatie, l’économie, le commerce, les sciences et technologies, l’écologie, l’éducation et le bien-être. Les discussions ont abouti à un consensus largement partagé. Les résultats de ces travaux seront rendus publics dans les prochaines semaines.

Suivez China.org.cn sur Twitter et Facebook pour rejoindre la conversation."
http://french.china.org.cn/china/txt/2026-06/15/content_118549207.htm
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

How a new “dictionary for rappers” is helping writers rhyme by continuing an ancient Chinese tradition

 

"The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Reverse Edition) has been compiled by the Institute of Linguistics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and published by The Commercial Press, China’s oldest modern publishing house and publisher of this magazine. The book quickly gained traction online after being humorously dubbed “a dictionary customized for rappers.”

 

 

 

 

Tracing the Evolution of the Modern Chinese Language:

 

 

 

 

Letters of Revolution: The Failed Movement to Eradicate Chinese Characters

 

Two-Way Communication: How China Adopted Japanese Terms to Discuss Modernity

 

How China Adopted Western Punctuation

 

While the first modern English dictionary, A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, was compiled in 1755, the modern Chinese equivalent has a much shorter history. Since the early 20th century, along with the search for a modern national identity, intellectuals have sought to standardize spoken Chinese and replace classical Chinese with vernacular writing to form a modern unified language. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, first published in 1978, emerged from this quest for standardization—its more than 56,000 entries are a comprehensive standard for the language, setting the model for modern Chinese lexicography.

 

 

 

 

The new reverse edition is based on the seventh edition of The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary from 2016, with minor updates. Where the standard edition lists words in alphabetical order according to the pinyin (romanized spelling) of their first character, the reverse edition organizes multi-character entries, which make up the majority of Chinese words, according to the pinyin of their final character. For instance, the reverse dictionary collects 236 words under the character 心 (xīn, heart), including 耐心 (nàixīn, patience), 良心 (liángxīn, conscience), and 野心 (yěxīn, ambition).

 

 

 

 

For editor Chen Yuqing, who worked on the latest edition on and off over the past eight years, this broadens the reverse dictionary’s appeal beyond just literary reference. “It’s extremely functional, and fun to keep around,” says Chen, “you can even use it as an encyclopedia.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under 心 (heart), related words ending in the same character are grouped together (Jiayu Zhang)

 

 

 

 

Li Yuming, President of the China Association for Lexicography and noted linguist, explained how this works in an April interview with Guangming Daily. Li notes that Chinese nouns often follow one of two structural patterns: a modifier preceding a head noun, as in 金 (gold) + 鱼 (fish) = 金鱼 (goldfish); or a lexical stem followed by a suffix such as 子 (-zi), as in 儿子 (son) and 妻子 (wife). Because the reverse dictionary organizes entries by their final character, all nouns with the same head and suffix appear together, essentially grouping related concepts and objects like trees, flowers, or horses. Looking up the character 星 (xīng, star), for example, opens up a world of celestial objects, from comet (彗星 huìxīng) and Mars (火星 huǒxīng), to supernova (超新星 chāoxīnxīng).

 

 

 

 

The reverse dictionary is also a powerful aid for poets and songwriters looking to create rhymes. China’s extended history of classical poetry comes with a long tradition of rhyming dictionaries, the earliest surviving examples of which date back to the seventh century. A particularly voluminous rhyming dictionary was compiled in the 18th century for literati to look up word origins and literary allusions, spanning 444 volumes and including around 10,000 characters across 1.4 million entries.

 

 

 

 

The first modern iteration, compiled in 1987, continued this ancient tradition. “It was by reader demand—people who wanted to write poetry or conduct lexical research,” explains Chen. In standard Chinese, a syllable consists of an initial (a consonant sound), a final (the vowel-based component that follows), and a tone mark. Words rhyme when they share the same or similar finals, regardless of the initial. Because the reverse dictionary includes a syllable index arranged by finals—such as gua, kua, hua—a writer can quickly find all characters and multi-character words that end with a chosen sound, making it much easier to find rhyming words that fit their work.

 

 

 

 

Compiling a dictionary of this scale and complexity is no easy feat. According to Chen, the six months leading up to release were intense, as the manuscript underwent more than 10 meticulous proofreading cycles. Since the launch, Chen has been monitoring the book’s reception online, much of which jokes about its usefulness for rappers who produce awkward bars, as well as examples, such as A-do’s notorious gaffe, of forced rhyming in pop lyrics. One netizen exclaimed, “Finally, rap lyrics could use such literary refinement.”

 

 

 

 

“We highlight a few aspects and explain how to use the dictionary,” says Chen, “but some readers have explored it on their own and uncovered things that, honestly, go even further than what we intended or noticed ourselves.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The seventh edition of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, released in 2016, added more than 400 new words and expressions, including terms such as 二维码 (QR code) and 人工智能 (artificial intelligence), along with nearly 100 new meanings for existing entries (Jiayu Zhang)

 

 

 

 

Xu Chen, an editor of eight years’ experience at Nanjing Publishing House, is among the dictionary’s earliest recipients. Specializing in classical Chinese texts, Xu finds the dictionary extremely useful. “Sometimes in my work, I come across words with an obscure first character, and the reverse dictionary is perfect for those situations.” The dictionary’s unique structure allows him to reference these words according to the more familiar second character, streamlining his work. “It pairs really well with the standard edition,” adds Xu, who keeps both editions on his desk. “My first reaction when I got the dictionary was to show off the set to my colleagues.”

 

 

 

 

Xu also shared his pair on Xiaohongshu (RedNote), receiving thousands of likes and hundreds of comments on the post. Some users were surprised to find out about the new edition, since the standard Contemporary Chinese Dictionary has been a household name in China for decades as an essential reference text recommended by schools. Others recalled their experiences using the dictionary, with one junior high school student admitting that her classmate enjoys reading it for fun as a break from homework during evening study sessions.

 

 

 

 

But alongside the nostalgia and intrigue are doubts about whether a print dictionary is necessary in the digital age. “You can look up anything with your phone,” remarked one commenter. While dictionaries and other reference books still hold ground in the Chinese book market—The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary has sold over 70 million copies since it was first published, with sales peaking every year before the start of the school semester—their overall market share is shrinking, giving way to digital dictionaries, free apps, and the broader internet.

 

 

 

 

Internationally, English dictionaries like Merriam-Webster have long faced similar operational challenges, from the early impact of the internet, which made answers to lexical questions readily available online, to the rise of AI models allegedly trained on their copyrighted content without permission.

 

 

 

 

For editor Xu, however, dictionaries in China are not easily replaced by AI models. “Right now, AI isn’t an authoritative source. Only when it earns that authority can we start talking about whether it might replace traditional reference books,” he says. “Until then, we should continue making authoritative reference books and constantly refine and improve them.”

 

 

 

 

Rapid technological change may one day threaten the future of dictionaries, but it also relies on them in its own way by giving birth to hundreds of new Chinese words each year. Just this March, the Chinese translation for “token” in the context of AI—the basic unit of text that an AI model reads and generates—was officially standardized as 词元 (cíyuán, literally “text unit”) by the National Data Administration and China National Committee for Terms in Sciences and Technologies. Each update to the dictionary serves not only to standardize the language that everyone in a society relies on, but also to document the era that produced it. In that sense, there will always be a need for dictionaries and the lexicographers who make them.

 

 

 

 

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2026/06/a-reverse-dictionary-of-modern-chinese/

 

#metaglossia 

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

One of the everyday challenges of police work is the language barrier

 

Sheriff’s Office implements language translation tech

 

“Obviously, there are non-English speakers in our area and this greatly assists us with being able to effectively communicate with them.”

 

One of the everyday challenges of police work is the language barrier. Officers often have to use translation services online or work with an interpreter to communicate. However, this can take considerable time. 

 

Earlier this month, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office announced that it is now implementing an artificial intelligence-based language translation software. 

 

Team members can access the tool through their body worn cameras. It is already being utilized for investigations, traffic stops and community events. 

 

The law enforcement agency’s team has access to 57 languages (with English being the base): Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh. 

 

“We’re always consistently looking for new and innovative ways to improve our public safety,” said PCSO traffic sergeant John Mullins. “Obviously, there are non-English speakers in our area and this greatly assists us with being able to effectively communicate with them.” 

 

Since the technology is artificial intelligence-based, it has an accuracy rate of 90 to 95%.

 

He added that the PCSO began a 90-day trial in November 2025 to “make sure things are functional and that it was actually beneficial.” The participating deputies provided feedback that was “overwhelmingly positive.” 

 

“Everyone who had access to it and used it in the field during the trial period spoke nothing but good things about how it bridged the barrier,” Mullins explained. 

 

The Sheriff’s Office received access to the tool through a partnership with public safety technology company Axon, which manufactures the agency’s body cameras. It is available to all certified law enforcement deputies in the field and at the Pinellas County Jail. Bailiffs at the county’s courthouses also have access to the technology. 

 

Additionally, multiple civilian team members at the Pinellas County Jail, including probation officers and medics, can utilize the software. 

 

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and the Tampa Police Department have been utilizing artificial intelligence-based language translation technology as well. 

 

He said that there are many benefits to using the new system. Officers can “quickly and effectively communicate with people in emergency situations.” Additionally, the technology “drastically reduces the wait time in trying to get someone who speaks that language to the scene or potentially waiting on the phone on a language line.” 

 

PCSO team members can access vital information firsthand and alert other responding units if necessary. 

 

Mullins explained that the software can also “reduce frustration with the citizen, allowing for “a much more fluid and natural conversation.” They can communicate with officers in real time without a delay. These individuals, he added, are “usually not going through their happiest hour.” 

 

More languages will be added over time as Axon expands the technology. According to the PCSO, deputies have reported two languages that are not represented: Creole and Albanian."

Michael Connor

June 15, 2026

 

https://stpetecatalyst.com/sheriffs-office-implements-language-translation-tech/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

The decision comes after several incidents that drew criticism from journalists and fans. The most striking one occurred before Brazil’s debut against Morocco, when a Spanish journalist asked Vinícius Jr. a question in English to comply with FIFA regulations, which until now had only allowed for English and the languages of the two participating teams.

 

FIFA will include Spanish in translations of all World Cup press conferences

 

 

 

 

FIFA will now allow simultaneous translation into Spanish at press conferences during the 2026 World Cup, following the controversy sparked by the exclusion of one of the official languages of Mexico, the tournament’s co-host alongside the United States and Canada.

 

 

 

 

A source close to the organization told AFP on Sunday that the translators available at the conferences are requested directly by each team according to their needs, but specified that Spanish will be incorporated into the interpretation system going forward.

 

 

 

 

AFP also confirmed that the FIFA website now offers the option of simultaneous translation into Spanish for press conferences.

 

 

 

 

The decision comes after several incidents that drew criticism from journalists and fans. The most notable incident occurred before Brazil’s debut against Morocco, when a Spanish journalist asked Vinícius Jr. a question in English to comply with FIFA regulations, which until now had only allowed for English and the languages of the two participating teams.

 

 

 

 

The Brazilian forward, who has played in Spain since 2018, interrupted the exchange and encouraged the journalist to continue in Spanish.

