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Charles Tiayon
August 6, 8:35 PM
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"Les romans de l'écrivaine Han Kang, lauréate du prix Nobel de littérature 2024, sont présentés dans un espace qui leur est dédié, dans une librairie Kyobo du centre de Séoul, le mercredi 16 octobre 2024. A 9h du matin ce mercredi, les ventes réalisées par les romans de Han depuis qu'elle a remporté la prestigieuse récompense avaient atteint 1,03 million d'exemplaires. Les ventes des versions numériques de ses livres auraient également dépassé le seuil des 70.000 exemplaires. (Photo d'archives Yonhap) SEOUL, 06 août (Yonhap) -- Les ventes à l'étranger d'œuvres littéraires coréennes traduites ont fortement bondi l'année dernière, illustrant l'intérêt croissant du lectorat étranger pour la littérature coréenne après l'obtention du prix Nobel de littérature 2024 par la romancière Han Kang, a fait savoir ce mercredi l'Institut coréen de la traduction littéraire (LTI Korea). Environ 1,2 million d'exemplaires d'ouvrages de littérature coréenne traduits et publiés avec le soutien du LTI Korea se sont vendus à l'étranger l'an dernier, soit un bond de 130% par rapport à l'année précédente. Les ventes moyennes pour chaque traduction ont ainsi atteint le niveau record de 1.271 unités. Parmi ces ouvrages, 45 se sont vendus à plus de 5.000 unités, dont 24 ont même dépassé les 10.000 exemplaires. LTI Korea a attribué ce bond au succès des œuvres de la lauréate du prix Nobel de littérature 2024, Han Kang. Ses écrits ont été traduits en 28 langues avec le soutien de l'institut pour un total de 77 ouvrages. Pris ensemble, leurs ventes ont dépassé les 310.000 exemplaires rien que l'année passée. En regardant les ventes des 19 traductions publiées avant 2023, celles-ci ont vu leurs ventes quintupler en passant d'environ 30.000 unités en 2023 à 150.000 en 2024. Des romans d'autres auteurs ont également obtenu de bons résultats à l'étranger, comme «S'aimer dans la grande ville» de Park Sang-young, «Kim Jiyoung, née en 1982» de Cho Nam-joo et «Lapin maudit» de Chung Bora, qui a été retenu parmi les finalistes pour le prix international Booker 2022 et le National Book Award for Translated Literature 2023. LTI Korea a noté que l'élargissement du lectorat en Amérique du Nord et Europe encourageait les maisons d'édition étrangères à «présenter plus activement des livres coréens», tout en ajoutant que «les réseaux de distribution de ces maisons d'édition et leur puissance marketing ont considérablement amélioré l'accès à la littérature coréenne à l'étranger».
lsr@yna.co.kr"
Ventes record des traductions de romans coréens à l'étranger après le Nobel de Han Kang
06.08.2025 à 14h16
https://m-fr.yna.co.kr/view/AFR20250806001400884
#metaglossia_mundus
Researchers across Africa, Asia and the Middle East are building their own language models designed for local tongues, cultural nuance and digital independence
"In a high-stakes artificial intelligence race between the United States and China, an equally transformative movement is taking shape elsewhere. From Cape Town to Bangalore, from Cairo to Riyadh, researchers, engineers and public institutions are building homegrown AI systems, models that speak not just in local languages, but with regional insight and cultural depth.
The dominant narrative in AI, particularly since the early 2020s, has focused on a handful of US-based companies like OpenAI with GPT, Google with Gemini, Meta’s LLaMa, Anthropic’s Claude. They vie to build ever larger and more capable models. Earlier in 2025, China’s DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, added a new twist by releasing large language models (LLMs) that rival their American counterparts, with a smaller computational demand. But increasingly, researchers across the Global South are challenging the notion that technological leadership in AI is the exclusive domain of these two superpowers.
Instead, scientists and institutions in countries like India, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are rethinking the very premise of generative AI. Their focus is not on scaling up, but on scaling right, building models that work for local users, in their languages, and within their social and economic realities.
“How do we make sure that the entire planet benefits from AI?” asks Benjamin Rosman, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and a lead developer of InkubaLM, a generative model trained on five African languages. “I want more and more voices to be in the conversation”.
Beyond English, beyond Silicon Valley
Large language models work by training on massive troves of online text. While the latest versions of GPT, Gemini or LLaMa boast multilingual capabilities, the overwhelming presence of English-language material and Western cultural contexts in these datasets skews their outputs. For speakers of Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa and countless other languages, that means AI systems may not only stumble over grammar and syntax, they can also miss the point entirely.
“In Indian languages, large models trained on English data just don’t perform well,” says Janki Nawale, a linguist at AI4Bharat, a lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. “There are cultural nuances, dialectal variations, and even non-standard scripts that make translation and understanding difficult.” Nawale’s team builds supervised datasets and evaluation benchmarks for what specialists call “low resource” languages, those that lack robust digital corpora for machine learning.
It’s not just a question of grammar or vocabulary. “The meaning often lies in the implication,” says Vukosi Marivate, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa. “In isiXhosa, the words are one thing but what’s being implied is what really matters.” Marivate co-leads Masakhane NLP, a pan-African collective of AI researchers that recently developed AFROBENCH, a rigorous benchmark for evaluating how well large language models perform on 64 African languages across 15 tasks. The results, published in a preprint in March, revealed major gaps in performance between English and nearly all African languages, especially with open-source models.
Similar concerns arise in the Arabic-speaking world. “If English dominates the training process, the answers will be filtered through a Western lens rather than an Arab one,” says Mekki Habib, a robotics professor at the American University in Cairo. A 2024 preprint from the Tunisian AI firm Clusterlab finds that many multilingual models fail to capture Arabic’s syntactic complexity or cultural frames of reference, particularly in dialect-rich contexts.
Governments step in
For many countries in the Global South, the stakes are geopolitical as well as linguistic. Dependence on Western or Chinese AI infrastructure could mean diminished sovereignty over information, technology, and even national narratives. In response, governments are pouring resources into creating their own models.
Saudi Arabia’s national AI authority, SDAIA, has built ‘ALLaM,’ an Arabic-first model based on Meta’s LLaMa-2, enriched with more than 540 billion Arabic tokens. The United Arab Emirates has backed several initiatives, including ‘Jais,’ an open-source Arabic-English model built by MBZUAI in collaboration with US chipmaker Cerebras Systems and the Abu Dhabi firm Inception. Another UAE-backed project, Noor, focuses on educational and Islamic applications.
In Qatar, researchers at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, have developed the Fanar platform and its LLMs Fanar Star and Fanar Prime. Trained on a trillion tokens of Arabic, English, and code, Fanar’s tokenization approach is specifically engineered to reflect Arabic’s rich morphology and syntax.
India has emerged as a major hub for AI localization. In 2024, the government launched BharatGen, a public-private initiative funded with 235 crore (€26 million) initiative aimed at building foundation models attuned to India’s vast linguistic and cultural diversity. The project is led by the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and also involves its sister organizations in Hyderabad, Mandi, Kanpur, Indore, and Madras. The programme’s first product, e-vikrAI, can generate product descriptions and pricing suggestions from images in various Indic languages. Startups like Ola-backed Krutrim and CoRover’s BharatGPT have jumped in, while Google’s Indian lab unveiled MuRIL, a language model trained exclusively on Indian languages. The Indian governments’ AI Mission has received more than180 proposals from local researchers and startups to build national-scale AI infrastructure and large language models, and the Bengaluru-based company, AI Sarvam, has been selected to build India’s first ‘sovereign’ LLM, expected to be fluent in various Indian languages.
In Africa, much of the energy comes from the ground up. Masakhane NLP and Deep Learning Indaba, a pan-African academic movement, have created a decentralized research culture across the continent. One notable offshoot, Johannesburg-based Lelapa AI, launched InkubaLM in September 2024. It’s a ‘small language model’ (SLM) focused on five African languages with broad reach: Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, isiZulu and isiXhosa.
“With only 0.4 billion parameters, it performs comparably to much larger models,” says Rosman. The model’s compact size and efficiency are designed to meet Africa’s infrastructure constraints while serving real-world applications. Another African model is UlizaLlama, a 7-billion parameter model developed by the Kenyan foundation Jacaranda Health, to support new and expectant mothers with AI-driven support in Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu.
India’s research scene is similarly vibrant. The AI4Bharat laboratory at IIT Madras has just released IndicTrans2, that supports translation across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Sarvam AI, another startup, released its first LLM last year to support 10 major Indian languages. And KissanAI, co-founded by Pratik Desai, develops generative AI tools to deliver agricultural advice to farmers in their native languages.
The data dilemma
Yet building LLMs for underrepresented languages poses enormous challenges. Chief among them is data scarcity. “Even Hindi datasets are tiny compared to English,” says Tapas Kumar Mishra, a professor at the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela in eastern India. “So, training models from scratch is unlikely to match English-based models in performance.”
Rosman agrees. “The big-data paradigm doesn’t work for African languages. We simply don’t have the volume.” His team is pioneering alternative approaches like the Esethu Framework, a protocol for ethically collecting speech datasets from native speakers and redistributing revenue back to further development of AI tools for under-resourced languages. The project’s pilot used read speech from isiXhosa speakers, complete with metadata, to build voice-based applications.
In Arab nations, similar work is underway. Clusterlab’s 101 Billion Arabic Words Dataset is the largest of its kind, meticulously extracted and cleaned from the web to support Arabic-first model training.
The cost of staying local
But for all the innovation, practical obstacles remain. “The return on investment is low,” says KissanAI’s Desai. “The market for regional language models is big, but those with purchasing power still work in English.” And while Western tech companies attract the best minds globally, including many Indian and African scientists, researchers at home often face limited funding, patchy computing infrastructure, and unclear legal frameworks around data and privacy.
“There’s still a lack of sustainable funding, a shortage of specialists, and insufficient integration with educational or public systems,” warns Habib, the Cairo-based professor. “All of this has to change.”
A different vision for AI
Despite the hurdles, what’s emerging is a distinct vision for AI in the Global South – one that favours practical impact over prestige, and community ownership over corporate secrecy.
“There’s more emphasis here on solving real problems for real people,” says Nawale of AI4Bharat. Rather than chasing benchmark scores, researchers are aiming for relevance: tools for farmers, students, and small business owners.
And openness matters. “Some companies claim to be open-source, but they only release the model weights, not the data,” Marivate says. “With InkubaLM, we release both. We want others to build on what we’ve done, to do it better.”
In a global contest often measured in teraflops and tokens, these efforts may seem modest. But for the billions who speak the world’s less-resourced languages, they represent a future in which AI doesn’t just speak to them, but with them."
Sibusiso Biyela, Amr Rageh and Shakoor Rather
20 May 2025
https://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2025.65
#metaglossia_mundus
"Lawyer takes Government to court over delay in translation of employment codes
Harare – based labour law expert, Adv Caleb Mucheche, has approached the High Court seeking an order to compel the Government to translate employment codes of conduct into all 14 constitutionally recognised vernacular languages and sign language...
Adv Mucheche, the first president of Zimbabwe African Labour Society for Labour Practitioners in Zimbabwe, argues that their failure to ensure translations constitutes an act of “constitutional perfidy” and systemic discrimination against workers not fluent in English.
He describes the current system as one that “weaponises the disciplinary process against workers” and denies the majority of Zimbabwean workers meaningful access to justice.