 

 

 

 

"Yes, you can," he said with a laugh.

 

 

 

 

However, a FIFA official cut off the exchange and reminded them that the language was not available in the interpretation system. Finally, Vinícius had to put on headphones to listen to the translation.

 

 

 

 

Similar situations occurred with other soccer players accustomed to speaking Spanish. Moroccan player Achraf Hakimi, born in Madrid, tried to help a Mexican journalist who was interrupted while asking a question in Spanish.

 

 

 

 

Dutch player Frenkie de Jong, of Barcelona, also downplayed the language used by a journalist before the match against Japan. The restriction sparked widespread criticism on social media, where users questioned why one of the most widely spoken languages on the continent was excluded from a World Cup partially hosted in Mexico."

 

 https://share.google/2Gi2eXJa7AxRHrVkg

 

#metaglossia 

 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"JCCC inmates spend their sentences making Braille books for the blind

Joe Gamm/News Tribune Inmates working in the Center for Braille and Narration Production inside the Jefferson City Correctional Center have been involved in back-to-school activities. On Wednesday, Steve Hoffman was in the process of taking a textbook and putting it into a large-print format before the next school year begins.

A team of inmates in Jefferson City are keeping a 53-year-old program going at the Center for Braille and Narration Production.

This year, 53 men work at the Jefferson City Correctional Center (JCCC) translating thousands of pieces of printed material into Braille text for blind individuals around Missouri.

The center translates anything and everything into Braille: novels, textbooks, calendars, maps and magazines, and all in a variety of languages. It also does vocal narration for video content.

Founded in 1973, the Braille center is a "close-knit group of men," according to inmate Stuart Grebing.

Grebing, 62, has been incarcerated for more than half his life. The Cole County native is serving a life sentence after his conviction for first-degree murder and kidnapping in 1988.

According to court documents, Grebing and his girlfriend went to a Jefferson City home where visitors were known to use drugs. Grebing and another man took a third man, John Allen, from the residence and later returned without him. Allen's body was later found lying in tall weeds in an isolated area of Cole County.

Grebing bounced around the prison system for a number of decades until he received a good conduct convenience transfer to move to JCCC in 2023. Shortly after arriving at JCCC, Grebing began his six-month training for the Braille program.

"The worst part for me was the computers," he said.

After so many years in prison, Grebing was not very familiar with modern computer systems. He had experience as a machinist, but working all the programs needed for Braille translation proved to be a much different challenge.

Now with three years of experience, Grebing is one of the primary coordinators for the center within JCCC. On Wednesday, his office was filled with calendars for 2027 soon to be enhanced with Braille text. Grebing said the inmates have more than 9,000 calendars to get through before the new year arrives.

At the Braille center, inmates can be found working on computers formatting text and making sure everything lines up properly. Braille is comprised of a series of raised dots on paper arranged in particular patterns. Blind and hard-of-sight individuals run their hands along the page and use their sense of touch to read the letters. Grebing said it is important to "come at it from the perspective of the Braille reader" when translating.

Many of the center's work requests come from schools around Missouri. Teachers with incoming blind or hard-of-sight students can send books to the center to be translated into Braille at a low cost.

Inmates work from 7:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. On Wednesday, 77-year-old Marvin Irvin worked on a translation of the Bible's Book of Joshua.

"We're in the binding department. We QC (quality-check) the QCs. If there's any errors, we send it back," he said.

Irvin, a former police officer, pleaded guilty to three Buchanan County murders in 1991, avoiding the death penalty. He is serving three life sentences for two counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder.

Irvin said the program has been a "godsend" for him as he spends the remainder of his life behind bars. Working six days each week gives him and other inmates at JCCC a task to break up the monotony of daily prison life, and it allows them to do some good in the process.

"They bring clients in every now and then. They are so grateful that we're doing this job," Irvin said. "It's a great reward. It makes me appreciate what we've done."

With limited resources, inmates at the center have to make the most with every piece of equipment they get. The center's designated handyman is Derrick Jones, a 45-year-old serving a life sentence for second-degree murder.

"Any electronic that we have in the center, it is my job to keep it operational," he said. "If a coffee pot goes down, it's trouble."

Individual Braille printers can cost the center more than $12,000, and sending individual parts back to Japan for repairs costs thousands more. After Jones joined the center in 2016, he committed to learning how to fix the printers and other equipment in-house to avoid the costly expenses.

Jones said he does not know what the exact budget for the center is, but he does know that being fiscally responsible is the best way to ensure it has everything it needs to operate smoothly.

"Sometimes I ask for stuff and I can't get it," he said.

Braille text expands accessibility for written material, but it can also be very cumbersome to produce. A single scientific computation can sometimes take up to 20 pages to reproduce. Inmate John "John John" Crowder said the center did a full translation of the King James Bible last year. The finished collection of volumes, each 150 pages, was two stories tall when stacked up, around 17 feet.

Crowder, who is serving a 50-year sentence for first-degree assault, assists other inmates in completing their training for Braille translation. Crowder's favorite part of working in the program is helping those in the local communities who are "overlooked at times."

In the front hallway of the Center for Braille and Narration Production is a string of letters from students thanking the inmates for translating books for them. Crowder described receiving notes from the same students from kindergarten all the way through high school. He said hearing from them each year brings him elation and joy."
June 14, 2026 by Jack Wardynski
https://www.newstribune.com/news/2026/jun/14/jc-inmates-spend-their-sentences-making-braille/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

The study of the neologisms of ‘nature in the city’ in a trilingual perspective within the Simulated Translation Bureau...

"Pascale Elbaz was invited to lead a session of a Simulated Translation Bureau, as part of the undergraduate program of the School of Languages and Translation Studies at the university of Turku (Finland). Her host were Tiina Tuominen and Leena Salmi, researchers in the English and French departments respectively. The aim was to introduce students to the study of the neologisms of ‘nature in the city’ in a trilingual perspective within the Simulated Translation Bureau.

The students were working for a simulated Finnish-French architectural agency which aim was to create urban projects integrating nature in the sustainable cities, both in France and in Finland. The proposed activity, with a total duration of 7 hours, consisted of two face-to-face sessions of three hours and 30 minutes each, with a break. Eighteen students attended the workshop. The working languages were Finnish, English and French. 

Three teachers from the Translation department took part in the workshop: Kalle Konttinen, Tiina Holopainen and Lea Huotari. They were able to participate in the discussions with the students and to help them make bridges between their learnings in class and this hands-on workshop, between theory and social implementation of neology.

This project explored how new terms emerge in different languages in the domain of ecourbanism. Students tracked terminology trends and assessed linguistic adaptation strategies, a useful competence when working in a specialised field. They participated in debates on the emergence of new terms, standardization, and cross-cultural terminology challenges."
https://eneoli.eu/grant/stsm-teaching-neologisms-of-nature-in-the-city-within-a-simulated-translation-bureau-in-the-university-of-turku-finland/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"For half a century, Edwin and Willa Muir's translations were how the Anglophone world read Kafka. A prize-winning study of his translators barely registers their contribution.

The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. 

Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century, Maïa Hruska, translated by Sam Taylor, William Collins, £16.99

In 1995, a zanily inventive Scottish film won the Oscar for best live-action short. Two decades before his stint as the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi wrote and directedFranz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Richard E Grant, as the tormented author in his Prague garret, struggles in the face of endless interruptions to decide the kind of metamorphosis to inflict on his hapless hero, Gregor Samsa. A banana? A kangaroo? The arrival of a (misdirected) joke-shop costume, and a squashed cockroach, show him that it has to be a giant ‘insect’.

The joke works because everybody knows that Kafka – modern prophet of alienation and victimisation, invoked even when unread – converted poor Gregor into a big bug. That ‘insect’, however, owes its existence to two other Scots – except that neither exactly fitted that description. Willa and Edwin Muir – Willa born in Angus to parents from Shetland, Edwin a proud ‘Orkneyman’ who called himself a ‘good Scandinavian’ – published their translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) in 1933. The couple’s pioneering advocacy of Kafka’s works began with The Castle in 1929. It would continue until an edition of In the Penal Colony, with other stories, in 1948.

Thirty years of literary wandering, from 1919 to 1950, took the Muirs to new-born Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and several short-term British homes. They wrote (fiction, poetry and criticism as well as translations), taught and – in Edwin’s case – held senior British Council posts in Edinburgh, Prague and Rome. In addition to translations – not only from Kafka, but such landmark modern German novels as Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers – Edwin built up a body of visionary, myth-inspired verse. Seamus Heaney would later praise his poetry for its unique ‘stand-off with modernity’, and rank it with the great ‘tragic ironists’ of postwar Europe. Willa wrote formally ambitious satirical novels (Imagined Corners, Mrs Ritchie) and, a stalwart if eccentric feminist, saw her treatise Women: an Inquiry published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1925.

The pair sometimes regretted becoming a ‘translation factory’, first of all to pay their modest expats’ bills. Edwin’s 1954 Autobiography laments that the craft ‘began as a resource and hardened into a necessity’. Willa, a prize-winning classicist at the University of St Andrews, was the finer linguist of the two. She had spells of resentment at the assumption that she had served as a sort of technical assistant to her creative husband, and at the ‘whole current of patriarchal society’ that made her invisible. ‘Edwin only helped,’ one journal entry complains in 1953, although other accounts testify to a process of complete equality. They reportedly tore books in half, tossed a coin to pick a portion, and later revised each other’s labours.

However they split the job, the results proved solid and durable. The Muirs gave Kafka a distinctive voice in English for half a century: fluent, formal, enigmatic and mesmeric. They worked from the – now-amended – texts that Kafka’s friend Max Brod edited, after he had declined to honour the author’s dying request in 1924 to destroy all unpublished manuscripts. In the 1980s, a team led by the Oxford scholar (and friend of Kafka’s niece, Marianne Steiner) Malcolm Pasley began to issue revised editions. Only then did a fresh wave of English translations start to supplant the Muirs’. But it was Willa and Edwin who ventriloquised the writer that I (and countless other readers) first encountered; who chose, for example, a ‘gigantic insect’ for Kafka’s sinister ungeheueres Ungeziefer. Does the creepily non-specific ‘monstrous vermin’, or something similar, do a better job? The Muirs’ successors think so. They seldom hold back in denunciations of the work of the impecunious, vagabond not-quite Scots, as too ‘faulty, too domesticated, too in sync with Max Brod’s Messianic vision of the texts… and too lacking in humour’ (a summary verdict from Michelle Woods’s valuable 2014 study Kafka Translated).

According to their detractors, the Muirs conveyed to the Anglosphere a Kafka who sounded too smooth, too sombre and too saintly. Still, their achievement deserves loud hosannas. Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain. In 1936, in a letter to Stephen Spender while translating The Trial, Edwin writes that Kafka’s ‘fascination is simply endless’, and that ‘a feeling of greatness comes to me in every sentence’.

He and Willa transmitted that greatness to several literary generations. They did so in the teeth of penury, insecurity and prejudice. In the early 1940s, the self-taught Orkney smallholder’s child tried to find a teaching role at St Andrews. Although TS Eliot and John Buchan submitted testimonials, the professor of English swatted Muir away as ‘a crofter’s son who has never been to university’. So he stamped ration books in Dundee instead. Now tenured academics with hefty grants can bask in the celebrity of Kafka and pass judgment on the near-penniless strivers who first made him known.

At least Kafka’s English translators from the post-Pasley era grapple with the Muirs, if only to usurp them. Breon Mitchell, for example, who translated The Trial in 1998, allows that the duo managed a ‘readable and stylistically refined’ version, albeit one that smoothed over the idiosyncrasies of the German text. But that very ‘domestication’, so deplored by the Muirs’ heirs, helped inject this unsettling author into our literary bloodstream. Most readers confronted, then or now, with a literary personality as singular and baffling as Kafka’s would very happily settle for ‘readable and stylistically refined’. The Muirs – marginal itinerants uneasy with the dominant Scottish, never mind British, literary culture – did not enjoy the luxury of institutional radicalism.

Now, in a Kafka-like twist, their vilification has led to total erasure. Just published in the UK and US, in Sam Taylor’s translation from French, Kafkaesque is the prize-winning debut of the Czech-French writer Maïa Hruska. Subtitled ‘Ten great writers translate the twentieth century’, it traces Kafka’s impact on a selection of authors who directly translated, or otherwise interpreted, his work. They include Jorge Luis Borges (responsible for 18 Kafka translations into Spanish), Bruno Schulz (who, with his fiancée Józefina Szelińska, translated The Trial into Polish), Paul Celan, and even Primo Levi. The Auschwitz-surviving author of The Periodic Table embarked on an Italian Trial in 1982, commissioned by Italo Calvino. Levi, whose own death-camp experience seemed to ratify Kafka’s status as the arch-prophet of deadly bureaucratic inhumanity, found it a ‘pathogenic book’ and felt tainted by his work.

Hruska has written an engaging, often moving, work, more aphoristic personal essay than systematic study. She understands why Kafka appealed to homeless and displaced creative minds, around Europe and beyond, amid the storms of 20th-century history. And she explains that their involvement with this most unsheltered of writers formed part of a quest for an impregnable pokoj: a Czech word for private dwelling-place, or inner sanctum, which she glosses as ‘the elementary cell of the self’. Hruska (whose grandmother’s name was Ludmilla Kafka) eloquently grasps that Kafka’s early champions navigated an era of genocide, dictatorship and total war, with ‘the possibility of a theft, a crash, an expulsion, a disaster’ forever at their doors. Pretty often – as with Schulz, murdered by a German officer in 1942 – that possibility smashed through into actuality.

Yet, in a rather Kafkaesque act of obliteration, the Muirs appear nowhere in the body of this work (they do merit three citations in the bibliography). It’s not as if Hruska, as a Francophone, chooses to ignore English translations. She has a section on Eugene Jolas, the avant-garde Franco-American editor who translated a few stories, and shows how Jewish academic exiles made Kafka ‘a mainstay of Ivy League curricula’ in postwar America. She says not a word, though, about the ubiquitous English versions – the Muirs’ – that originally embedded his fiction in Anglophone literature courses everywhere.

Neither does Hruska dismiss ‘flawed’ translations, nor treat Kafka’s foreign reception as a story of progress towards glitch-free comprehension. Quite the contrary: she respects early versions as artefacts of their age and makers, and – channelling Borges – finds that: ‘Each translation leaves behind a space for the next one, as if the Tower of Babel was being built as it collapsed.’ Outsiders translating the ultimate outsider, the Muirs would slot neatly into the thesis and the mood of Kafkaesque. Hruska applauds, for instance, the work of Alexandre Vialatte: a charmingly irreverent Auvergnat maverick who brought Kafka into French as a labour of love. After Vialatte’s death in 1971, he suffered the indignity of having his translations publicly, pompously ‘corrected’ in the canonical Pléiade edition. ‘Perhaps’, as Hruska puts it, ‘the most important thing was to bring this unknown, uneducated nobody from the Auvergne down a peg or two.’

Since the Muirs faced a parallel devaluation, it’s sad that this account of literary occlusion and forgetting should itself rub out their memory. More approachable, less analytic, than Woods’s Kafka Translated, Hruska’s book may become the go-to volume for lay readers who want to know how Kafka made his way from the far fringes of German-speaking Jewish culture in late-Habsburg Bohemia into the universal currency of literature. Regrettably, it effaces one crucial stage of that journey, and the writers who enabled it.

In later life, Willa Muir feared just such erasure. ‘Edwin’s poems will live,’ she confided to her diary – ‘But of himself only a legend. Of me, only a very distorted legend.’ Not entirely: Faber does keep Edwin’s poetry in print, while Canongate has a portmanteau anthology (Imagined Selves) of her fiction and essays. Yet their Kafka translations still circulate, still introduce newcomers to a spirit and a style that, once read, will stay with them forever. Often scorned, now ignored, the pair have not quite yet endured the fate of Gregor as Metamorphosis ends, reduced to a dry husk to be swept out with the trash. ‘You don’t need to bother about how to get rid of the thing next door,’ their charlady tells the Samsas (in the Muirs’, still supremely involving, translation): ‘It’s been seen to already.’"
https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-forgotten-scots-who-gave-kafka-his-voice/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"A tale of two ‘contexts’: ideological differences in the translations of UN political speeches by human interpreters and by ChatGPT4o

This study interrogates the ideological disparities between ChatGPT4o and human interpreters in rendering Chinese political speeches delivered at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) from 2008 to 2023. Drawing on van Dijk’s socio-cognitive Context Model, it examines how ‘context’ is operationalised regarding (1) role-relation engagement through deictic pronouns, (2) the modulation of agency via modal verbs, and (3) the treatment of culturally embedded metaphors, which carry significant ideological implications. With corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis and qualitative interpretation, the study illuminates that human interpreters, informed by sociopolitical cognisance and cognitive adaptability, actively mediate discourse to align with the speakers’ ideological positioning through discursive amplification. Conversely, ChatGPT4o, limited by its token-based algorithmic architecture, tends toward literal translations in parallel with its diluting key ideological markers. These divergences underscore the epistemologically grounded differences between human cognition and algorithmic processing, pointing to the sensitivity of human interpreters in ideologically laden contexts alongside the opacity of large language models."

Published: 09 June 2026
Fei Gao & Binhua Wang
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026)

We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07877-7
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Rylo raises $85M to expand AI communication tools for deaf and hard-of-hearing users

The company, formerly known as Nagish, said the funding will support its expansion from phone-call captioning into a broader AI-powered communication platform.

 

The financing includes growth funding from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, along with a new investment by Canaan and participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures and Contour. 

 

The company said the round brings its total financing to more than $100 million.

 

WHAT IT DOES 

 

Founded in 2021 as Nagish, Rylo offers an FCC-certified platform that provides real-time captioning and text-to-speech capabilities for phone calls and in-person communication. 

 

The company said its Rylo Phone app will continue to offer those core features while it develops additional AI-powered tools for workplace accessibility, network improvements, speaker characteristics, sentiment analysis and real-time fraud detection.

 

The rebrand reflects the company’s planned expansion beyond phone call captioning into a broader communication platform for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, Rylo said in a statement, also noting the name Rylo combines the concepts of "relay" and "rely."

 

MARKET SNAPSHOT

 

In 2024, Rylo announced $16 million in funding, including an $11 million Series A and $5 million in seed funding. 

 

Rylo acquired Sign.mt in 2025, a company focused on real-time sign language translation. That acquisition helped lead to Rylo Sign, an AI-powered sign language platform designed to support translation between signed and spoken languages.

 

About 15% of American adults, or 37.5 million people ages 18 and older, report some trouble hearing, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

 

Digital health and technology companies have been building communication and hearing tools for several years. 

 

In Fall of 2024, Apple received FDA clearance for over-the-counter hearing aid software for AirPods Pro headphones that uses machine learning to adjust sounds to users’ hearing needs.

 

The hearing technology market has also seen AI-enabled product development. Soundwave Hearing received FDA 510(k) clearance in 2023 for self-fitting over-the-counter hearing aids that use mobile technology and AI calibration capabilities. 

 

Voiceitt launched an app designed to help people with non-standard speech communicate with others and use voice-command devices. The company raised $10 million in Series A funding in 2020 to support its speech-recognition technology for people with speech and motor disabilities.

 

Google unveiled Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier in 2019, with one app designed to transcribe speech to text and the other designed to amplify certain sounds and reduce background noise.

 

A 2018 roundup of voice applications in healthcare included Ava, VocaliD and Voiceitt among companies using voice technology to support people with speech or hearing difficulties."

 

By Eve Bender | June 12, 2026 | 4:00 PM

https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/rylo-raises-85m-expand-ai-communication-tools-deaf-and-hard-hearing-users

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

We should express due appreciation for the pontiff’s profound effort to understand AI, and we should also welcome and encourage the unique power of language—its ability to bridge gaps, to encapsulate and disseminate experience, to inspire and encourage expression.

"The very first story in the Judeo-Christian tradition about humans forging supernatural beings can be found in Tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud.

 

The tale dates to the third century, and it records an ill-fated effort by a leading rabbinic figure to create an artificial man. The Hebrew letters composing the three words (רָבָא בְּרָא גַּבְרָא) are interchanged, anagrammed, in a virtuosic manipulation of language, as if to underline the uniquely human ability to employ words in all their nuance.

 

But Rava’s creature itself proved incapable of speech, and the story ends when Rabbi Zeira, Rava’s mentor, consigns the anthropoid to the dustbin. Without the power of language, the Talmud tells us, artificial entities are, at best, worthless and, at worst, dangerous.

 

This story swirled through my head earlier this week as I read Magnifica Humanitas, the thoughtful, constructive, and eloquent encyclical recently issued by Pope Leo XIV. As neither a Christian nor an expert in church doctrine, I’m unqualified to weigh in on Leo’s application of Catholic principles to contemporary debates over AI. But as someone who has researched and written about how ancient Jewish sources inform our understanding of this groundbreaking technology, I was struck by how the encyclical presented an incomplete perspective on how traditional conceptions of the power of language can and should influence our thinking about AI.

 

The pope contrasted two biblical constructs: the Tower of Babel and the Wall of Nehemiah. In the former story, situated in Genesis following the flood, humanity sets forth to build a tower ascending to the heavens. The builders were able to coordinate only because “everyone on earth spoke the same language and the same words.” Regarding this uniformity and what it allows humanity to do as a rebellion, God confounds their language into a babble—pun very much intended—and the project collapses.

 

By contrast, as Leo recounts beautifully, in the Book of Nehemiah, set in the sixth century B.C., the eponymous prophet collects the remnant of Jews who survived the Babylonians’ destruction of the Holy Temple and coordinates their reconstruction of Jerusalem—a joyous occasion of renewal of God’s covenant.

 

On one hand, the encyclical laments the hubris and arrogance of the tower builders. On the other hand, the pontiff heaped praise upon Nehemiah and his followers, noting how “the narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part.”