Currently, employment codes of conduct, including the National Code of Conduct (S.I. 15 of 2006) and public service regulations, are only required to be translated into Shona and Ndebele, leaving out other official languages such as Tonga, Kalanga, and sign language.
Adv Mucheche argues that this selective approach violates the constitutional mandate of inclusivity and equality.
“This omission obliterates the right to fair labour practice, turning due process into a punitive administrative formality,” he states.
Citing Section 6 (1) of the Constitution, Adv Mucheche underscores that all 16 official languages of Zimbabwe – including sign language-enjoy equal status and must be treated as such in labour regulations.
He asserts that the Registrar of Labour’s continued certification of English-only codes is not only unlawful but also an affront to the principle of constitutional supremacy.
“This is systemic linguistic discrimination that renders the ‘equal benefit’ of the law a legal fiction,” he argues.
The application seeks declaratory and mandamus orders to compel the respondents to enforce mandatory translation of all workplace codes within three months.
Adv Mucheche further requests that the Labour Code Regulations of 1990 be amended to explicitly require translations into all official languages.
He maintains that this omission is not a mere oversight but a deliberate failure to uphold constitutional obligations.
“The failure to immediately amend the regulations to incorporate all official languages is a breach of the constitutional mandate,” he declares.
This case is a direct challenge to what Adv Mucheche calls “institutional violence” against workers who are linguistically disenfranchised.
He emphasises that the Constitution mandates the state to ensure all citizens can access legal frameworks in their own languages. The current situation, he says, creates a legal vacuum.
“The inaccessible code of conduct leaves workers legally naked and susceptible to merciless employer action.”
Adv Mucheche concludes his affidavit by urging the court to intervene, describing the issue as one of fundamental human rights.
“This is not a matter of minor administrative detail; it is a critical intervention to secure linguistic justice and the supremacy of the Constitution.”
This move is rooted in the supreme law and labour laws of Zimbabwe, which demand inclusivity and accessibility for all citizens.
More than a decade after the enactment of the 2013 Constitution of Zimbabwe, the Government has yet to fulfill its legal obligation.
The Constitution explicitly requires the Ministry to facilitate the translation of these critical documents from English into the diverse local languages of the nation. The respondents are yet to respond to the application."
December 5, 2025
Fidelis Munyoro
Chief Court Reporter
https://www.heraldonline.co.zw/lawyer-takes-government-to-court-over-delay-in-translation-of-employment-codes/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Orla Case explores translated fiction, its cross-cultural benefits, and the linguistic science behind it.
"by Orla Case
December 3, 2025
My Saturday mornings consist largely of one poorly timed wakeup, two scalding coffees, three minutes late to my weekly Oxford Blue meeting, and four more books purchased in Blackwell’s on the journey home. Each time I make the fateful £45 decision to walk through that door, I find myself drawn specifically to the ‘Translated Fiction’ section on the first floor. A section so beguiling I metamorphose into a voracious magpie, in awe of the dazzling titles and shiny covers. I am by no means alone in my fascination: a recent survey conducted by Nielsen for the Booker Prize Foundation highlights that young people drive the sales of translated fiction, despite the largest group of readers being over the age of 60. Recently, I have started to wonder if the segregation of translated fiction from works originally composed in English may be problematic, despite its convenience. Does the separation of translated works simply acknowledge the painstaking and vital work of the translators involved? The notion that works of fiction not originally written in English, and thus ideas not originally pondered in English, are in some way inherently different or perhaps second-fiddle is most certainly a dangerous one.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more commonly known as the theory of linguistic relativity, posits that the language that we speak is related to, and influences, the way we think. Deservedly, this theory has come under great scrutiny sinceqqq its inception. Originating from the assumption that Native American people were inferior in their grammatical structure, and therefore their cognition, this hypothesis is rooted in colonialism. American linguist William Dwight Whitney went as far to state that Native American languages must be eradicated, and that those who spoke them should be taught English in order to adopt a ‘civilized’ way of life. In this case, the implication that thought differs with language fosters nothing more than bigotry. However, contemporary cognitive scientists and linguistic philosophers alike have accepted a slightly more palatable form of the theory of linguistic relativity: that language reciprocally influences thought. For instance, in his elementary works, Whorf himself discovered that in the Inuit lexicon, there are three words to distinguish varieties of snow, enabling increased perceptual discrimination between types of snow in Inuit communities. This is an example of a lexical gap, as a direct translation of such terms does not exist in English.To put it plainly, native English speakers simply do not need three words for snow. French and Czech author Milan Kundera, known for his groundbreaking novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, emphasises the issues that lexical gaps breed for translators. The Czech word ‘litost’ has no exact translation in any other language, yet Kundera cannot “see how anyone can understand the human soul without”. The term depicts a feeling “as infinite as an open accordion, a synthesis of grief, sympathy, remorse, and indefinable longing”, which begs the question – does the language in which we read a novel change the emotions it evokes? And, if this is truly the case, does translating a piece of literature from its mother tongue dampen its effect?
One of my personal favourite examples of translated literature is the work of Olga Tokarczuk, a Nobel Prize-winning Polish author whose literary activism is laced with what can only be described as magical realism. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who has translated many of Tokarczuk’s works into English, shared her experience with translating in an interview with Notes from Poland. Lloyd-Jones admits that “it is difficult not to get seduced by the Polish text and stick too closely to what’s on the page”, and expresses the need to consider “if this person were writing in English, how would they write that?”. The role of the translator is ultimately not to reproduce, but to allow each and every individual to best reap the benefits of the abundant harvest of literature worldwide, maintaining both connotation and denotation
Translated fiction is a vehicle for literary travel across borders, facilitating visits to the best tourist attractions and recreational indulgence in some of the intimate aspects of different cultures. It is not a pair of magic glasses that enables us to see the world from another perspective. Our digestion of translated fiction is inevitably compromised by our backgrounds and past experiences, but this does not take away from its merit as a window into the life of another. We will never know what it is like to think in another first language, just as we will never know what it’s like to grow up somewhere else. In an International Booker Prize interview, Vigdis Hjorth, author of Is Mother Dead, says that reading translated fiction is important because:
“reading fiction from abroad, but in your own language, is a meeting with experiences, environments and cultures that are different from your own, but still you met them in a way that is familiar, in your own language. It’s a win-win experience”.
The way we think is most certainly impacted by the culture in which we are embedded, which inevitably includes our native language. Thus, the creative labour of the translator in preserving the intentions of the author, whilst appealing to a dissimilar cultural demographic, is not one to be overlooked. To acknowledge that a piece is translated is to acknowledge our ignorance of it in its true context, but appreciate the invaluable insight it gives us. Whilst the emotions aroused when reading a book in English might not be the same as those experienced when reading it in its original form, it is the closest we can come to literary universality, to broadening our horizons in the comfort of our own homes, and to embracing our unrelenting curiosity. Completely incomparable, translated fiction cannot be dictated as better or worse than its originally English counterpart; it is a necessary piece of the puzzle depicting humankind. We should all engage with it, but not with the expectation that it is a perfect representation of the initial version in its true context."
https://theoxfordblue.co.uk/meta-whorf-asis-on-litost-and-translated-fiction/?amp=1
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"''Thirukkural'' translation to be made available in 30 more languages by Jan 2026, says official
Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) | The Central Institute of Classical Tamil has started a new initiative to translate the classical Tamil text, Thirukkural, into 30 more languages, a top official of the institute said.
Thirukkural, which consists of 1,330 aphoristic couplets that are divided into three parts -- on virtue, material world and romantic love -- and is lauded as having universal relevance beyond its time.
The text has so far been translated into 34 languages, including 25 Indian languages, said R Chandrasekaran, Director, Central Institute of Classical Tamil, an autonomous institution established by the Ministry of Education, Chennai, after Tamil was declared a classical language in 2004.
"In addition to the 34 languages in which Tirukkural is already available, we have a plan to make it available in 30 more languages, including 23 Indian languages by Pongal 2026," he told PTI.
The Institute wants to see Thirukkural in 100 languages by August 2026, Prof Chandrasekaran said.
"That will convey to the world the value and specialities of Thirukkural to the people living across the globe," he said.
To a question, he said that the Centre wants to expand the reach of Thirukkural and its values by taking it to the people living in various parts of the globe, and hence the institute translates the text into more languages.
Some of the Indian languages into which Thirukkural is to be translated are non-scheduled languages. For example, it will be translated into a language spoken by the Irular tribe living in the Ootacamund, Nilgiris district, he said.
"We have released the translation of Tirukkural in scheduled languages already. Now, we are releasing it in non-scheduled languages," he explained.
To another query, he said some of the foreign languages into which Thirukkural is proposed to be translated include German, French and Spanish.
"We are tentatively planning to launch the translation of Thirukkural into non-scheduled languages by January 2026", he said.
It may be noted that January 15, the second day of Pongal festival (and Tamil month 'Thai'), is celebrated as Thiruvallurvar day in Tamil Nadu.
Referring to the launch of the multilingual translation of 'Tholkappiam', the oldest Tamil grammar book, by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on December 2 during the inauguration of Kashi Tamil Sangamam 4.0, Chandrasekharan said the institute has taken up the initiative to cater to a wider section of the people.
"It has been translated into 10 languages, including four Indian languages viz. Odia, Assamese, Urdu and Tulu," he said."
Published on :
07 Dec 2025, 7:33 AM
https://english.metrovaartha.com/entertainment/thirukkural-translation-to-be-made-available-in-30-more-languages-by-jan-2026-says-official
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Oman will host the 8th conference of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) themed "Sustainable Translation in the Age of Knowledge Extraction, Generation and Reproduction".
The 4-day conference will kick off on December 10, 2025 at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) under the auspices of the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth.
The Sultanate of Oman was chosen to host the conference’s 8th edition due to the country’s global reputation as an advocate of peace and a guardian of dialogue, international understanding and coexistence. The event gains impetus amid the current global and regional circumstances.
By hosting the event, the SQU seeks to promote international dialogue through translation studies, intercultural communication and research—the common areas that currently witness remarkable global activity.
The conference will be attended by a select group of scholars, researchers, experts, teaching staff and students from 61 countries.
The conference provides a platform for dialogue and exchange of expertise. It offers opportunities for exploring the latest trends, theories and practices in this field of knowledge. It will focus on its applications in real-life situations like the conservation of heritage, the settlement of peace and the promotion of international understanding.
The prospects also include transferring knowledge in the fields of medicine and public health, establishing the values of justice in legal spheres, as well as related applications in the areas of tourism, information, international relations and the concept of soft power in bridging country-to-country relations.
The conference events include an exhibition about the role of translation in the sustainability of identity, heritage and culture, seminars and panel discussions that bring together participants from the Sultanate of Oman abroad who are specialized in the fields of translation, the sustainability of identity, heritage and culture.
The conference will feature an intensive media programme to be conducted in cooperation with the Ministry of Information. It will also include an educational programme dedicated to students of colleges and universities. The educational programme will be organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth."
OMAN NEWS AGENCY (ONA)
Published: 5:13 PM, Dec 07, 2025"
https://www.omanobserver.om/article/1180765/oman/community/oman-to-host-8th-translation-and-intercultural-studies-conference
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Bilingual brains reveal something fundamental about human intelligence. It's not about language. It's about domain translation, the cognitive capacity AI cannot replicate.
"What neuroscience reveals about human intelligence.