 

This sharply drawn binary represents a useful and poignant scaffolding for building an understanding of how tools can be made and used for good and for ill. It forms the backbone of the encyclical’s analysis of AI, and it figures to become a cornerstone of a practical and ethical understanding of technology and its limitations.

 

But precisely because of the importance of this paradigm, I humbly suggest that the encyclical neglects a key element of the Babel story: the appropriate role of language in society and in AI models.

 

Biblical sources distinguish humans from animals through the power of speech, and ancient, medieval, and early modern Jewish authorities amplify this message. Rava’s creature could not communicate and was therefore less than human.

 

Centuries later, Rava’s spiritual descendant, Rabbi Eleazar of medieval Germany, described how to animate a humanoid from a lump of clay. The would-be creator must sequentially read aloud Hebrew letters and word fragments to the clay in a manner eerily reminiscent of how today’s AI models undergo training. Rabbi Eleazar also prohibited individuals from creating these anthropoids on their own for their own private benefit, instead insisting that the act be performed in collaboration with others.

 

And, perhaps most famously, Rabbi Yehuda Loew of 16th-century Prague summoned a golem from the Vltava River. He did this by chanting a mystical rendition of the Genesis story, one that employed Hebrew letters whose kabbalistic numerical value totaled 310, equal to the value of the word yesh, or “existence.” The golem sought to defend the persecuted Jewish community confined to the ghetto in Prague.

 

These legendary feats of linguistic brilliance created superhuman creatures designed to protect and nurture the community—something of the essence of the beneficent type of AI that Pope Leo seeks to foster.

 

And that verbal beneficence indeed has parallels in today’s technology. As Yuval Levin observed in The New Atlantis, we call these products “large language models” for a reason. “AI has essentially broken all language barriers,” Levin argues, “not only between human languages but, more importantly, between human language and computing language.”

 

Yet, per Magnifica Humanitas, this linguistic breakthrough enriches human experience and should be welcomed. Leo quite correctly urges us to eschew “the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance” and instead to embrace a “plurality of voices and visions.” But far from constituting a single, uniform language, LLMs expand and enhance our understanding of the spoken and written word across an extraordinarily wide variety of templates. In this way, perhaps, AI made and used well combines the best of the Babel and Nehemiah stories: It both adopts and fosters the multiplicity of language and experience.

 

Put differently, today’s AI models do not flatten or steamroll language but, instead, improve our ability to understand the world and, more importantly, one another. Yes, some versions of ChatGPT and Claude tend to use similar vocabularies and sentence and paragraph structures. And it’s true that modern technology generally threatens certain endangered languages. 

 

But real-time translation, instant transcription, advanced cultural research, and similar offerings of LLMs preserve the robustness of a multiplicity of linguistic and cultural forms while dramatically improving access to them across geographies and other barriers. As Levin puts it, contemporary AI software “allows people and computers to communicate with each other in our own natural language without needing to translate between that language and various forms of computing scripts.” 

 

In this sense, LLMs are the anti-Babel: They respect and amplify the diversity of linguistic and cultural experiences; they embrace the nuances of the spoken and written word; and they render uniformity obsolete. For this reason, we should express due appreciation for the pontiff’s profound effort to understand AI, and we should also welcome and encourage the unique power of language—its ability to bridge gaps, to encapsulate and disseminate experience, to inspire and encourage expression. This is what large language models facilitate, and it’s precisely what makes humanity magnificent."

by Michael M. Rosen

Nonresident Senior Fellow

June 07, 2026

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/what-the-popes-encyclical-misses-about-language/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"...Linguistic diversity varies widely across Southeast Asia, but no country comes close to Indonesia. According to Ethnologue (2026), Indonesia is home to more than 700 living languages, far surpassing the Philippines (184), Malaysia (132), Myanmar (131), Vietnam (111), Laos (86), Thailand (79), Cambodia (31), Singapore (25), Timor-Leste (22), and Brunei Darussalam (17). These numbers underscore Indonesia's remarkable position not only as the most linguistically diverse country in ASEAN, but also as one of the most linguistically diverse nations in the world. 🌏

The number reveal just how exceptional Indonesia’s linguistic landscape is. The country alone possesses nearly four times as many languages as the Philippines, highlighting a level of diversity unmatched in the region.

🔍 Why It’s on Our Radar
In an increasingly connected world, local languages are disappearing at an alarming rate ⚠️. While globalization has made communication easier than ever, it has also placed pressure on smaller languages as younger generations shift toward national and international languages 🌍.

Indonesia’s linguistic diversity is more than a statistic. Each language carries stories, traditions, oral histories, and local wisdom that have been passed down through generations. When a language disappears, an irreplaceable piece of cultural heritage disappears with it.

💔 What Could Be Lost?
The disappearance of a language means more than losing words 💬. It means losing songs, folklore, customs, traditional knowledge, and unique perspectives 🎶📖 that may exist nowhere else in the world.

Across Indonesia, some indigenous languages are spoken by only a small number of people. Without efforts to preserve and pass them on, future generations may inherit fewer voices and fewer stories than those who came before them..."
Vila Marescotti, and Elias Widhi
Jun 14, 2026
https://www.thesoutheastasiadesk.com/p/one-nation-hundreds-of-languages
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Some of Robert Munsch's work to be translated into four Yukon First Nations languages

20 Robert Munsch titles are being translated into Indigenous languages

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

Robert Munsch is one of Canada’s most celebrated authors. His books have been translated into 22 Indigenous languages and dialects, according to Scholastic Canada.
Soon, that will become 26 Indigenous languages and dialects.
That’s because 20 of Munsch’s books are now being translated into four languages spoken in the Yukon. Those languages are Kaska, Tlingit, Southern Tutchone, and Northern Tutchone.
The project is being led by the Yukon Native Language Centre (YNLC), who received $294,000 from the Yukon government for the initiative.
“He was really willing and open to help First Nations and Indigenous groups have access to his books and translate them,” Kelsey Jaggard, YNLC’s manager of language training programs, said of Munsch. “Not a lot of publishers or authors are as open to that.”

Jaggard says the participants for each language group had their own method of translating the books.
“For Tlingit, Kèyishí Bessie Cooley came in and, on the spot, translated all the books and just read through them … and we videotaped her,” said Jaggard. “Those went to transcribers, and a lot of the transcribers are learning the language also.”
YNLC partnered with four Yukon First Nations on the project, one for each language.
The Carcross/Tagish First Nation (C/TFN) assisted with the transcriptions of Cooley’s on-the-fly readthroughs. But the language itself has fallen on tough times in the community.
Deborah Baerg, C/TFN’s cultural projects and language coordinator, says three elders who were fluent speakers have passed away in the last eight years.
“We don’t have any more fluent speakers left,” Baerg said.
Image | Deborah Baerg

Caption: (TJ Dhir/CBC)

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The wider use of Tlingit, which is also spoken in parts of British Columbia and Alaska, is suffering as well. The language was included on the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s list of languages in danger in 2010.
Statistics Canada found that as of the 2021 census, there are only 120 Tlingit speakers in the country — a drop of 52.9 per cent from the 2016 census.
The Munsch project is just one way C/TFN is taking steps to reverse the trend.
Carcross is also set to host a Tlingit language camp from July 20-24, with X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell and G̱uneiwtí Marsha Hotch from Alaska serving as the instructors.
They’re also working on a Tlingit language app to help learners.
Baerg believes it’s important for Tlingit people to learn the language.
“When you’re speaking your language, it’s an identity,” she said. “I think most people feel like something is missing in their life if they don’t have their language and culture in their life.”
LISTEN | Kelsey Jaggard explains the Munsch project:
Media Audio | Midday Cafe :

Caption: The project is being run by the Yukon Native Language Centre. CBC's TJ Dhir speaks with Kelsey Jaggard, the manager of language training programs.

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The transcribed Munsch books are currently in the final stage of editing and are set to be delivered to communities in the fall, according to Jaggard.
“We’re hoping to put them into the daycare and then also into the school here,” said Baerg.
Baerg says kids will stand to benefit.
“Lots of young people, they’re on the internet and they’re losing so much because they’re not actually involved in their language,” she said. “I think it’s a big loss to the future generation for the children here because they won’t have that language and culture around them and they won’t know who they are.”
Jaggard agrees, saying you can’t separate language and culture.
“All Indigenous languages, and the Yukon First Nation languages, carry the worldview of the people,” she says. “A lot of people are learning language separate from culture and culture separate from language. But when they’re together, it really improves learners’ health, it improves their identity and knowing who they are.”"
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7232646
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"7 reasons to read the Odyssey
The new Catalan translation, by Pau Sabaté, claims the strength and validity of the classic, which tells the adventures of Odysseus and the longed-for return to Ithaca

This is how the new Catalan version of Homer's Odyssey begins, one of the foundational epic poems in the history of literature, translated by Pau Sabaté and just published by Bernat Metge Universal, a label from Abacus. The classic tells the journey of the heroic and cunning Odysseus (or Ulysses, depending on the version), after the Trojan War – an episode dealt with in the Iliad, Homer's other literary monument–, with the aim of reaching the island of Ithaca, reuniting with his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus, and reclaiming his throne. It is one of the books "most known and influential, subject to countless readings, rewrites and interpretations," comments the editor in the preface of the volume, Roger Aluja. Why does it continue to amaze readers and motivate new adaptations, such as the one that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is about to premiere, almost three thousand years after its conception?

1.
A foundational and enigmatic text
"Homer is the great child poet. The world is born and Homer sings it. He is the bird of that dawn". These words by Victor Weber in the first chapter of his essay William Shakespeare (1864) serve to illustrate the foundational element of the Odyssey. Composed and recited orally since the 9th century BC and fixed in writing during the 8th century BC, it is one of the first epic poems in the Western literary canon. Divided into 24 cantos and comprising more than 12,000 hexameters, it has been praised by writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce –who offered a very personal reinterpretation in Ulysses–, Mercè Rodoreda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Margaret Atwood. "Whether the Odyssey is Homer's work or not adds a mist of mystery that seems secondary to me. What is important is that we have two great poems attributed to this name", comments Roger Aluja.

In the essay The Scar of Ulysses, included in Mimesis (1946) and recently recovered by Acantilado in Spanish, Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) praised "the joy of sensory existence that becomes present" when reading the Odyssey: "We don't care to know if it's a legend, if it's all lies – he adds–. Homer doesn't need to insist on the historical truth of his narrative, his reality is solid enough. Homer seduces us, traps us in the reality he describes, and that's enough for him. In that real world, which exists in itself, and to which we as readers have been brought as if by magic, there is nothing else. The Homeric poems hide nothing, they contain no teaching or secret second meaning".

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2.
Resonates in the past of any reader
Classics can be fascinating on a personal level – and end up in the "unforgettable" books drawer – or blend into the collective unconscious, as Italo Calvino recalled in Why Read the Classics (1981; in Catalan at Edicions 62). Youthful readings are so important, for Calvino, that he recommends rereading them at least once in a lifetime. “As we grow older, we change and our encounter with texts is totally different,” he writes: every rereading of a classic is, in reality, a reading as initiatory and surprising as the first.The love for Pau Sabaté and Roger Aluja's Odyssey

began in adolescence and has been transforming. "The first time I read it, I was 15 years old – Sabaté recalls. We had the second translation by Carles Riba at home [published between 1947 and 1948]. It amazed me. When you overcome the barrier of the splendid language it uses, it becomes very seductive and interesting." Homer influenced Sabaté in his decision to study Greek and, later, classical philology at the University of Barcelona (UB). In 2019, he inaugurated the lavish Bernat Metge Universal collection with his translation of the Iliad, and six years later he repeats with the Odyssey. His editor, Roger Aluja, was also captivated by the same book as Sabaté when he was in high school. "My research project consisted of comparing various versions of the sixth canto – he explains. Riba's, which was the first I read, but also the one in prose by Joan Alberich [La Magrana, 1998], and a couple or three in Spanish." When he was studying classical philology at the UB, Aluja coincided in the classroom with the Hellenist Jaume Pòrtulas: "He is one of the foremost specialists in the world in Homeric poetry. Professor Pòrtulas ended up directing my doctoral thesis, which is an aesthetic commentary on the eleventh canto of the Odyssey".

Pau Sabaté and Roger Aluja, translator and editor of Homer's 'Odyssey', during the interview at Casa Abacus, on Peu de la Creu street in Barcelona.XAVIER BERTRAL
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3.
It goes beyond being an adventure book
"TheOdyssey" is a book of travels, without travels –assures Dolors Miquel in the epilogue of the new edition of the Bernat Metge Universal–. A tale that a shepherd or a peasant would tell by a fire or on a summer evening. Or someone from distant lands. It would seem that the author is telling us that the only great and possible journey is that of the logos, that the most penetrating Odyssey of all is that of the imagination."

It is Odysseus himself who, transformed within the work into an aede –a term that designated Greek rhapsode poets–, is in charge of narrating his adventures, among which are the deception of the cyclops Polyphemus, the song of the Sirens –who have the head of a woman and the body of a bird–, the sacrifice of the Sun's cows, and his relationships with Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso. "Although Calypso offers him immortality if he stays with her on the island where she lives, Odysseus prefers to return to Ithaca to reunite with Penelope and his son Telemachus –says Sabaté–. At first glance, the most striking and attractive part of the Odyssey is the adventures, but the cantos that take place in Ithaca are fundamental. For the adult reader, perhaps they are even more interesting." In relation to highlighting the adventures in the epic poem, Carles Riba considered it, in the prologue to his second translation, an attempt to bring the classic "to the marketplace," and added: "To snatch the Odyssey" from the monopoly of more or less learned Hellenists, all right; but as much as delivering it to the insensitivity and banality of mere novel devourers [...] it is difficult to resign oneself to it".

4.
Allows rediscovering a different hero
Odysseus represents "a type of heroism different from that of Achilles, the great protagonist of the Iliad", says Aluja. He shares with Achilles skill on the battlefield, but unlike him, "he does not give up other war tactics, such as ambushes, camouflage, or the use of the bow, which for warriors of strength is the weapon of cowards".

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"Odysseus is a master of dissimulation and deception", comments Sabaté. The fact that he is a man "of great cunning" –according to Riba–, "of a thousand faces" –in the translation by Joan F. Mira in 2011 for Proa– or "very versatile" –in Sabaté's version– allows him to overcome all obstacles, human and divine, during the ten years that separate him from the end of the Trojan War and his arrival in Ithaca. "When he wakes up on the beach of Ithaca, Athena [or Athena], his protector, transforms him into a miserable beggar, so that he remains unnoticed by everyone, friends and enemies alike –writes Jaume Pòrtulas in the prologue to the latest reissue of the Odyssey translated by Carles Riba in the Bernat Metge Essencial in 2019–. Finally, already at home and among his own, the man who had been [...] No one will manage to recover, thanks to a series of measured and successive recognitions, the different facets of his personal and social self. He thus returns to the fullness of himself. We could say that he rebuilds himself: he rebuilds himself as the father of Telemachus, as the husband of Penelope, as the son of Laertes, and also as the king of Ithaca".

Detail of Odysseus's route map that leads him from Troy to Ithaca, included in the Proa edition of the book.Proa
5.
The excellence of Catalan translations
There are three versions of the Odyssey by Carles Riba: between the first, published by Editorial Catalana in 1919, and the last, by Alpha – from the Col·lecció Bernat Metge – in 1953, more than three decades passed. "The mark it has left on contemporary Catalan literature has been important, although perhaps more in the realm of poets, translators, and other writers than for the average reader," admits Jaume Pòrtulas. When Joan F. Mira published his Odyssey in 2011 with Proa, he aimed "not to embellish the text, nor to try to improve it, nor to pretend to make it more poetic and more elevated". Like Riba and Sabaté, but unlike Joan Alberich's version, he translated it in verse. "Translating Homer in prose is entirely respectable, but it can never be read, perceived, or felt like a translation in verse – Mira argued at the time –. Never, in any way. And translating Homer in verse means, if it is materially possible (in some languages it certainly is not), reproducing the hexameters of the original".

Cargando
Pau Sabaté has wanted to follow "Riba's path": "I have tried to capture the passion for genuineness. Riba is sometimes even colloquial. He also has the aspiration to be very literal, to convey the strangeness of the original Greek text, which sometimes seems like an incantation. I have tried not to emphasize this point". The translator has avoided "modernizing the language of the Odyssey to the extreme". The reader interested in a sound prose version – made from the English adaptation by Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, in 1900 – can turn to the recent edition by Blackie Books, which features the translation by Xavier Pàmies.

6.
A poem full of women that announces patriarchy
As Dolors Miquel points out in her epilogue, the Dolors Miquel points out in her epilogue, the Odyssey opens and closes with the goddess Athena. Throughout the poem, women have "a more relevant role than in the Iliad", says Aluja. "Although Calypso wants to keep Odysseus on the island, she eventually lets him go, and it is Circe who explains all the obstacles he must overcome to reach Ithaca — she adds—. Penelope awaits him there, who has managed to postpone the decision to choose a suitor with the cunning of undoing at night what she weaves during the day. Until the work is finished, she will not remarry." Miquel explains that beneath this female presence beats "the beginning of a phallocentric truth obsessed with hiding what is mysterious, what is feminine, uterine and unique". She recalls that Greek thought, appealing to the philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, transmits a "world that man has constructed to supplant adhesion to the maternal world, to assert himself against the mother, against participation in her world". In the Odyssey

7.
It will allow you to go down to hell and come back
In addition to proposing a journey through various Greek islands and allowing the reader to learn about their fauna, the Odyssey is a poem rich in mentions of trees and plants. "The names of animals and plants are always a thorny issue when translating ancient literature –comments Pau Sabaté–. The flora and fauna of the eastern Mediterranean, even if not radically different from ours, do not entirely correspond to that of the western shores either. A second problem is that the temporal distance and the limited nature of the sources have made certain denominations confusing." Wracking his brains, Sabaté has reached the conclusion that the "double thicket" under which Ulysses shelters on the island of the Phaeacians is formed by a part of olive tree and another that, instead of being broom or wild olive, must be oleaster. "A wild olive and an olive tree growing together do not quite make a "}double thicket" –he adds–. The usual cultivation technique for olive trees was to graft them onto oleasters to make them fruit faster.

Cargando
One of the riskiest adventures posed by the epic poem is the journey to Hades, the name by which hell was known in ancient Greece. "Odysseus goes there twice. The first time is explained in the eleventh canto, and among the most memorable passages is the reunion with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad", recalls the translator. Achilles laments having had to pay the price of death to achieve glory among the living: "Do not try to console me about death, Odysseus, do not comfort me! / I would much rather earn a day's wage on earth / by hiring myself out to a man without inheritance or much to live on / than be the king of all the dead, of those who have finished." Odysseus learns his lesson and ends up returning home."
Jordi Nopca
12/06/2026
https://en.ara.cat/culture/7-reasons-to-read-the-odyssey_130_5767086.amp.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Ukraine Drops Russian, Adds Hebrew and Yiddish to Language Protection
Jun 14, 2026, 10:39 AM

Ukraine Removed Russian from European Protection — but Added Hebrew and Yiddish: What Law No. 4699-IX Means. Image created using AI

Ukraine Removed Russian from European Protection — but Added Hebrew and Yiddish: What Law No. 4699-IX Means
On June 12, 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed Law No. 4699-IX, a document that changes how Ukraine applies the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

At first glance, this may look like another internal Ukrainian language debate. But it is much more than that.

Ukraine has removed the Russian language from the list of languages protected under the European Charter. At the same time, Ukraine has preserved and expanded protection for the languages of national communities and indigenous peoples — including Hebrew and Yiddish.

That detail matters. Especially for Israeli readers.

Because this law is not only about what Ukraine is removing. It is also about what Ukraine is choosing to protect.

According to the updated list, Ukraine continues to apply the Charter to 18 languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Crimean Tatar, Modern Greek, German, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew, Urum, Rumeika, Romani, Krymchak, Karaim and Yiddish.

This means that Ukraine is not abandoning linguistic diversity. On the contrary, it is keeping the European mechanism of protection for national communities and indigenous peoples, while removing Russian as the language of the state that is waging war against Ukraine.

The so-called “Moldovan language” is also removed from the separate list, because in the updated legal logic, the language remains Romanian. At the same time, the list was not simply reduced. It was expanded to include several languages, among them Czech, Crimean Tatar, Krymchak, Karaim, Yiddish and Hebrew.

That is the core of the story.

Ukraine is not saying: “Only one language may exist.”
Ukraine is saying: “The tools created to protect vulnerable languages must not be used to preserve the privileges of the aggressor state’s language.”

What Zelensky signed
The signed law is Law No. 4699-IX. It followed the adoption by the Verkhovna Rada of bill No. 14120 on December 3, 2025. The bill was supported by 264 members of parliament.

The law was connected to Ukraine’s updated official translation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 2024. After that, Ukraine had to bring its legislation into line with the corrected legal wording.

The political meaning, however, is broader.

Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk explained the decision directly:

“The language of the aggressor state cannot use protection instruments created to support the languages of indigenous peoples and national communities.”

He also called the decision a matter of “dignity, justice and linguistic security of Ukraine.”

Those words should not be dismissed as rhetoric. Since 2014, and especially since the full-scale invasion of February 24, 2022, Russia has repeatedly used the argument of “protecting Russian speakers” as a political weapon. It was used to justify pressure, occupation, interference and war.

In that context, language is not only culture. It becomes part of a security architecture.

What the European Charter is — and what it is not
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a Council of Europe document. It was opened for signature in Strasbourg on November 5, 1992, and entered into force on March 1, 1998. In Council of Europe documents, it is known as ETS No. 148.

The Charter was created to protect languages that are historically used in European states but are in a weaker position than the state language. Its goal is to help preserve linguistic and cultural heritage where certain languages may gradually disappear from education, public life, media, local administration and culture.

In simple terms, the Charter does not automatically protect every language spoken by people in a country. It protects regional or minority languages that need support.

Each state determines which languages it applies the Charter to. The Charter itself does not force Ukraine to protect Russian. Ukraine, like other countries, defines the list of languages that receive selected protection measures.