Updated December 8, 2025
Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Key points
Bilingual cognitive benefits stem from domain translation practice, not just language switching itself.
Neural networks manage multiple incompatible systems by selecting context-appropriate responses.
London taxi drivers and Japanese elders show similar cognitive gains through different domains.
Cultivating multilingual or multidomain fluency builds cognitive flexibility AI cannot replicate.
In 2009, I stood in Utrecht presenting research on the bilingual brain at the International Symposium on Bilingualism. This was my great-grandfather Wilhelm's city, the place he'd left more than a century earlier to migrate to Mexico. I was presenting research on the very phenomenon his migration had set in motion.
Wilhelm adapted quickly to San Luis Potosí. He learned Spanish, raising five children in a household that was neither fully German nor fully Mexican. He never taught his children German. The language was gone within a generation. But three generations later, my own children recovered it through deliberate immersion during my research fellowships in Germany, becoming trilingual.
This family story isn't just personal history. It's a case study in something fundamental about human cognition: Our capacity for adaptation is inseparable from our capacity for translation.
The Bilingual Brain as Model
Bilingual individuals offer a useful window into how human cognition achieves flexibility, albeit not for the reasons usually cited. The advantage isn't just about accessing two languages. It's what managing multiple linguistic systems reveals about adaptive cognition.
When bilinguals switch between languages, they engage neural networks that manage context-dependent selection—choosing the appropriate linguistic system based on who they're talking to, where they are, what they're discussing. This requires mapping different contexts onto different response systems while maintaining coherent output.
This same mechanism operates across domains. London taxi drivers navigating complex spatial layouts show well-known hippocampal adaptations that support managing thousands of routes and selecting the appropriate one based on context (Maguire et al., 2006). A different illustration comes from Japan, where older adults routinely engage with a written language that uses three distinct character systems, hiragana, katakana, and kanji, requiring constant shifts in form, meaning, and context. This ongoing, multisystemic engagement supports cognitive health even in a largely monolingual society.
The pattern isn't specific to language. It's about flexibility through managing multiple systems that can't be simultaneously active but must remain accessible. This is domain translation at the cognitive level.
Translation as Fundamental Mechanism
Translation, from the Latin translatus, means "to carry across." And this carrying across is what brains do constantly.
Every act of cognition involves translation: the infant translates sensory patterns into categories, the child translates embodied experience into symbolic thought, the scientist translates observations into theory. What we call "learning" is translation. What we call "understanding" is translation. What we call "adaptation" is translation between what our neural architecture expects and what the environment provides.
This reframes intelligence itself. Intelligence isn't just computation within a single domain. It's the ability to move between domains, to translate incompatible systems of meaning into coherent action.
The Human Advantage
This matters urgently because of artificial intelligence. Large language models can process information at scales humans never could, matching human performance on many standardized tasks. However, they remain trapped within computational frameworks.
article continues after advertisement
Humans do something different. We translate between fundamentally incompatible systems: between computational abstraction and embodied sensation, between symbolic representation and physical presence, between what we can articulate and what we intuitively understand.
When we're overwhelmed by abstract processing, we don't solve it with better algorithms. We translate to an entirely different domain: we go for a walk, listen to live music, cook dinner. We move from the symbolic to the sensory.
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This isn't stress relief. It's domain translation as survival mechanism. The body knows what the overwhelmed mind forgets: adaptive intelligence requires moving between systems, not optimizing within them.
Why This Matters
AI systems optimize within domains. When the environment changes in ways training data didn't anticipate, they fail catastrophically. They have no mechanism for domain translation. They don't have a body. They don't have a life.
Humans survive environmental change by switching domains entirely. When one framework stops working, we adopt another. When symbolic processing becomes overwhelming, we shift to sensory experience. When conscious reasoning reaches its limits, we rely on intuition.
This flexibility isn't a deficit in human cognition. It's our core strength. We're not information processors who happen to have bodies. We're domain translators who happen to process information.
Implications
If translation between domains is our fundamental adaptive mechanism, then human flourishing in the AI era requires cultivating this capacity. This means recognizing when we're domain-trapped and need to translate, developing fluency in multiple domains, and building cognitive architectures that facilitate domain switching.
My children's trilingualism isn't only valuable because they can communicate in three languages. It's valuable because they learned early that meaning exists across incompatible systems, that you can belong to multiple worlds simultaneously, that adaptation requires translation.
This is what Wilhelm's migration taught me a century later. He didn't just move from Utrecht to San Luis Potosí. He translated himself into a new world while maintaining continuity of self. The capacity to become someone new while remaining yourself, to carry meaning across incompatible domains, is the inheritance that matters.
The Future
AI will continue improving at computational tasks within defined domains. But the uniquely human advantage lies in our ability to move between domains AI cannot bridge. Between computation and embodiment. Between optimization and meaning. Between what we can measure and what we can feel.
The future won't belong to those who process the most information. It will belong to those who can translate between human and artificial intelligence, between multiple systems of meaning, between who we are and who we need to become.
Because adaptation, at its core, has always been translation. And translation, at its core, has always been human...
References
Maguire, E. A., Woollett, K., & Spiers, H. J. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus, 16(12), 1091–1101. https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.20233";
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-emergence-of-skill/202512/the-bilingual-brain-translation-as-adaptation
#metaglossia_mundus
#Metaglossia
"Catherine Thankamma writes about her experience of translating Malayalam novels, ‘Kocharethi’ by Narayan, and ‘Pulayathara’ by Paul Chirakkarode, into English.
Catherine Thankamma
Dec 07, 2025 · 01:30 pm
Translating regional language texts into English has become the “in” thing in the last two decades, with translators, especially in Kerala, eagerly soliciting writers to get a chance to translate their novels. With Geetanjali Shree and Banu Mushtaq winning the International Booker Prize, the fervour has definitely hit the roof. The eagerness to translate, however, wanes when it comes to texts that occupy a space beyond the boundaries of mainstream literature, texts that are sidelined, at times even erased by the source language literary community.
However, when such texts do get translated into English, the translation performs the unintended task of enabling them to gain visibility and traction within the linguistic terrain from which they evolved; it’s almost like forcing the hand of the mainstream literary community to acknowledge the existence of these texts and their authors. I refer to two of my translations to prove my point, Kocharethi by Narayan, India’s first tribal novelist, and Pulayathara by Paul Chirakkarode, both novels that have withstood the test of time.
A strategic act of defiance
Narayan belonged to the Mala Araya tribe, which at one time inhabited the hilly terrain of the Western Ghats in central Travancore. He was born in 1940, seven years before India gained independence. A first-generation literate, he passed the tenth standard examination and joined the postal service in Kochi. He began his literary career by penning short stories. Writing Kocharethi, his first novel, was a strategic act of defiance against a certain upper caste writer’s attempt to misrepresent the tribal community and reduce it to a trope. He completed the novel in 1988 and gave the manuscript to a friend for an objective evaluation. The friend took the manuscript but forgot all about it. Narayan wasted almost five years, too diffident to ask his friend what he thought about its literary worth. Finally urged by another friend, he retrieved the manuscript; then rewrote it as the ink had dulled by then.
The book was published in 1998, a decade later. It won the 1999 Kerala Sahitya Academy Award and two other awards. The ordinary Malayalee reader welcomed the novel wholeheartedly but the response of the literary elite was unsettling. While some openly challenged the text’s legitimacy, the diplomatic ones opted for a willed silence. The result, even as late as 2009, postgraduates in Malayalam, research scholars in Malayalam, who spoke volubly on black identity and negritude, had not heard of Narayan and Kocharethi, despite the fact that the text had been translated into Hindi, and a Tamil translation was in the offing. A few translators did approach Narayan, expressing interest in translating the text into English, but all they did was pocket the complimentary copy and disappear.
The English translation finally materialised only because the late Ayyappa Paniker demanded that Mini Krishnan of Oxford University Press commission it. That I, whose only credentials as a translator at that time were limited to half a dozen short stories of NS Madhavan, which I translated for The Little Magazine, was asked to translate a text like Kocharethi speaks for itself.
Translating the novel was difficult, requiring frequent and extensive interactions with the author. The weight of the realisation that I was not just translating a text, but bore the moral and ethical responsibility of translating an entire tribal community’s interaction with modernity, was daunting. Narayan helped me understand the cultural nuances of usage and expressions, as well as gain insight into the customs and rituals of the tribe. And of course, I had a brilliant editor in Mini Krishnan. Then came the 2011 Crossword Award, which inevitably extended the text and the author’s visibility beyond Kerala’s literary terrain, ensuring translations into three more regional languages plus French. Juri Dutta’s translation won the Assam Sahitya Academy award. But I want to focus on the shift in perception that occurred in the source language community.
Academia could no longer ignore a text that had travelled so far as to be included in the culture studies program of the University of Calgary. Malayalam and English language departments across the state included the text in their postgraduate syllabi, not in any core paper, mind you, but in optional papers like Dalit Studies, Translation Studies or Culture Studies; papers whose inclusion makes the syllabus look impressive but few colleges opt for. Narayan continued to be an outsider for the most part, dignified till the end. I recall an incident: When urged to undergo cardiac surgery, Narayan stumped the doctor with the words, “I walked half a kilometre to get here. Can you guarantee that I will walk out of this hospital?”
When Narayan died in 2022 due to Covid-related complications, the print and visual media mentioned his passing, and a brief statement of condolence was made in the state assembly; that was all. Way back in 2011, when a certain powerful academic and Adivasi welfare activist vehemently opposed Mini Krishnan’s claim that Narayan was India’s first tribal writer, Krishnan gracefully withdrew, and the translation introduced Narayan as South India’s first tribal writer. However, in a recent publication, the same writer calls Narayan India’s first tribal writer; an acknowledgement that has come too late for the one person who would have treasured it! However, Narayan has one great asset, the backing of his Mala Araya tribe, which is determined that his legacy remains.
A powerful depiction of oppression
The same cannot be said of Paul Chirakkarode, who died in 2008. He wrote Pulayathara in 1962. It’s a short novel, with a simple storyline but certain features make it remarkable; one, the seamless interweaving of social history and fiction, which transforms it into a powerful depiction of the oppression and persecution of the Pulaya community who worked in the paddy fields of Kuttanad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, the way Chirakkarode moulds language to depict the various levels of oppression and angst experienced not just by Dalits who convert to Christianity but also those who adhere to their native beliefs and rituals; for instance, the monosyllabic acquiescent responses of the indigenous Dalit labourer which reveal the near total erasure of autonomy, the half- formed sentences of the converted Dalits who struggle to express their thoughts, the crisp, controlled utterances of the upper caste landlords; they are all linguistic markers of inequality, held together the omniscient narratorial voice which alternates between strident criticism and evocative sentences that achieve almost lyrical cadences.
Most importantly, Pulayathara exposes the hypocrisy of the Church, which even as it actively engages in converting Dalits, maintains a complicit silence regarding the inequality that exists within the church, making no attempt to erase the caste hierarchy that is maintained between the Syrian Christians who claim an ancient lineage and converted Dalits, a hierarchy which is manifested spatially with the converts sitting on straw mats on the floor while the Syrian Christians lounge on benches at the back of the church.
The church naturally does not take well to criticism. As no one would publish the novel, Chirakkarode paid for 500 copies to be printed, but the church, which is a major vote bank in Kerala politics, made sure that the book disappeared from the public domain. When Oxford University Press commissioned the Anthology of Malayalam Dalit literature in translation and the editors decided to include a few chapters from Pulayathara, they discovered that only two copies existed in all of Kerala, one of which was a tattered copy in Thiruvananthapuram public library, on the brink of being weeded.