That distinction is essential.

The new Ukrainian law does not ban people from speaking Russian. It does not make Russian illegal. It does not erase Russian-speaking citizens from Ukrainian society.

It does something different: it removes Russian from a special European protection mechanism designed for vulnerable regional and minority languages.

Why Hebrew and Yiddish matter here
For Israeli readers, the inclusion of Hebrew and Yiddish is not a minor detail.

It shows that Ukraine is not acting against minority languages as such. Ukraine is not rejecting the European model of protecting cultural and linguistic communities. It is doing the opposite: it is clarifying which languages deserve protection under that framework.

Hebrew carries a unique meaning for Israel and the Jewish people. It is not merely a language of communication. It is a language of memory, return, sovereignty and national revival.

Yiddish also carries a deep Jewish historical memory — especially in Eastern Europe, including the territory of today’s Ukraine. For generations, Yiddish was the language of Jewish homes, schools, newspapers, literature, humor, pain and survival. It was one of the living languages of Jewish civilization before the Holocaust destroyed much of that world.

The fact that Hebrew and Yiddish are included in Ukraine’s updated list matters symbolically. It means that Ukraine recognizes Jewish linguistic heritage as part of the broader historical and cultural mosaic of the country.

This is especially important because Ukraine is often discussed abroad only through the lens of war. But Ukraine is also a country of many communities, memories and languages: Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, Jewish, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Roma and others.

Law No. 4699-IX is therefore not only a law about Russian. It is also a law about who Ukraine sees as part of its protected cultural space.

What the law does not do
This part must be repeated because Russian propaganda will almost certainly try to distort the story.

The law does not ban Russian speech.

It does not prohibit private conversations in Russian.

It does not create punishment for speaking Russian at home, in the street, in private life or in personal communication.

It does not mean that Russian-speaking citizens disappear from Ukrainian society.

It means that Russian no longer receives the special status of a language protected under the European Charter in Ukraine.

There is a major difference between the rights of individuals and the privileges of a language used by an aggressor state as a political instrument.

Ukraine is preserving individual rights. But it is ending a special European legal privilege for Russian.

Why Russian became a security issue
For many outside observers, language policy may seem like an abstract cultural dispute. In Ukraine, it is not abstract.

Russia has long used language as a geopolitical instrument. The phrase “defense of Russian speakers” was used for years to question Ukrainian sovereignty and to portray Ukraine as a supposedly artificial or hostile state. It became part of the ideological preparation for aggression.

This is why the Russian language question in Ukraine cannot be reduced to grammar, schools or street signs. It is connected to propaganda, identity, media influence and the idea of the so-called “Russian world.”

The Ukrainian state is now drawing a line.

People have the right to their private language. But the Ukrainian state is not obliged to support Russian as if it were a vulnerable minority language threatened with disappearance.

Russian was never weak in Ukraine in the way that many minority languages are weak. For decades, Russian had strong positions in cities, media, culture, business and public life. To present it as a powerless minority language is historically misleading.

Why this matters for Israel
Israel is a multilingual country. Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, French, Ukrainian, Amharic and many other languages are heard here every day.

But Israel also understands that language is not only a practical tool. It can be identity. It can be memory. It can be sovereignty. It can be security.

Hebrew’s revival was one of the great national acts of Jewish history. It turned an ancient language of prayer, memory and scholarship into the living language of a modern state. That experience makes Israelis especially capable of understanding why a nation at war cares about its linguistic space.

Ukraine’s decision should therefore not be read as a rejection of diversity. It should be read as an attempt to separate genuine minority protection from the political infrastructure of an aggressor state.

For Jewish readers, the inclusion of Hebrew and Yiddish makes the point even clearer: Ukraine is not closing the door to national communities. It is preserving a European framework for them.

The door is closed to a different category — the language of a state that uses culture, media and language as part of its pressure against Ukraine.

The political formula
The formula behind Law No. 4699-IX is simple:

The rights of people remain. The privileges of the aggressor state’s language do not.

This is the distinction Russia will try to erase.

Moscow will likely present the law as “discrimination” or as proof that Ukraine is violating European standards. But Ukraine is not leaving the European framework. It is clarifying how that framework applies during a war of aggression.

The Charter protects regional and minority languages. It was not created to preserve the political privileges of a language used by a state that denies Ukraine’s sovereignty.

That is the legal and moral argument.

A Ukrainian decision with a Jewish dimension
The addition of Hebrew and Yiddish gives this law a wider meaning.

For Ukrainians, it is part of decolonization and national security.

For Europeans, it is a test of whether minority protection can be defended without allowing the aggressor to abuse that language.

For Israelis and Jews, it is also a reminder that Ukraine’s cultural map includes Jewish memory — not as a footnote, but as part of the country’s protected heritage.

NAnews — Israel News sees this law not as a ban on language, but as a political and legal statement: Ukraine is no longer ready to let the myth of the “Russian world” use European mechanisms, Ukrainian law and minority protection as instruments of influence.

The real question is not whether people may speak Russian. They may.

The real question is whether the Ukrainian state must continue granting special European protection to the language of the state that invaded it.

With Law No. 4699-IX, Ukraine has answered: no.

About the AuthorAleksandr Lutsenko is a commentator bridging Israeli and Ukrainian public discourse. He writes on shared history, Jewish life in Ukraine, Ukrainian integration in Israel, and the intersection of memory, identity, and security"
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-drops-russian-adds-hebrew-and-yiddish-to-language-protection/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

This isn’t about whether you invest in translation at all. It’s about whether your decisions assume a single market or multiple from the outset.

76% of consumers prefer products with information in their native language, and 40% won’t buy if the information is not in their native language

"There’s a quiet assumption embedded in how most companies operate: English is almost always seen as the starting point. I see it play out almost daily in conversations with leadership teams. It shows up in how product specs are written, how campaigns are planned, and how expansion is sequenced.

On the surface, this feels efficient. In practice, it constrains growth in ways that are easy to miss until it’s too late...

How to design for multiple languages
For leaders, this isn’t about whether you invest in translation at all. It’s about whether your decisions assume a single market or multiple from the outset. That distinction shows up in several ways:

First, assume from the outset that your product and messaging will exist in multiple languages, and build systems that reflect that reality. This reduces rework and forces clarity earlier in the process.

Second, localize the idea, not just the words. If something doesn’t resonate in another market, it’s rarely because the translation is off. More often, the underlying premise needs to be adapted. The companies that grow effectively give teams permission to rethink, not just translate.

Third, move language upstream. The earlier language considerations are integrated into product and marketing workflows, the fewer bottlenecks you create later. Treat language as a core input, not a final step.

Finally, be explicit about who you’re designing for. If the customer you picture in decision-making only exists in one language, you’re likely leaving growth on the table. Expanding globally isn’t just about reaching more people; it’s about understanding them on their own terms.

The companies that get this right rarely talk about translation as a standalone function. They talk about markets, customers, and growth. Language is simply embedded in how they operate. The assumption that English should come first has persisted because it’s invisible. It feels neutral and efficient. But in my experience, it’s one of the most limiting defaults a company can carry into its growth strategy and one of the easiest to overlook."
BY Brian Murphy
14.06.2026
https://lnkd.in/d97fDhVi
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"In 2026, Russian will rank 11th in terms of prevalence worldwide. It is used as a primary language in daily life by 210 million people.

 

According to the Ethnologue website, English is the most widely spoken language in the world, with 1.5 billion speakers. Mandarin, or Simplified Chinese, ranks second with 1.2 billion speakers. 

 

Hindi ranks third with 611.2 million speakers. The top 10 also includes Spanish (561.3 million), Standard Arabic (334.9 million), French (333.5 million), Bengali (274.4 million), Portuguese (269.4 million), Indonesian (254.8 million), and Urdu (246 million). 

 

Standard German ranks 12th (133 million), Japanese 13th (126 million), Nigerian Pidgin 14th (121 million), and Egyptian Arabic 15th (118 million). Six of the top 15 languages in the ranking are predominantly spoken in Asia, including Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Hindi, Bengali, Indonesian, Urdu, and Japanese. 

 

Collectively, these languages reflect the massive populations of China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Japan. 

 

Ukrainian ranks 58th. It is spoken by 30.8 million people. Romanian ranks 68th. It is considered the native language of 23.2 million people worldwide."

 

14 June 2026 Igor Fomin

Source: logos-press.md https://logos-pres.md/en/news/the-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world-in-2026/

https://logos-pres.md/en/news/the-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world-in-2026/

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"Is language — at least Chinese — fundamentally visual? I spent a few days turning this over in my brain, and finally decided to find out with the way I know how: train some language models and see what really happens.

The Experiment: Pixels In, Tokens Out
Every language model has to deal with tokenization first. The basic idea is: computers don’t understand text, so we assign each word or character an ID, that is, a number. For example, the character 你 becomes 100, 好 becomes 3, etc. From there, the LLM learns everything from scratch.

In this sense, when you reduce characters such as 山 (mountain) and 水 (water) to simple integers, you throw away their shapes. And Chinese characters have beautiful shapes — stroke configurations, radical components, spatial layouts that carry real information. Another example: 打 (hit), 拍 (pat), and 拉 (pull) all share the radical 扌 (hand). You reduce them to IDs 423, 1089, and 2341, and that relationship is gone.

So instead of token IDs, I rendered each character as a grayscale image and fed it to a language model. The model’s job was to predict the next character.

You Don’t Need Great Eyesight
If you’ve ever taken off your glasses to read, you know that blurry text is still readable. The same principle happens here.

Take a look at these 8×8 pixel versions of 人工智能 (hold your screen at arm’s length):

Each character is 64 pixels. And the model, trained on inputs at this resolution, performs just as well as one trained on 80×80 images.

Indeed, we tested image resolutions from 4×4 all the way to 80×80, and found that: Going from 8×8 to 80×80 — 100 times more pixels — buys essentially nothing.

The cropping results are even more striking and exciting. With 50% of each character removed, accuracy drops by less than 2%. The model doesn’t need the whole clear picture. It turns out that it needs just enough structure to know which radical family a character belongs to.

(A note on methodology: in the examples above, I’ve placed full and cropped versions side by side so you can compare. In the actual experiments, each training condition is completely independent — the model trained on cropped characters has never seen a complete one.)

The Hot-Start Effect
So, is the visual model better than the text-based one?

Not in the end. Both converge to essentially identical final accuracy. But the journey looks very different, especially the beginning.

After seeing only 0.4% of training steps, the visual model is already twice as accurate as the text-based baseline.

This is what we call the hot-start effect. The visual model arrives at training already knowing something useful: that 打, 拍, and 拉 look similar, and probably behave similarly. The text-based model starts with random embeddings and has to figure this out from scratch.

If you look at the embedding space at initialization — before any training — you can see this directly:

You can see that characters sharing the same radical cluster together at the very early training stage. Cosine similarity for radical-sharing pairs: ~0.27 for visual embeddings, ~0.002 for random token embeddings.

Why the Race Ends in a Tie
Here’s the key thing: the visual prior encodes visual similarity, but not linguistic co-occurrence. However, next-character prediction ultimately depends on the latter.

Yes, 打, 拍, and 拉 all share 扌 and look similar. But in actual text, they can appear in very different contexts — 打击犯罪 (combat crime), 拍摄照片 (take photos), 拉动经济 (stimulate the economy), etc. Once the text-based model has seen enough data to learn these patterns, the visual priors start no longer matters.

In other words, visual inputs warm-starts the optimization. But, well, it doesn’t change the information ceiling.

This always reminds me of Ted Chiang’s story Story of Your Life (the basis for the film Arrival). In the story, written and spoken language are two independent systems. But they ultimately serve the same purpose: communication. Two paths, same destination.

Where This Actually Matters
Despite of the same destination, there are real situations where it matters:

Low-resource settings. When you don’t have much training data, the visual head start translates into a real practical advantage. In our experiments, with just 10K samples, visual models already outperform a fully trained text baseline on downstream Chinese benchmarks (C-eval).

Damaged historical texts. This is another exciting one. A visual can help check classical Chinese manuscripts, damaged books, and handwritten documents where strokes are missing or faded.

What About Compute?

Good news: almost no overhead. The simplified visual encoder I used actually has fewer parameters than the text baseline (12.6M vs. 19.0M). Memory overhead: +1.3%. So we argue that the visual prior is nearly free.

The Short Answer
Is Chinese language visual of its nature? The answer seems to be: at the start, yes. By the end, it doesn’t matter.

Visual structure gives models a hot start. It is similar to that human reader makes when they see 扌 and immediately know they’re in the territory of hand-related actions. But the deeper patterns of language have to be learned from data. Both representations learn them equally well.

The paper is on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09566";
https://towardsdatascience.com/is-language-visual-an-experiment-with-chinese-characters-2/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"‘At the 2026 World Cup draw, FIFA Peace Prize recipient and U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the game should really be called “football.”

“There’s no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. It really doesn’t make any sense,” said Trump, an apparently new convert to the round-ball game.

He isn’t alone. The word “soccer” is, in some parts of the world, shunned by some fans.

Indeed, as a scholar of the sport who teaches a course called Soccer and Global Politics, I am bombarded with comments that the word “soccer” does not make any sense, and that people who use that term obviously know nothing about the beautiful game.

To me, this disparagement of the word “soccer” is not only petty and tiresome – it is also incorrect. It ignores the roots of the sport and the development of the language of the game.

Rather than making the word taboo, the football ecosystem should embrace it. To understand why, let’s go back to the beginning.

Associated to ‘assoc’ and then ‘soccer’
The game has been around in various forms for centuries, but it began to be codified in the mid-19th century.

“Association Football” was coined in 1863 to distinguish the game from rugby football, which, somewhat ironically, is played largely with the ball in hand.

British university students created their own slang at the time by abbreviating words and adding “-er” to them. Thus, “rugby” became “rugger” and “association football” was shortened to “assoc” and slanged to “soccer.”

And this term “soccer” was freely and proudly used in the British press and in public for nearly a century, until the 1980s.

In countries with other established codes of football – American football, Australian rules football and Gaelic football in Ireland – “soccer” became the dominant term. But British fans began abandoning the word in the 1980s, largely as a response to the embrace of the term in the States. And now, in the U.K. especially – but also among fans in the U.S. and Canada who present as “true” fans of the game – there are attempts to shame those who use the very term that the British invented and proudly used.

And that’s a pity. After all, using the word “soccer” has benefits. The British press continues to use “soccer” and “football” interchangeably to avoid repetitive writing. The shorter word is useful for tabloid editors when creating tight headlines. And using both words does not reveal that a person is ignorant but rather cosmopolitan.

The widespread use of “soccer” in Britain is still evident in the ongoing success of authoritative magazine World Soccer, founded in London in 1960; the TV show “Soccer AM,” which ran every Saturday from 1994 to 2023; the annual British charity match Soccer Aid; and Sky Sports’ “Soccer Saturday.” All document the enduring legacy of the term in Britain, despite the naysayers.

A shared vernacular
The beautiful game is also a universal one with a language shared by some 4 billion people.

Language evolves, and fans today equally understand “football,” “soccer,” “calcio,” “futebol” or “fútbol.”

Embracing all the variations of the beautiful game enriches the conversation. It illustrates the sport’s globalization and universal language, a shared vernacular that cuts across identities.

And besides, nobody wants the war that would ensue if American football fans were forced to find another name!"
https://theconversation.com/soccer-is-a-fine-term-for-the-beautiful-game-dont-let-any-football-snob-or-president-tell-you-otherwise-this-world-cup-280779
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"Réagissant à la parution de l’ouvrage « premier lexique bancaire et financier Français-Pulaar », Seybatou Aw, président de la compagnie de réassurance Aveni Ré estime que « nos langues africaines portent en elles la capacité d’exprimer le monde d’hier comme celui de demain ».  Voici sa lettre intégrale adressée à Alassane Ba, l’auteur de l’ouvrage.
Cher Alassane,

À la lecture du beau témoignage de notre aîné Mamadou Oumakala, une profonde émotion m’a envahi. Ses mots ont ravivé en moi les souvenirs d’une époque qui a façonné notre génération, celle des solidarités naturelles et des amitiés sincères forgées dans les épreuves de la vie villageoise.

J’y ai retrouvé avec émotion le souvenir de mon grand ami, feu Farba Abdoulel Ba, ton frère, avec qui j’ai entretenu des relations fraternelles exceptionnelles. Son évocation m’a également rappelé d’autres amis, compagnons de jeunesse aujourd’hui disparus : Sall Elibana, Amadou Mobel et tant d’autres qui ont marqué notre parcours et dont la mémoire demeure vivante dans nos cœurs. À travers eux, c’est tout un pan de notre histoire commune qui ressurgit : celle des enfants du Fouta élevés dans la simplicité, l’effort, la dignité et le respect des valeurs héritées de nos parents.

Ton ouvrage s’inscrit précisément dans cette continuité entre mémoire et modernité. En entreprenant de traduire et d’adapter au pulaar les concepts les plus élaborés de la banque, de la finance et de l’économie contemporaine, tu accomplis bien davantage qu’un travail lexicographique. Tu contribues à démontrer qu’aucune langue africaine n’est condamnée à demeurer à la périphérie du savoir moderne. Tu rappelles avec force que nos langues portent en elles la capacité d’exprimer le monde d’hier comme celui de demain.

Ce lexique constitue à mes yeux une œuvre de transmission. Il relie les générations, rapproche les héritages culturels des exigences de la modernité et offre aux futurs chercheurs, enseignants, étudiants et professionnels un outil précieux pour penser le développement dans leur propre langue.

Les peuples qui avancent sont ceux qui savent préserver leurs racines tout en embrassant l’avenir. En donnant à la finance moderne des mots pulaar, tu ne fais pas seulement œuvre d’érudition ; tu participes à la construction d’une souveraineté intellectuelle et culturelle dont l’Afrique a profondément besoin.

Je te félicite pour cette contribution remarquable. Elle honore non seulement la communauté pulaarophone, mais également tous ceux qui croient que le développement durable passe aussi par la valorisation de nos langues, de notre mémoire et de notre patrimoine immatériel.

Avec toute mon amitié fraternelle et mon admiration.

Seybatou AW"
https://www.financialafrik.com/2026/06/12/seybatou-aw-aucune-langue-africaine-nest-condamnee-a-demeurer-a-la-peripherie-du-savoir-moderne/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Connaissez-vous (vraiment) le genre des mots ?
"QUIZ - «Espace», «tentacule», «hémisphère»... Le genre grammatical donne toujours du fil à retordre. Saurez-vous correctement appliquer le masculin et le féminin ?

La langue française réserve bien des embûches à ceux qui croient la maîtriser. Parmi ses caprices les plus redoutables figure le genre grammatical, qui ne cesse de prendre le chou aux Français de 7 à 77 ans.

Tout petits déjà, on nous apprend que certains mots sont masculins, d’autres féminins… voire les deux selon les cas, car la langue française n’aime pas les règles sans exception. Pourquoi une oasis et non pas un oasis ? Pourquoi un pétale échappe-t-il à la féminité qu’on lui prête volontiers ? Le français hérité du latin a brouillé les pistes, francisé, emprunté, et semé le doute jusque dans les dictionnaires. Le Larousse, Le Robert ou le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française ne donne d’ailleurs pas toujours le même genre à certains de nos mots. Même les locuteurs aguerris trébuchent sur des vocables en apparence très simples, mais bien plus traître qu’ils n’y paraissent.

Connaissez-vous le genre d’«épître», renvoyant à une lettre écrite par un auteur ancien ? Le mot «alvéole» est-il masculin, féminin, ou les deux ? Avec Le Figaro, testez vos connaissances sur le genre grammatical des mots. Obtiendrez-vous 10/10 ?"
https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/quiz-francais/connaissez-vous-vraiment-le-genre-des-mots-20260613
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

"La langue d'un État agresseur ne peut pas bénéficier d'instruments de protection": Volodymyr Zelensky retire au russe son statut de langue protégée en Ukraine

 

Alors que le russe reste la langue principale d'une partie de la population en Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky a signé une loi lui retirant son statut de langue protégée dans le pays.

 

Le président Volodymyr Zelensky a signé vendredi 12 juin une loi retirant au russe son statut de langue protégée en Ukraine, où elle reste la langue principale d'une partie de la population malgré un recul depuis l'invasion russe.

 

"Le président de l'Ukraine a signé la loi (...) une décision importante pour protéger l'espace linguistique ukrainien et remplir nos obligations européennes", a déclaré sur Facebook le président du Parlement Rouslan Stefantchouk.

 

"La langue d'un État agresseur ne peut pas bénéficier d'instruments de protection conçus pour soutenir les langues des peuples autochtones et des communautés nationales", a-t-il affirmé, invoquant "la justice et la sécurité linguistique de l'Ukraine"."

BFM

J.D. avec AFP

https://www.bfmtv.com/international/europe/ukraine/la-langue-d-un-etat-agresseur-ne-peut-pas-beneficier-d-instruments-de-protection-volodymyr-zelensky-retire-au-russe-son-statut-de-langue-protegee-en-ukraine_AN-202606130132.html

#metaglossia 

#metaglossia_mundus 

"La France et l'Italie s'opposent à ce que l'anglais soit la seule langue utilisée dans les couloirs de l'Union européenne

La France et l'Italie s'opposent à ce que l'anglais soit la seule langue utilisée lors des discussions entre les pays de l'Union européenne, institution qui prône le multilinguisme puisqu'elle compte 24 langues officielles.
Dans quelle langue les pays européens doivent-ils discuter pour trouver des accords commerciaux? Pour accélérer les discussions, l'utilisation de l'anglais est plébiscitée par plusieurs pays. "Si l’on examine n’importe quelle évaluation des pertes financières engendrées par la longueur de ce processus, je pense que, surtout dans le contexte mondial actuel, c’est quelque chose que nous ne pouvons plus nous permettre", estime par exemple le commissaire européen au Commerce Maroš Šefčovič, dans des propos relayés par le Financial Times.