Now comes the interesting part. The news of the anthology prompted Raven Books, a local publisher, to bring out a thousand copies of the source text. When the English translation appeared in 2019, Malayala Manorama, a leading publishing house, stepped in to reprint the source text. Translation into English did something unique; it made it impossible for the source language community to feign ignorance anymore; ensured the rebirth of the source text after five and a half decades of incognito existence. What saddens me, however, is that in spite of knowing all this history of exclusion and near erasure, prejudice made a certain well-known Malayalee Dalit writer incapable of an objective assessment of the text and Chirakkarode’s contribution to Malayalam literature.
I recall an incident that occurred a couple of years ago. I was asked to conduct a translation workshop in a local college. The texts selected for the two-day program included a poem by a well-known Malayalam Dalit writer. The powerful imagery prompted me to check if it had been translated. It had. However, a crucial line had been carelessly translated, thereby destroying not just a powerful image but the very structural and thematic cohesion of the poem. The poet is unaware of the error that has crept into the translation. More importantly, anyone who reads just the translation will dismiss the poem as trivial. Uncompromising integrity to the source text, therefore, needs to be the cornerstone of the translation process, particularly in the case of writers from marginalised communities, who are either deceased or lack the necessary competence to identify errors that can occur during the process of translation.
Catherine Thankamma’s latest book is A Kind of Meat and Other Stories."
https://scroll.in/article/1088914/translators-notebook-uncompromising-integrity-is-essential-when-translating-texts-from-the-margins
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
As trees across campus shed the last of their autumn leaves, a new species of tree blossomed in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Its trunk and branches were papier-mâché, and its colorful leaves displayed various versions of a single poem. Students created the tree as a part of Introduction to the Art of Translation, a class about the theory of translation taught by Marella Feltrin-Morris, professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
"The translation tree, created by the students in Introduction to the Art of Translation, has been planted in the Office of International Student and Scholar Services, open for additional translations of the Italian poem, “Soldati.”
As trees across campus shed the last of their autumn leaves, a new species of tree blossomed in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Its trunk and branches were papier-mâché, and its colorful leaves displayed various versions of a single poem. Students created the tree as a part of Introduction to the Art of Translation, a class about the theory of translation taught by Marella Feltrin-Morris, professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
The tree is an artistic representation of the Italian poem “Soldati,” or “Soldiers,” written by nobel-prize winning poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. The tree trunk contains the original poem, with students’ translations written on paper leaves hanging from the branches.
Though the tree initially consisted only of translations created in the class, Feltrin-Morris and her students hope to encourage community members from across to contribute to the project. On Nov. 14, students from the class set up a table in Textor Hall to promote the tree, inviting people passing by to marvel at its beauty and aid its growth. On Dec. 3, the tree was relocated to the Office of International Student and Scholar Services, where international students will be able to add their own translations.
For years, Feltrin-Morris dreamed of creating the tree, but said she felt daunted by her lack of artistic skill. This year, thanks to the enthusiasm of her students, she is finally bringing her vision to life. She enlisted Senior Lio Grogan to assemble the model using twigs from real trees and old newspapers. Though Grogan said they never imagined being this involved in the process, they are pleased with their role in the project.
“Having a visual representation of multiculturalism and multilingualism is very rewarding,” Grogan said. “It’s always fun to see how people interpret things through art [and] language.”
The project aims to increase the visibility of translation, a field that Feltrin-Morris said is often taken for granted.
“The translator is not simply conveying information,” Feltrin-Morris said. “They’re also helping understand a different culture.”
Communicating the nuances of “Soldati” is particularly challenging. The four line, eight word poem is famous across Italy for its brevity and poignant message. Ungaretti wrote the piece in 1918 while fighting in World War I. The poem compares soldiers to autumn leaves, hanging to life precariously, waiting to drop one by one. The subject matter gave the Translation Tree seasonal relevance — its construction coincided with the height of Fall and Veterans Day. And though the constant imminence of death felt in wartime is a uniquely traumatic experience, the impermanence of mortality is universally relatable.
“I think that the reason why the poem has survived for so long is that it speaks to a sense that we all share at one time or the other,” Feltrin-Morris said. “Not that we think that we’re dying from one moment to the next, but that we feel this sense of insecurity. This certainly speaks to the political situation, the world situation, but even when we think of our own mental health. How do we give voice to that sense of insecurity?”
Feltrin-Morris said she also sees autumn leaves as a metaphor for translation itself. The layout of the tree represents the ephemerality of the medium.
“No translation is ever going to be final,” Feltrin-Morris said. “No translation is ever going to be the one. There’s always going to be something else. We appreciate a text, not just through one translation, but through many translations.”
The leaves on the tree can be seen with each student’s translations of the poem, highlighting the interpretive nature of translation. (Kai Lincke)
The imperfection and impermanence of the field is what makes the class both frustrating and fascinating. By understanding translation as an art form, students learn to see it as a circle of life, rather than a linear process.
One fundamental of the class is the understanding that so much of language can never truly be translated. The course devotes an entire project to “untranslatable words” — words that are so specific in their meaning and cultural context they cannot easily be transferred from one language to another. Students are often asked to translate documents charged with specific emotional significance; Grogan’s current assignment is to translate a death certificate.
Junior Chloé Pénot, a student in the class, said she appreciates the nuances of the discipline.
“In this class, you realize that there is no perfect translation,” Pénot said. “Nothing can be perfect because between languages, there’s no means of communicating exactly phrases, nuances, pictures, all of that.”
Each student enriches the class with their unique language knowledge. Students in the class speak Cantonese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili. Over the years, Feltrin-Morris estimates that the class has included 25 different languages.
This year, roughly half the class speaks Spanish, making it the most common language for translations on the tree. Of all the Spanish translations of “Soldati,” no two were exactly alike, varying based on dialect or interpretation of the poem.
Sophomore Xavier Newby, a Spanish major and one of the nine Spanish-speaking students in the class, said he was surprised and inspired by the diversity of Spanish translations.
“A lot of the time with poetry, especially if you don’t have the author of the poem in front of you, it’s up to your interpretation of what that poem means to you personally,” Newby said. “Capturing all of the different interpretations in a language other than the original when you aren’t the author yourself is really difficult.”
Newby said that a translator must decide which aspects of the poem must be prioritized and which must be sacrificed. Should they preserve the rhyme scheme, or emphasize strong word choice? Should they clarify the message, or maintain syllable count?
Each translation hanging from the tree alters the poem in a different way. Some students changed the order of the words for clarity. Others changed the placement of line breaks, altering the structure of the piece.
Though Grogan said they often feel daunted by the expansive task of translation, they said they have learned to see the beauty of its imperfection.
“When you’re translating poetry, you might as well become a poet yourself,” Grogan said. “Because you are essentially rewriting the poem … It’s very much an artistic medium.”"
By Meital Fried, Contributing Writer
December 5, 2025
https://theithacan.org/65264/life-culture/art-of-translation-class-utilizes-poetry-to-spread-its-roots/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
""Les Bouquiottes d'lai Castafiore" : un album de Tintin en patois bourguignon de l'Auxois voit le jour
Fanny Gelb
8 décembre 2025
"Les Bouquiottes d'lai Castafiore", comprenez "Les Bijoux de la Castafiore". Pour la première fois, un album de Tintin en bourguignon de l'Auxois voit le jour. Nicolas Poussy est originaire de Mont-Saint-Jean (Côte-d'Or). Pour ce fan de Tintin, il était naturel de lier ses racines à sa passion.
Est-ce que "Les Bouquiottes d'lai Castafiore", ça vous parle ? C'est la traduction de l'album de Tintin "Les Bijoux de la Castafiore" en bourguignon de l'Auxois ! Le vint-et-unième album des Aventures de Tintin, histoire mythique du dessinateur belge Hergé, est traduit dans ce patois de Côte-d'Or. Une initiative de Nicolas Poussy, un tintinophile - un fan de Tintin - originaire de Mont-Saint-Jean. Il a entendu ses grands-parents parler l'Auxois durant toute sa jeunesse. Alors cet album c'est pour continuer à faire vivre cette langue.
Dans la commune de Mont-Saint-Jean, à une dizaine de kilomètres de Pouilly-en-Auxois, la charmante maison en pierre de Nicolas Poussy est en plein travaux...
Dans la maison de Nicolas Poussy, il est difficile de faire un pas sans tomber sur un bibelot à l'effigie d'un personnage de l'univers de Tintin. © Radio France - FG
L'album des "Bouquiottes", comme on peut le simplifier, tenait à cœur à Nicolas Poussy. Le but : faire vivre le patois, aujourd'hui presque plus parlé, grâce à sa passion de Tintin. "C'est Tintin qui amène le patois à la maison. Quand je vois sur des marchés des enfants qui ont cinq ans et qui reconnaissent les titres mais qui disent qu'ils ne comprennent rien. Ils se demandent si c'est de l'anglais, alors que, non, c'est du patois, ça remet une couche de transmission d'un patrimoine", s'enthousiasme encore Nicolas Poussy.
Nicolas Poussy a commencé la traduction tout seul de son côté, il y a cinq ans. "Il y avait certains termes que j'avais entendu dans ma jeunesse. C'était assez intuitif. Après, il a fallu faire des recherches avec de la littérature en patois." Mais sans dictionnaire, le plus compliqué a été la conjugaison. "Si on veut de l'homogénéité, on va se faire un peu sa propre graphie. Par exemple, le mot "semblable". Ici, on dit " semblabiye". On entend le "-bieu". C'est pas évident de traduire ça, de le faire sentir dans l'album. Alors on a mis un "-y" pour l'illustrer."
...
L'album est le petit dernier des BD traduites dans 51 langues régionales. C'est souvent "Les Bijoux de la Castafiore" qui est choisi, explique Robert Sillen, directeur juridique chez Casterman. "C'est une aventure qu'on peut imaginer facilement en France. Elle ne se déroule pas à l'étranger. Donc c'est plus logique que les personnages parlent la langue régionale.""
https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/culture-loisirs/les-bouquiottes-d-lai-castafiore-un-album-de-tintin-en-patois-bourguignon-de-l-auxois-voit-le-jour-2657648
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Pacific islanders on Tokelau celebrate full translation of Bible in their language
By Chris Eyte Dec 5, 2025
The translation of the Bible into Tokelauan involved experts such as Ioane Teao, (pictured, left, with Dr. Stephen Pattemore) who dedicated over 23 years to the work, and Rev. Tui Sopoaga, who chaired the translation committee. United Bible Societies LinkedIn
Pacific islanders on the small island nation of Tokelau have received the first complete Bible translation in their local heart language of Tokelauan.
Announcing the accomplishment on social media on Dec. 3, the United Bible Societies (UBS) hailed the news as a “historic milestone for one of the world’s most remote island nations.”
About 1,500 people live across the three isolated atolls Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo of the island nation located between Hawaii and New Zealand, and in the southern part of the ocean. Most of the islanders are Christians and their dialect is historically in the oral tradition rather than a written form.
“This achievement is a testament to the power of partnership and the perseverance of God’s people. It shows what can happen when translation, community, and faith come together,” said Neels Janse van Rensburg, Chief Executive Officer of Bible Society New Zealand (BSNZ).
“What makes this moment especially meaningful is the journey behind it,” explained the UBS.
“For a language that has been largely oral, this translation required deep collaboration with the community, careful linguistic work, and 26 years of patient partnership. We are grateful to everyone in Tokelau, the Bible Society New Zealand (BSNZ), and the wider global Bible translation community who contributed to this milestone.”
A launch of the complete Bible translation took place on the Fakaofo Atoll on Oct. 27. It coincided with Tokelau Language Week in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The BSNZ team visiting Tokelau for the launch were honored at a parliamentary sitting with an official “thank you” alongside a cultural evening of song and dance presented by the people from the three tropical coral atolls.
A “Toluma” traditional gift given to the BSNZ team comprised a wooden container used by the Tokelauans when canoe fishing at sea. It traditionally holds valuables and the caught fish, and is cleverly designed to float towards land should the canoe capsize.
Tokelau community leader and former Ulu-o-Tokelau (Tokelaun head of government), Kelihiano Kalolo, described the new Bible translation as “a very big event,” which also served to remind people of the importance in both preserving and strengthening the language.
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“It will be good for the development of the spiritual life of people that will lead to harmonious living in the villages,” he said.
The work started as a structured project in 1996 with the launch of a translators’ workshop, following a “dream that had been for decades prior,” according to the UBS. The mission worked with BSNZ to make it a reality.
“Over the following decades, teams of translators, linguists, and advisors worked diligently to bring scripture to life in Tokelau’s own words,” added the UBS release.
“The task was monumental—not least because Tokelauan had long been an oral language, with early translators first needing to develop consistent written forms and grammar before translation could begin.”
The translation team included Ioane Teao who dedicated 23 years to the work and Rev. Tui Sopoaga, who chaired the translation committee.
They worked with Stephen Pattemore, BSNZ’s now-retired translation director, and eventually performed the final verse check in 2019.
Clare Knowles, Abi Das, and Daniel Harrison guided the final stages of typesetting, design, and publication, ensuring the Bible would be ready in time for the long-awaited celebration, according to the UBS.
Rensburg paid tribute to colleagues from UBS for their hard-working efforts in the project.
“UBS provided earlier translation advisory and consultancy services in the pioneering years of the project, technical tools, such as Paratext, and strategic guidance that were essential to this project’s success,” said van Rensburg.
The history of the translation originated with the idea of a Tokelauan Bible in the late 1960s when a number of Tokelauans migrated to New Zealand. Samoan Bibles served earlier generations but the new Tokelauans arriving in the country were not fluent in Samoan. They worshiped in their own language in the 1980s but there remained a prevailing need for Bibles that would make the Word of God accessible in their heart language.
“The need for Scripture in their native language became urgent,” stated the UBS.
Meetings about the issue took place in 1991 between the Pacific Islanders Presbyterian Church in Grey Lynn and Porirua, both suburbs in New Zealand. Consultations were also facilitated across Auckland, Hutt Valley, Rotorua, and Taupo.
A delegation subsequently visited Tokelau in 1994 to obtain approval for the translation project. The local government and church groups gave support and the project officially began in June 1996 under the Tokelauan Society for the translation of the Bible, in partnership with BSNZ and UBS.
“The Bible’s arrival represents a linguistic and cultural rejuvenation,” stated the UBS.
“For generations, Tokelauans have relied on the Samoan Bible for Old Testament readings and the portions available to them in Tokelauan. In 1999, the Gospel of Mark was published, and four years later, the Four Gospels were released. In 2009, the New Testament was launched with a celebration at Pahina Church.
“For the first time now in 2025, God’s Word in full can be read, heard, and cherished in Tokelauan.”"
https://www.christiandaily.com/news/pacific-islanders-on-tokelau-celebrate-full-translation-of-bible-in-their-language
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"While classic folk horror relies on a basic recipe—an isolated setting, a landscape that feels hostile, or at best indifferent but uncomfortably alert, ossified rituals against an unspoken, watchful threat, beauty that invokes dread, paganism and not-fun festivals, insular communities a little too keen on conformity—in translation, we can taste the terrors particular to other cultures and other landscapes.
Here’s a reading list of translated fiction that will make you quiver, shiver, and think twice about crossing invisible lines.
Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream (trans. Megan McDowell)
South America has given us much contemporary body, ecology and folk horror, and I’m still not over Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (trans. Megan McDowell). A little boy sits by a dying woman’s bedside, interrogating her about how she got there, and pushing her to remember “the worms,” a hidden danger. Years before, he almost died after drinking poisoned river water, then an Argentine folk ritual saved his life—but maybe not his soul.
The deep horror here is environmental, and this is a perfect example of slow, atmospheric mood-setting that lulls you into a false sense of security. A whole lot of not very much happens—until you suddenly find yourself creeped out of your skin...
Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Alejandro Magallanes, The Book of Denial (trans. Lawrence Schimel)
Not folk horror in the strictest sense but one that gets right under your skin and means to claw its way out is a stunning graphic novel, or perhaps more aptly, an illustrated performance: The Book of Denial by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda & Alejandro Magallanes (trans. Lawrence Schimel) uses the Mexican Dia de los Muertos as a jumping-off point for—in its own words—”the worst story in the world.”
A little boy discovers how inexplicably cruel the real world can be—has been—to children, when he pages through the book his father is writing and begins to comprehend that the real monsters—people—are with us every day. “How can you see letters without wanting to read them?”—curiosity as one of the staple drivers of horror plots.
Zuzana Ríhová, Playing Wolf (trans. Alex Zucker)
Over to Europe and Playing Wolf by Zuzana Ríhová (trans. Alex Zucker), a vivisection of a yuppie couple who move to a remote Czech village as a cure for their troubled marriage, to find that the villagers are not exactly wholesome and also seriously disinclined to welcoming the newcomers.
Some disturbing local rituals and sinister noises outside their cottage later, the couple’s young son vanishes, in this sly, sharp tale with a nod to fairy tales about hunters and hunted.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (trans. Ebba Segerberg)
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (trans. Ebba Segerberg) concerns a bullied Swedish boy befriended by another lonely soul—a vampire living as a young girl. Lindqvist confidently relocates the dread and isolation of a rural hamlet to a comfortless brutalist housing estate, and his supernatural creature—in the wrong time and place—is as tragic as it is chilling.
Halldor Laxness, Under the Glacier (trans. Magnus Magnusson)
A young naif is sent to a remote Icelandic locale to investigate the rumors of a priest gone rogue in Nobel prize-winner Halldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier (trans. Magnus Magnusson). Our narrator arrives at the foot of Snaeffels volcano, prosaically, by bus—but, in the end, hightails it back “hoping that I would find the main road again.”
The local version of Christianity is doctrinally suspect, the community leader engages him in cryptic, circular conversation, and the femme fatale is a woman straight out of the sagas—so far so Wicker Man—but Laxness’s jeu d’esprit novella is both a spoof and deeply serious, satiric and philosophical, not horror-ful but very charming in a quietly absurd, rather Scandinavian way..."
https://lithub.com/chilling-lit-six-novels-in-translation-that-blend-folktales-and-horror/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Le Goethe-Institut Tunis, en partenariat avec la maison d’édition Pop Libris Editions et la librairie Al Kitab, organise une rencontre entre littérature et musique autour de la traduction tunisienne du roman “Der Steppenwolf-Le Loup des steppes- du romancier, poète, peintre et essayiste allemand Hermann Hesse, devenue “El Dhib”, une œuvre culte réinventée dans une langue vivante, rugueuse et intime.
La rencontre, qui aura lieu le 14 décembre 2024 à la librairie Al Kitab-Mutuelleville, se déroulera en présence du traducteur et écrivain Dhia Bousselmi, ainsi que de l’éditeur de Pop Libris, Sami Mokadam, qui, dans un débat littéraire, évoqueront les défis, les choix et les audaces de cette traduction singulière: comment transposer la folie, la solitude, le jazz et la philosophie dans les mots de la rue tunisienne ?
La soirée sera ponctuée d’un concert littéraire avec le comédien Mohamed Grayaa, qui prêtera sa voix au loup, accompagné à la contrebasse par Wassim Berrhouma, donnant à voir une performance qui fait vibrer les mots."
https://www.webmanagercenter.com/2025/12/06/557243/hermann-hesse-en-tunisien-debat-autour-de-la-traduction-singuliere-del-dhib-der-steppenwolf-par-pop-libris-et-al-kitab/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The greatest difficulty for international students isn’t the language barrier, academic writing or even demanding classes, but a full-time ambassadorship they never signed up for...
Duke Vo did not expect the constant need to explain his culture, the history of his country, and to deal with people’s misconceptions about them. This constant ambassadorship, he says, causes more stress than learning a new language.
“I wish my country were known more for all the other things, like beautiful nature, culture and great food,” Vo adds.
Vo sees himself as an ambassador for his country, a responsibility he takes seriously.
“I was taught since I was young by my teachers that if you go to other countries as tourists or students, you are representing the country,” Vo explains.
This advice weighs heavily on Vo, “It is a big responsibility, especially if you do something bad and then people associate your country for what you just did,” Vo said
Common concern
His concerns are common at MRU’s Global Student Lounge.
The space, a vibrant, peer-driven university service staffed by students, provides a dedicated space for all students to meet, study, and engage in social and cultural activities...
According to the MRU Annual Report, in the 2024-2025 academic year, MRU welcomed 81 international exchange students. Since Spring 2024, the lounge has supported more than 350 students through onboarding and community-building initiatives.
These programs were delivered by two student volunteers and 28 trained volunteers.
Christine Jensen, an international education intern, acknowledged how her work demanded a shift in perspective.
“I ask questions rather than make assumptions because so often we are wrong,” she said.
“The best way that I can think of is to just do a lot of listening – asking questions that assume nothing crucial, such as ‘What do you do during Christmas back home?’ because that question itself forces the asker to define home,” she added.
Listening and resilience
Ultimately, the role of an ally demands intentional self-correction, placing the burden of cultural education on yourself rather than the student.
“It’s about listening and being willing to leave your pride behind, being okay with being wrong,” Jensen adds.
Despite these significant struggles, students find resilience in the community. Vo advises incoming students to take advantage of the support systems available to them...
Overall, the core struggle for international students is not finding their voice, but finding a listener. The actual resolution lies with the host community.
As Jensen has learned, the best way to support a stranger is not to ask them to explain their history, but to show that you are willing to learn and listen."
https://calgaryjournal.ca/2025/12/07/the-language-barrier-isnt-the-hardest-part-try-explaining-your-culture-to-a-stranger/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"AI Conference Unveils Uganda’s First Multilingual Language Model to Support African Languages
7 December 2025
The 2025 AI for African Languages Conference... focused heavily on East Africa’s diverse linguistic landscape and the work required to bridge the “low-resource” gap that limits access to AI tools for many African languages.
A major highlight was the official launch of Sunflower, Uganda’s first multilingual large language model, developed by Sunbird AI. The model was unveiled by Dr. Aminah Zawedde, permanent secretary of the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, and John Quinn, research director at Sunbird AI.
Sunflower can understand and communicate in more than 30 Ugandan languages, enabling translation, summarization, and question answering in local contexts. It was trained using books, radio archives, and community data to reflect authentic Ugandan speech patterns. The model outperforms global AI systems in 24 of 31 tested languages.
Dr. Zawedde described the launch as “not just a technological achievement but a cultural one,” saying it demonstrates the need to ensure that African languages are not excluded from modern digital platforms. She urged students and innovators to develop tools that eliminate language barriers and make technology more inclusive for Ugandans.
During a panel discussion, Dr. Joyce Nabende, director of the Makerere Centre for Artificial Intelligence, highlighted the societal importance of language technologies. She said natural language tools could support citizens in real-world situations, such as improving access to justice for those who cannot communicate in English within legal systems...
The conference invited submissions and discussions across a wide set of natural language processing themes, including:
Data collection and annotation for low-resource African languages
Machine translation and cross-lingual learning
African speech technologies
Ethical considerations and bias in AI systems
NLP applications for social good in education, healthcare, agriculture, and cultural preservation
Large language models for multilingual understanding
Uganda has more than 40 living languages and a linguistic diversity score of 0.928. That diversity represents both cultural strength and technological complexity. Conference discussions and the Sunflower launch show how African-led innovation can help modern AI systems become more representative and accessible.
The AI for African Languages Conference reaffirmed a shared vision: building a digital future where technology understands every African voice.
The initiative is a partnership between the Makerere University Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, and is supported by the International Development Research Centre and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office."
https://iafrica.com/ai-conference-unveils-ugandas-first-multilingual-language-model-to-support-african-languages/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding will hold an international symposium titled "Translation and Artificial Intelligence" Tuesday morning, featuring experts and specialists from Qatar and several Arab countries to discuss the challenges posed by artificial intelligence in the field of translation.
The symposium forms part of the cultural program accompanying the announcement and honoring of the winners of the eleventh edition of the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding, scheduled for the same evening.
The event will feature three main presentations.
The first, titled "Smart Tools and Open-Source Lexical Resources for Translation and Arabization", will be delivered by Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Director of the Ibn Sina Laboratory for Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence at both Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Birzeit University in Palestine.
The second presentation, titled "Translation and Artificial Intelligence: Knowledge and Academic Gaps in the Arab Context", will be given by Dr. Ghassan Mourad, researcher in language computation, artificial intelligence, and digital media at the Lebanese University.
The third presentation, "Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Translation: Identity of Meaning or Struggle of Wills", will be delivered by Tunisian translator and researcher Abdelhaq Azmouri, Director-General of Ab'ad Center for Futures Studies in Washington.
His talk will address AI's capacity to process philosophically open-ended texts and highlight the epistemological and cultural limitations of machine translation compared with human translation.
As part of the cultural program accompanying the award ceremony, two closed workshops will also be held on "Recommendations to Support Translation between Arabic and Each of German and Albanian." The workshops will feature leading translators and experts working between Arabic and both Albanian and German, and will discuss the challenges facing translation among these languages while exploring practical ways to enhance exchange and support the growth of translation in these linguistic spheres.
The eleventh edition marks a milestone in the award's continuous evolution as it enters its second decade, expanding its cultural impact and updating its tools and areas of work to keep pace with global transformations in the field of translation.
For the first time, the award has adopted three of the world's most widely spoken languages - English, German, and Turkish - alongside two lesser-used languages, Albanian and Thai.
This step reflects the award's commitment to bridging influential global languages with local languages that require greater support to strengthen their presence in translation to and from Arabic.
This year's edition has seen a notable increase in the number of nominations across all approved languages, including Turkish, which was added to the honored languages only three years ago - an indication of the award's growing influence and rising credibility in cultural and academic circles.
The award's total value amounts to two million US dollars, distributed across two categories: translation of individual books in the two main languages, and lifetime achievement awards in both the main and secondary languages."
https://m.thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/06/12/2025/international-symposium-on-translation-and-artificial-intelligence-next-tuesday-in-doha
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Why do we struggle to translate words when we don’t experience the concept?
If you are fluent in any language other than English, you have probably noticed that some things are impossible to translate exactly. A Japanese designer marvelling at an object’s shibui (a sort of simple yet timelessly elegant beauty) may feel stymied by English’s lack of a precisely equivalent term. Danish hygge refers to such a unique flavour of coziness that entire books seem to have been needed to explain it.
Portuguese speakers may struggle to convey their saudade, a mixture of yearning, wistfulness and melancholy. Speakers of Welsh will have an even harder time translating their hiraeth, which can carry a further sense of longing after one’s specifically Celtic culture and traditions.
Imprisoned by language
The words of different languages can divide and package their speakers’ thoughts and experiences differently, and provide support for the theory of “linguistic relativity”.
Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this theory derives in part from the American linguist Edward Sapir’s 1929 claim that languages function to “index” their speakers’ “network of cultural patterns”: If Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won’t. Yet Sapir also went a step further, claiming language users “do not live in the objective world alone […] but are very much at the mercy” of their languages.
This stronger theory of “linguistic determinism” implies English speakers may be imprisoned by our language. In this, we actually cannot experience hygge—or at least, not in the same way that a Danish person might. The missing word implies a missing concept: An empty gap in our world of experience.
Competing theories
Few theories have proven controversial. Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf famously claimed in 1940 that the Hopi language’s lack of verb tenses (past, present, future) indicated its speakers have a different “psychic experience” of time and the universe than Western physicists. This was countered by a later study devoting nearly 400 pages to the language of time in Hopi, which included concepts such as “today”, “January” and— yes— discussions of actions happening in the present, past and future.
I even heard of “50 Inuit words for snow?” Whorf again. Although the number he actually claimed was closer to seven, this was later said to be both too many and too few. (It depends on how you define a “word”.)
More recently, the anthropological linguist Dan Everett claimed the Amazonian Pirahã language lacks “recursion”, or the capacity to put one sentence inside another (“{I trust {you’ll come {to realise that {my theory is better.}}}}”). If true, this would suggest that Pirahã differs in the exact property that Noam Chomsky has argued to be the principal defining property of any human language.
Once again, Everett’s claims have been argued both to go too far and not far enough. The cycle would appear to be endless, such that two excellent recent books on the topic have adopted almost diametrically opposite perspectives—even down to the opposite wording of their titles!
Language as a comfortable house
There is truth in both perspectives. At least some aspects of human languages must be identical or nearly so, since they are all used by members of the same human species, with the same sorts of bodies, brains and patterns of communication. Yet recent increases in understanding of the world’s Indigenous languages have taught us two important additional lessons. First, there is far more diversity among the world’s languages than previously believed. Second, differences are often related to the patterns of culture and environment in which languages are traditionally spoken.
For example, in many Himalayan languages, an expression like “that house” comes in three flavours: “that-house-upward”, “that-house-downward” and “that-house-on-the-same-level”—a reflection of the mountainous area these speakers live in. When their speakers migrate to lower-elevation regions, the system may shift from “upward/downward” to “upriver/downriver”. If there is no large enough river present then the distinction may disappear.
In Indigenous Aslian languages of peninsular Malaysia, there are large vocabularies referring to finely-distinguished natural odours. This is an index of the richly diverse foraging environment of their speakers. Studies of small, tightly-knit communities like the Milang of northeastern India have revealed how languages can require speakers to mark their information source: Whether a statement is the general knowledge of one’s social group, or is arrived at through a different type of source—such as hearsay, or deduction from evidence.
Speakers of languages with such “evidentiality” systems can learn to speak languages—like English—without them. Yet native language habits turn out to be hard to break. One recent study showed speakers of some languages with evidentiality add words like “reportedly” or “seemingly” into their statements more often than native English speakers. Human languages may not be a prison their speakers cannot escape from. They may be more like comfortable houses one finds difficult to leave. Although a word from another language can always be borrowed, its unique cultural meanings may always remain just a little bit out of reach.
-The Conversation
Mark W Post
Post is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney.
December 7, 2025
https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/12/07/impossible-translations
https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2025/12/07/impossible-translations
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Moose Cree First Nation has released the fourth edition of its community-developed dictionary.
This latest edition marks more than a decade of work to help revitalize the unique Moose Cree “L” dialect — a language now spoken fluently almost exclusively by elders.
The project, which began in 2012, has grown into a 34,000-word dictionary available both in print and online. The newest edition adds roughly 10,000 new entries, updated grammatical tables, additional sample phrases, and continues to be funded entirely by Moose Cree First Nation.
“We’re pretty proud of the fact that this initiative is fully funded by Moose Cree, with no outside funding,” said executive director Mark Butterfly. “We’re trying to re-establish our Cree language.”
Butterfly, who grew up speaking Cree on the land, said many community members lost the language over the generations as English became dominant in homes and in school.
“I can understand almost 90 per cent of Cree, but I can speak maybe 35 to 40 per cent,” he said.
Despite the decline in fluent speakers, he said interest among young people is growing. Community-led language circles often fill quickly, with residents gathering weekly on their own time to practice.
Built from scratch
Director of language and cultural programs Geraldine Govender has led the dictionary project since its inception. Speaking from Kapuskasing, where she had travelled for the northern book launch, she said the new edition reflects years of steady expansion.
“We started our dictionary project in 2012 with about 6,000 words,” Govender said. “Each edition grew from there.”
Govender was hired by Moose Cree in 2006 — even before funding existed — to begin building a language department. Over the years, she said she was unable to secure government support for core operations, leaving the community to finance salaries, editing, design, printing, and now digital development.
“That’s why Moose Cree continued to pay for the costs,” she said. “The leadership felt this was really important.”
Moose Cree First Nation has released the fourth edition of its community-developed dictionary. Supplied photo/Mark Butterfly
The Moose Cree dialect is one of six major Cree dialects and is unique across Canada for its “L” pronunciation. In Moose Cree, “L” replaces sounds such as “th,” “y,” and “n” used in other dialects. This sound change is unique to Moose Cree and doesn’t appear across all Cree-speaking communities.
With most fluent speakers now over 65, Govender said the language is endangered.
“Our elders are the experts, and there are fewer and fewer fluent speakers every year,” she said. “That’s why we need to do whatever we can to revitalize the language.”
Govender said language instruction in schools is no longer intensive enough for students to become conversational speakers.
“Some classes only get half an hour a day,” she said. “Children are learning nouns, like the word for ‘goose,’ but they’re not learning how to use it in a sentence. They’re not learning to speak.”
To counter this, her department continues to develop tools, run immersion programs, and host language-learning circles.
With the newest edition out, work now shifts to producing audio files for every entry, an effort already 9,000 words in. The digital dictionary is being updated continuously, she said.
Govender said seeing the project continue for more than a decade has been personally meaningful.
“Our language defines who we are,” she said. “If you don’t have that part, there’s a void. People feel that.”..."
Marissa Lentz-McGrath
https://www.timminstoday.com/local-news/young-people-want-to-learn-new-edition-released-of-community-developed-dictionary-11547831
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Interpreters Unlimited Wins Gold for Service Excellence in Best in Biz Awards 2025
12-04-2025 05:34 PM CET |
Interpreters Unlimited (IU), a San Diego based family owned language service provider specializing in foreign language interpretation, American Sign Language and document translation, has been awarded Gold in the Small or Medium Business Service of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards 2025, the only independent business awards program judged exclusively by prominent reporters and editors from top tier media outlets in North America.
This marks a very proud moment for the longtime leader in language access solutions, further solidifying its place among the most innovative and impactful service providers in the country. This year's awards drew entries from thousands of organizations, from rising startups to global household names, making IU's Gold recognition one of the most competitive and meaningful achievements in the program's 15 year history.
Best in Biz judges praised company growth, innovation, and community impact, noting that winners in this milestone year exemplified not just strong business performance, but a clear and measurable positive influence on clients, employees, and the communities they serve.
IU's selection as the top service provider in the Small or Medium Business Service of the Year category reflects a remarkable stretch of accomplishments spanning 2024 and 2025. The company expanded into nearly a dozen new cities and counties, secured contracts with three new state governments, added four major school districts, and earned new partnerships with federal and military agencies nationwide. IU also launched a robust Language Access Plan service line to help public agencies meet evolving equity, compliance, and accessibility requirements.
The company's hybrid Human + AI translation model, developed in partnership with Diya Health and supported by new OPI, VRI, and AI leadership, has improved speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency, helping clients deliver language access more effectively during a time of rising demand and limited budgets.
The past two years have also brought other notable recognition. IU was named one of America's Top 100 Small Businesses by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and earned a place on Slator's Language Service Provider Index Top 100 list in both 2024 and 2025. Locally, IU leaders and staff were honored by the San Diego Business Journal across several categories, including Fastest Growing Companies, CEO of the Year Finalist, and Leaders of Influence in Advertising, PR & Marketing.
Beyond business achievements, Interpreters Unlimited continues to place philanthropy at the center of its identity. The company supports a wide range of nonprofit partners, from PATH (People Assisting The Homeless), Survivors of Torture International, and Endangered Species International to Junior Achievement, Ronald McDonald House, and Alzheimer's & Dementia Resource Center. IU also contributes an extraordinary amount of complimentary language services each year, including its long standing role providing multilingual access for the NORAD Tracks Santa Program. For 2025, IU is expanding its real time interpreter access from 8-9 major languages to over 200 languages for the entire 24 hour Christmas Eve phone hotline event, making it more accessible than ever.
"We are incredibly proud to receive Gold in Best in Biz Awards 2025," said IU CEO Shamus Sayed. "This award reflects the heart of who we are, an organization built on service, responsibility, and a commitment to making communication accessible for every person we touch. Our team shows up every day with purpose, and this recognition belongs to each of them."
This 15th annual Best in Biz Awards was judged by writers and editors from top tier publications including Forbes, Inc., Associated Press, Consumer Affairs, New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and Wired. Their independent evaluation process remains one of the most respected in the awards landscape.
A full list of Best in Biz Awards 2025 Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners can be found at: www.bestinbizawards.com/2025-winners...";
https://www.openpr.com/news/4299543/interpreters-unlimited-wins-gold-for-service-excellence-in-best
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Judicial Council to Consider Ways to Increase the Availability of Court Interpreters
....
SAN FRANCISCO—The Judicial Council at its December 12 business meeting will consider a study on the future of the court interpreter workforce and how best to meet the needs of the state’s nearly 6.4 million limited-English-proficient (LEP) residents and potential court users.
The study highlights critical gaps in meeting the language needs of LEP court users. Findings reveal that while Spanish interpreter needs are generally met, significant shortages persist in other languages.
Factors affecting interpreter availability include difficulty in passing the required court interpreter examinations, a retiring workforce, geographic constraints, and competition from other industries.
The study’s findings call for action by multiple groups, including recommendations to the Legislature, as well as considerations for the council, the courts, and experienced court interpreters. The guidance includes:
Continue funding for interpreter services
Extend workforce pilot programs
Expand career pathways and education through apprenticeship and mentorship programs
Review examination standards and content
Increase use of video remote interpreting
..."
By Blaine Corren
Dec 5, 2025
https://newsroom.courts.ca.gov/news/judicial-council-consider-ways-increase-availability-court-interpreters
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"If educators want their students to hone the skills of respectful debate across cultural boundaries, these eight tips – including planning and agreeing definitions – offer a place to start
University course design and delivery
Student engagement
Internationalisation at home
Feature article
Europe
Daphne Vallas
University of Westminster
3 Dec 2025
Do you get hot under the collar when some ignorant fool fails to see things your way on topics you deem of great importance? Of course not. In academia, we pride ourselves on expressing carefully measured opinions rooted in logic and based on facts.
And yet, when I hear a colleague respond to students’ complaints about the quality of their teaching, or lack thereof, with an authoritative “Learn to teach? What for? I know everything there is to know in my discipline. The students are lucky to have me”, my measured opinion deserts me, in favour of a cutting response. A French proverb recommends that you twist your tongue seven times before speaking to avoid faux pas – a work in progress for many, including myself.
Let’s teach students to disagree well
Don’t fear conflict in the classroom: foster respectful discussion instead
Four ways to help students develop critical thinking skills
It is easy to become polarised in any debate. We want our viewpoints to be heard, validated and reinforced because they make complete sense to us. We don’t mind them being challenged because, after all, isn’t this what debate is about? But when our conversation partners show no sign of understanding what we mean, we get grumpy. The multicultural classroom is a fertile environment for debate that can polarise unexpectedly and leave educators and students unsure how to react.
Debating respectfully is a skill. It is not innate. It can be acquired and honed. And that requires help and guidance.
In the multicultural classroom, many students will not have engaged with critical thinking in their home country, school culture or family environment. Or, more accurately, they have, but not in ways we as their teachers expect or understand. Educators too can struggle to reconcile their own culture with that of the country where they teach, as well as their students’ culture, especially when the end game is to take everyone’s opinion into account.
So, what can we do? Here are eight tips to help students and educators debate in a multicultural context.
1. Agree on what culture means
Culture should be considered in its widest sense. A multicultural class does not solely comprise international students. Many home students will have multicultural backgrounds, awareness of diverse cultural perspectives and multiple languages. Sonya Nieto and Patty Bode’s definition of culture as consisting of “the values, traditions, worldview and social and political relationships created, shared and transformed by a group of people bound together by a common history, geographic location, language, social class, religion or other shared identity” would be a great starting point for a discussion with your students.
2. Test your own bias
Reflect on how you view your discipline – its relevance, appeal and accessibility for students. We all have biases, conscious or unconscious, regarding the discipline we teach. Students will have them too. These often relate to culture.
Set up an activity for the class to discuss biased commonly held views on your discipline, such as “adulthood is too late to learn a language” or “learning Latin is useless”. This helps identify potential biases, informs your teaching and enhances students’ awareness of each other’s perceptions.
3. Challenge your assumptions about behaviours
Students are not universally in agreement on how a respectful debate should play out, and neither are educators. Avoid relying on assumptions about the students’ prior experience (ie, “they know the drill, they’ve done plenty of debates at school”) or maturity (“they are old enough to behave”). For many, there is nothing wrong with shouting or calling other people idiots. Again, this includes educators.
4. Encourage students to co-create a charter
Think back to a challenging experience you had with a class debate that went pear-shaped. Make a list of what went wrong and use this as a basis to establish guidelines with the class. Set up a group activity to write a charter for respectful debate. Provide a basic charter as an exemplar to help shape the document. Explain that the class will need to discuss the rules as a group to ensure that debate remains respectful and balanced. Highlight and discuss your institution’s values and ethos as part of the charter design.
5. Plan the debate
Prepare for debate as part of your lesson planning. Carefully craft your questions and reach out to colleagues for advice and inspiration. Think about what may cause friction – anticipated problems – and how you would deal with this – anticipated solutions.
We lead by example and students can learn from the way we manage a difficult situation. They can also benefit from seeing how educators can purposefully create opportunities for them to explore multiple perspectives, and express opinions in a safe and inclusive environment through careful lesson planning.
6. Define critical thinking and echo chambers as part of your teaching
Critical thinking can have very different meanings depending on your cultural background. In some cultures, critical thinking and echo chambers are cut from the same cloth, as questioning or disagreeing with established norms is discouraged. These terms need to be defined through class discussion to clarify course expectations.
Embed activities with a dedicated focus on critical thinking skills development in your teaching, rather than rely on students taking optional critical thinking modules or their prior experience.
7. Consider the effects of multilingualism on class communication
Language and culture walk hand in hand. When communicating in an additional language, as opposed to your native one, interaction can come across as polarised. Underneath the use of English as lingua franca is multilingual thinking.
For many speakers of languages other than English, a blunt “no, that’s wrong” or “absolutely not” are the appropriate answers to express disagreement, whereas the norm in the UK might be to say, “that’s interesting but I’m not sure I agree with that”. While both messages mean the same thing, one might be considered more confrontational or aggressive and therefore less respectful. The same applies to how loudly we speak and the body language we use.
8. Promote cultural competence
Many students and educators have first-hand and daily experience of intercultural communication, whereby they navigate diverse cultural norms. There are often exercises in respectful debate throughout the day! Encourage your class, and yourself, to draw on these experiences and share strategies everyone uses to remain respectful in the face of adversity.
Celebrate cultural competence and remind your students that it is a precious gift. It helps to develop empathy, creativity, adaptability, collaboration and conflict resolution (all desirable employability skills) and opens the door to global citizenship.
Daphne Vallas is senior lecturer in academic professional development at the University of Westminster."
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/how-foster-debate-multicultural-classrooms
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Language is rooted in culture and even shapes our thoughts. Eloquency maybe a sign of recycling other's thought. So let's embrace the awkward pause, searching for our own words.
"How would you describe mac-and-cheese to the Japanese?
Posted December 3, 2025
Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Key points
Bilingualism enriches the brain, but it also brings natural hesitations and gaps in fluency.
Language shapes perception, identity, and even the thoughts we believe are our own.
Words we speak fluently may reflect inherited and borrowed ideas. Genuine thinking can result in pauses.
Let's embrace speech hesitation: it can be reflect authenticity, originality, and deep thinking.
A recent large-scale study showed that speaking more than one language can protect the brain for age-related changes. Although the study did not directly examine brain mechanisms, scientists have long theorized that managing multiple languages develop extra language centers, engages the brain’s executive system, and may even be associated with larger hippocampus volume.
I grew up in Japan, so English (what I currently use daily) is my second language. Perhaps these findings should make me a bit happy, but there are downsides to being bilingual. I have not fully mastered English, and I am now forgetting some of my Japanese. My Japanese friend tells me that my Japanese sounds a bit strange. I often now struggle to find the right words in both languages. Especially, when I try to think and speak, my speech becomes halting, full of pauses. It is a bit embarrassing, and as I became more self-conscious, I also grew more reluctant to speak my mind.
Yet after reading this study (and after pondering this issue for a long time), I’ve come to a different conclusion: it is okay not to be eloquent. It is okay not to dazzle anyone with effortless oratory.
Language and Thought
One of the founding figures of structuralism, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, argued that words and language are not as neutral or objective as we assume. Language is a system of symbols, and its meaning is culturally shaped. In English, the word sheep refers to the animal, whereas in French, the word mouton includes both the live animal and its meat. (English uses a separate word, mutton, for the meat). So when a French speaker hears the word mouton, they might imagine a savory dish; but when an English speaker hears sheep, they’re more likely to picture a soft, woolly animal. The closest translational word can evoke entirely different associations. Saussure’s point was that language is arbitrary—what a word means depends not on some inherent truth but on how that society uses and interprets it.
Building on this idea, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic relativity) proposes that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and interpret the world. For example, in English, we have distinct words for “blue” and “green.” In Korean, a single word can cover both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see the difference, but they may see blue as a shade of green. In contrast, Russian distinguishes between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and studies show that Russian speakers can more quickly differentiate between those two shades. Language, in other words, shapes perception.
The abilty fo discern color may differ based on language describing the colorsSource: hh5800/iStock
Before moving to the US, I was first exposed to American culture during my internship at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Okinawa. The American staff, far from home, welcomed me warmly and delighted in cultural exchange, especially swapping food traditions. One day, they offered me something called mac-and-cheese — they could not believe I never had it in my life, and I suddenly became the center of attention as I lifted my fork.
I was a bit skeptical of its bright orange color, but I decided to plunge in. As the creamy, cheesy soft pasta melted in my mouth, I screamed,
“This is the best food I’ve ever had in my life!”
Later, they even delighted more in showing the box, and I could not believe it came from a box, which only costed 79 cents! Needless to say, after moving to the US, I often served my daughter and her friends quick mac-and-cheese dinners (with broccoli, of course).
Later, I tried to describe mac-and-cheese to my Japanese friends but found it almost impossible. Sure, I could translate the ingredients, even describe the taste and preparation. But the idea of mac-and-cheese didn’t exist in Japanese. There was no cultural reference point for the nostalgic comfort, the bright orange color, the childhood memories that Americans attach to it. The word mac-and-cheese carries not just its technical meaning, but a shared emotional and cultural experience. Without the word, the world it represents also doesn’t fully exist.
Reaching for the "Right" Word
Beyond physical things like animals or food, language also shapes how we understand abstract concepts—like freedom, justice, kindness, and morality.
“We have the right to be free.” “War is bad.” “We need to respect the law and the constitution.”
When these phrases come out of our mouth smoothly with conviction, we think we’re expressing our own values. But are we?
We like to imagine that our thoughts come from a stable, inner self—that we use language as a tool to express our minds. But is that sequence, correct?
What if language doesn’t just express thought, but actually creates it?
When we speak fluently and confidently, we assume we are articulating deeply held beliefs. But often, we’re repeating words and phrases we learned from others, from TV, in books, in school and at home. We don’t invent our own language; we inherit it. And in borrowing words, we may also be borrowing the thoughts, perspectives, assumptions and values embedded in them.
Cognition Essential Reads
How to Dress for Who You Want to Become
Our New Cognitive Manifesto
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “what we find words for is already dead in our hearts.” In other words, by the time we articulate something, it has already passed through filters—of memory, of interpretation, of culture. He believed that the spoken word was already one step removed from the living experience it tried to capture. The moment we give something a name, we freeze it in place, stripping it of its fluidity. In that sense, a spoken word is already dead.
Ironically, the moments when I struggle for words—when I pause, repeat myself, stammer and try to reach for the right words maybe the time when I am most authentic. The hesitation is not a failure of language; it maybe evidence of that I’m actually thinking.
I used to see my speech hesitation as an embarrassment. Now I accept it as who I am. Perhaps it is a sign of honesty: when the words come slowly, at least they are truly my own. And maybe, in turn, that is also helping the brain. So here is to embracing the hesitation, the stumble, and grasping to find our words."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/breaking-good/202512/when-you-dont-have-the-words-yet
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Appel à communications : " Traduction littéraire et liberté d'expression : peut-on tout traduire ?"
Pour les traductologues comme pour les traducteurs et traductrices, le mot « liberté » est familier : il forme depuis longtemps un couple dialectique avec « fidélité », désignant la latitude que s’accorde la personne qui traduit pour répondre aux attentes du public cible. Mais cette « liberté » n’embrasse pas toutes les libertés : s’ajuster à un lectorat signifie aussi composer avec ses contraintes. Elle peut même conduire à se plier aux limites de la liberté d’expression. C’est ce paradoxe que ce colloque voudrait explorer en examinant la manière dont la traduction se heurte à des mécanismes de censure et d’autocensure. La pratique se déploie en effet dans des rapports de force et des configurations socio-politiques qui déterminent ce qui peut être dit, publié et circuler d’une langue à l’autre. Le traducteur se trouve au carrefour de multiples formes de régulation : censure étatique, autocensure, pressions idéologiques et économiques qui façonnent le répertoire des textes traduits et les stratégies de traduction elles-mêmes. Les régimes politiques peuvent instrumentaliser ou réprimer la traduction, faisant du traducteur ou de la traductrice tantôt un agent de contrôle, tantôt un passeur clandestin de textes dissidents. La traduction peut-elle ainsi devenir un moyen de faire circuler les idées et les mots que l’on ne peut écrire dans les publications originales ? Dans le prolongement de la réflexion éthique sur la responsabilité du traducteur à l’égard de la « lettre » et du « vouloir-dire » du texte à traduire, il apparaît nécessaire d’interroger les dimensions éthiques et politiques de la liberté d'expression en traduction : les traducteurs sont-ils responsables des mots qu’ils traduisent, des discours qu’ils font circuler dans une nouvelle langue-culture ? Quelle autonomie peuvent-ils revendiquer face aux diverses formes de prescription ? Comment résistent-ils, s’accommodent-ils ou participent-ils aux mécanismes de censure ?
Ce colloque mené dans le cadre de la Chaire COLIBEX sur les enjeux contemporains de la liberté d’expression se propose d’examiner les tensions entre traduction et liberté d'expression dans une perspective à la fois théorique et pratique. Cette rencontre accueillera aussi bien des contributions de traductologues, que des témoignages de traducteurs et traductrices confrontées à ces enjeux dans leur pratique professionnelle. Qu’il s’agisse de la traduction de textes politiquement sensibles, de la négociation avec les instances éditoriales, des stratégies de contournement de la censure, ou des dilemmes éthiques posés par la traduction de discours de haine ou de propagande, cette rencontre vise à croiser les regards théoriques et les expériences de terrain pour mieux comprendre comment la traduction littéraire s’articule aux questions de liberté d’expression, de résistance et de responsabilité dans l’espace public transnational.
Axes thématiques
Axe 1 : Pratiques traductives et témoignages
Cet axe accueille des contributions de praticiens et praticiennes relatant leur expérience concrète face aux questions de liberté d’expression : traduction de textes dissidents, négociations avec les éditeurs et éditrices, stratégies de traduction face à des passages sensibles, démarches d’intervention ou d'effacement. Les témoignages réflexifs sur la pratique traductive en contexte contraint sont particulièrement bienvenus.
Axe 2 : Censure, autocensure et circulation transnationale des textes
Cet axe interroge les mécanismes explicites et implicites qui contraignent ou interdisent la traduction de certains textes : censure étatique, pressions éditoriales, autocensure des traducteurs et traductrices, non-traduction stratégique. Les contributions pourront porter sur des études de cas contemporains, sur les politiques de traduction sous les régimes autoritaires ou illibéraux, ou sur les modalités de résistance et de contournement développées par les traducteurs et éditeurs.
Axe 3 : Éthique de la traduction et responsabilité du traducteur et de la traductrice
Comment le traducteur négocie-t-il sa liberté d’expression face aux textes qu’il traduit ? Cet axe explore les dilemmes éthiques posés par la traduction de contenus controversés, violents ou idéologiquement marqués. Il interroge également la notion de fidélité et d’hospitalité langagière dans un contexte où traduire peut donner voix à des discours problématiques ou au contraire faire entendre des voix censurées.
Modalités de soumission
Les propositions de communication en français (environ 3000 à 5000 signes, espaces compris) devront comporter :
Un titre provisoire
Un résumé
Une biobibliographie de l’auteur ou de l’autrice
Les propositions sont à envoyer avant le 1er février 2026 à l’adresse suivante : traductionliberte@gmail.com
Calendrier
01 février 2026 : Date limite d’envoi des propositions
28 février 2026 : Notification d'acceptation
31 mars 2026 : Programme définitif
18-19 juin 2025 : Colloque...
Responsable :
La chaire COLIBEX
Url de référence :
https://libexpress.hypotheses.org/appels
Adresse :
Sorbonne Université"
https://www.fabula.org/actualites/131363/traduction-litteraire-et-liberte-d-expression-peut-on-tout-traduire.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Can your AI adapt to multiple cultures? If not, it might underperform—or worse.
In the race to deploy large language models and generative AI across global markets, many companies assume that “English model → translate it” is sufficient. But if you’re an American executive preparing for expansion into Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or Africa, that assumption could be your biggest blind spot. In those regions, language isn’t just a packaging detail: it’s culture, norms, values, and business logic all wrapped into one. If your AI doesn’t code-switch, it won’t just underperform; it may misinterpret, misalign, or mis-serve your new market..."
BY Enrique Dans
https://www.fastcompany.com/91448973/can-your-ai-adapt-multiple-cultures
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
There are fewer than 100 speakers of the Arapaho language today — all of whom are above the age of 70. Researchers hope to preserve their voices.
"My early work focused on documenting the Arapaho language. Past linguists working with Native languages typically focused on traditional storytelling, as well as audio-recorded data.
But my interest in anthropology led me to focus on conversation and everyday interaction. I also recorded on video to capture social settings, gestures, and sign language. And to better understand the role of the language in daily use, I worked to become a good speaker myself.
I have compiled my documentation into a database that contains over 100,000 sentences of natural Arapaho speech. All of this has been transcribed, translated into English, and accompanied by detailed linguistic analysis.
The database is further supported by an online learning site and an online dictionary of around 25,000 entries. They are among the largest such resources for an Indigenous language, though resources do exist for other languages, such as Yurok.
From documentation to curriculum
In response to the Arapaho people’s goal of language revitalization, my own work has shifted from documentation to assisting teachers, students and curriculum developers. The database turns out to have great value in this area.
Adult learners can watch the videos along with the Arapaho transcriptions, English translations, or both, and review the detailed grammatical analysis.
Screenshot of Arapaho Text Database: single image from a video-taped conversation, with accompanying linguistic labeling.
However, it is quite difficult for young learners to immediately benefit from listening to natural discourse. That’s why carefully graded curricula are crucial. Unlike for commonly taught languages such as French or Spanish, materials for most Native American languages are just being developed.
Arapaho can be challenging to learn because its structure is quite different from English. Many small chunks of meaning are combined to produce long, complex words.
For example, an English speaker can start with “happy” and produce “un-happi-ness.” Arapaho speakers typically add three, four or even five prefixes, and multiple suffixes, as well. A speaker can say the word “niibeetwonwoteekoohunoo” — which has six separate meaningful chunks. This translates to English, “I want to go and drive to town.”
There is little value in memorizing such complex words, just as English learners don’t memorize entire sentences. Instead, Arapaho learners need to understand the separate parts and how they combine.
Previous efforts have succeeded in teaching children to speak basic Arapaho. The challenge now is to keep improving their Arapaho language abilities, using a graded curriculum that continues through all school levels.
The database can identify and label the individual chunks of words and assign meanings to each chunk. A beginner’s dictionary of 1,300 entries has been created by calculating the overall frequency of base words in the 100,000 sentences, and then selecting only the most common ones.
The list has been broken down further to produce target vocabulary for each grade level. Smaller chunks of prefixes and suffixes are also measured, and sequential grammar-learning goals can be produced based on frequency and complexity.
A draft Arapaho learning sequence has been created, with 44 stages. It is now possible for the first time to produce a full, progressive language curriculum for Arapaho. The next step is to develop more curricular materials and train teachers to use them.
The sequence of 44 stages is now being introduced at Wyoming Indian Elementary School, the first school on the Wind River Reservation to pioneer dual-language classrooms.
Limitations of technology
Technology is not a magic bullet, however. Only Native people can save their languages, by choosing to learn and speak them.
Because artificial intelligence works using large language models, it needs billions of words of discourse to be trained effectively in a language