Selon lui, il existe "un large consensus" en ce sens dans les rangs de l'Union européenne.

L'UE prône le multilinguisme avec 24 langues officielles
Large consensus peut-être, mais pas unanimité. Puisque selon le journal économique, la France et l'Italie s'opposent à l'utilisation totale de l'anglais dans les négociations.

"C’est une question de Constitution française. La France ne peut être liée par un texte qui n’est pas rédigé en français, ni s’y engager", souligne un responsable français auprès de nos confrères.
Alors que dit le règlement de l'Union européenne? L'institution met en avant sur son site "le multilinguisme" comme "l'un de ses principes fondateurs", se targuant de compter 24 langues officielles. Même après le Brexit, l'anglais est resté une des langues de l'institution puisqu'il est parlé à Malte et en Irlande.

"Le multilinguisme est inscrit dans la charte des droits fondamentaux de l’UE: tout citoyen de l’UE a le droit de communiquer avec les institutions européennes dans l’une des 24 langues officielles de l’UE, et les institutions sont tenues de lui répondre dans la même langue. Les actes juridiques et leurs synthèses sont disponibles dans toutes les langues officielles de l’UE", est-il indiqué. Au Parlement européen, les élus "ont le droit de s'exprimer dans n'importe quelle langue officielle de l'UE".

Alors les 27 risquent-ils d'abandonner le multilinguisme au profit de l'efficacité de la langue anglaise qui est la plus maîtrisée à travers le continent? Un porte-parole de l'UE se défend estimant qu'une seule langue peut être utilisée lors des discussions sans que "cela ne préjuge de la traduction intégrale de l'accord dans les 24 langues officielles""
Matthieu Heyman
13.06.2026
https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/economie-social/union-europeenne/c-est-une-question-de-constitution-la-france-et-l-italie-s-opposent-a-ce-que-l-anglais-soit-la-seule-langue-utilisee-dans-les-couloirs-de-l-union-europeenne_AN-202606130211.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus

Federal protections promise a fair trial in a language you understand, but for millions who speak lesser-known languages, courts can’t keep that promise.

In northern Oregon, just before dawn in October 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested and shackled two farmworkers on their way to work. The man and woman were Guatemalan citizens who spoke no English and very little Spanish. They spoke Mam, an Indigenous Mayan language.

 

Despite the man trying to tell an ICE officer as much, he was not provided with an interpreter, according to his sworn declaration. Suspected of being in the country illegally, they were detained in an immigration processing center and signed papers they did not understand. They were released later with ankle monitors and placed under an intensive supervision program requiring frequent check-ins at an ICE office in Portland.

 

Their experience points to a problem that reaches far beyond Oregon.

 

The civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution broadly apply to everyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. Courts have held that the right to an interpreter is protected by the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a fair trial – including understanding court proceedings and communicating with counsel. It’s also protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments, which state that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process.”

 

But in a multilingual society, these rights collide with how little most Americans, including law enforcement and court professionals, are taught about language itself. Speakers of minority languages, or languages that are not commonly used in schools, courts or government, are often disadvantaged by this lack of linguistic awareness. This can even affect nonstandard English speakers or people who speak a variety of English that differs from the mainstream varieties privileged in courts and schools.

 

Imagine an English speaker detained abroad and forced to navigate a criminal trial in a language they do not understand. Most people would recognize that as fundamentally unfair, but speakers of minority languages often face this reality in U.S. courtrooms.

 

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These failures are poised to multiply. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating English as the official U.S. language and rescinding a 2000 executive order that directed federal agencies to provide language access – despite the fact that around 25 million people in the U.S. have limited English proficiency.

 

At the same time, the Trump administration has sharply expanded an immigration crackdown that targets Latino communities. In immigration enforcement, heavily reduced training may be leaving ICE officers with limited understanding of constitutional protections, sweeping growing numbers of Indigenous-language speakers into a legal system unequipped to communicate with them.

 

As a linguist, translator and courtroom interpreter for the Ch'ol language – a Mayan language spoken by roughly a quarter of a million people – I see firsthand the ways in which the court system is unprepared.

 

Minority and Indigenous languages

More than 30 Mayan languages are spoken today by roughly 7 million people; they’re not dialects of Spanish but members of a separate linguistic family and have their own vocabulary, grammar and sound systems, as distinct from one another as the languages spoken across Europe. A speaker of Ch'ol would not be able to understand Mam, as is the case for thousands of other minority or Indigenous languages worldwide.

 

Since 2015 I have worked in southern Mexico with speakers of Ch’ol, and since 2023 I have been an expert witness and court interpreter. I have twice worked with defendants suspected of having learning disabilities, when, in reality, they had just been provided interpretation in the wrong language.

 

Consequences in the courtroom

A lack of awareness about language diversity and linguistic needs can have serious consequences in the courtroom. In the 1980s, a speaker of a Mixtec language was wrongfully convicted of murder after a trial conducted through a Spanish interpreter, a language he barely spoke. Four decades later this problem persists: In Texas in 2022, a man who spoke the Northern Tepehuan language was convicted of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and sentenced to 24 months in prison despite not understanding his court proceedings.

 

Data on linguistic diversity is more available in Los Angeles and New York City, two cities with large Indigenous populations. But in other areas of the country, court systems are unprepared for diverse linguistic needs. Even the 2020 census, which researchers and Indigenous-rights advocates say undercounts these communities, recorded more than 1.3 million people identifying as Latin American Indian. Still, in court files and immigration records, Indigenous-language speakers are typically logged as Hispanic or Spanish-speaking, erasing the distinction that determines whether someone gets an interpreter they can understand.

 

Although neither ICE nor Customs and Border Protection tracks Indigenous immigrants or the languages they speak, reporting at the border suggests as many as 1 in 5 people in immigration detention are Indigenous.

 

By one estimate, speakers of Indigenous languages represent between 10% and 44% of new arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, but without the right language services, misunderstanding and bias can push asylum-seekers to abandon valid claims and return to dangerous situations or otherwise jeopardize their chances of gaining entry.

 

Indigenous language–speakers are denied asylum in the U.S. more often than speakers of more commonly spoken languages. In one instance, when a woman was asked to describe a domestic abuse injury to a judge, one interpreter used the word “heel”; another, later, used “ankle.” In Mam, “heel” and “ankle” are the same word, but the inconsistency led the judge to think the asylum-seeker was changing her story. The judge ordered her removed.

 

A broader impact

The failure to respect language and dialect diversity threatens the fairness of the legal system for immigrants and citizens alike, as linguistic discrimination can extend to varieties of English as well.

 

Court reporters are required to transcribe at a minimum of 95% accuracy, but that measure does not evaluate their ability to transcribe nonstandard English. In one study, researchers tested more than two dozen Philadelphia court reporters and found that when it came to African American English, their transcriptions were less than 60% accurate, sentence by sentence. AAE is a group of varieties of English spoken by many Black communities in the U.S. with their own rule-governed syntax, lexicon and phonology that make them distinct from mainstream American English. Inaccurate transcription, the study explained, can lead to errors that “change the official record of who performed what actions under which circumstances, with potentially dramatic legal repercussions.”

 

In 2012, George Zimmerman killed unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin and was charged with second-degree murder. Rachel Jeantel was on the phone with Martin before his death and, so, was a key witness for the prosecution. She testified for nearly six hours – including about the start of the encounter and who confronted whom, a question central to Zimmerman’s self-defense claim – but jurors found her testimony not credible and ended up disregarding it. One said it was hard to understand. Zimmerman would eventually be acquitted.

 

Rachel Jeantel, a key witness in George Zimmerman’s trial, testifies in Florida in 2013. AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Jacob Langston

It is difficult to show how many people are affected by linguistic discrimination. Unlike people whose proficiency in English is low, AAE speakers are not counted as a distinct linguistic group, so the scale of the harm is undocumented. Nevertheless, one study showed that witnesses with foreign-accented English are viewed as less credible, and studies in both the U.K. and the U.S. found that speakers of nonstandard varieties of English are perceived to be guiltier.

 

In cases involving stigmatized varieties of speech, expert witnesses could help jurors understand linguistic diversity and separate how someone speaks from whether they are credible. Expert witnesses could also help jurors understand what linguistic discrimination is and explain that biases against someone’s language are often masked biases against their race, gender or socioeconomic background.

 

‘The last bastion of overt social discrimination’

The case against the two Mam-speaking farmworkers in Oregon was challenged in court, and in January 2026 a federal judge found the agents’ actions to be “reckless and erroneous.” The judge ordered ICE to remove their ankle monitors and end the supervision program imposed on them. Neither was convicted of a crime.

 

Despite the ruling in the farmworkers’ favor, though, their case reflects a broader problem: Although the right to an interpreter is constitutionally protected, that right means little when courts and officers are unaware of linguistic needs. Education for law enforcement and court officials on linguistic diversity, early language identification and increased funding for interpretation services are all essential before the courts can deliver on the rights the Constitution guarantees.

 

As sociolinguist James Milroy argued in a 1998 essay about linguistic discrimination in education, unless societies become more educated about linguistic diversity, “the last bastion of overt social discrimination will continue to be a person’s use of language.”

Carol Rose Little

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, University of Oklahoma

https://theconversation.com/the-constitution-promises-an-interpreter-for-fair-trials-us-courts-often-cant-deliver-283540

"AI language translation equipment
Officers are using upgraded body cameras that instantly auto-detect and translate 56 languages to eliminate interpreter wait times and speed up police report transcription.

RENTON, Wash. - As FIFA World Cup fans and international tourists flood into the region, the Renton Police Department deployed new technology — including automated drone trackers and AI-powered body cameras — to handle the influx of global visitors.

...Renton officers have been outfitted with upgraded body-worn cameras capable of translating 56 different languages instantly.

"We have a very diverse community here in Renton, and it’s incredibly important for us to be able to support everyone in the community, not just people who can speak English," said Denis Moynihan, Renton PD’s north sector Patrol Operations Commander.

Officers began training with the AI-powered translation software in February and have since been utilizing it on an almost daily basis. When an officer encounters a language barrier, they can manually activate the AI translation tool.

"We hold down a button, and we can either identify a language that we know somebody is speaking or we can allow the device to auto-detect, and then it will begin translation," explained Moynihan.

What they're saying:
Officials said the tool prevents confusion, eliminates waiting times for a live interpreter to arrive on scene, and helps de-escalate tense situations. Officials added that the software automatically transcribes the whole conversation, allowing officers to write faster, more accurate police reports.

"This is a huge pathway to helping people when they have problems or need our assistance," Moynihan said. "We have different people in this community that we need to be able to serve."

The rollout of the new drone-tracking trailer and translation software did not happen overnight. The equipment and upgraded software were part of a contract extension with safety technology vendor Axon Enterprise Inc.

The Renton City Council approved the contract extension back in 2025.

Renton Police are reminding all drone hobbyists to check current FAA flight restrictions before taking off. The temporary flight restrictions in Renton will be enforced through July 21."
By Franque Thompson
FOX 13 Seattle
Renton
Published June 11, 2026
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/renton-drone-tracker-ai-translators
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus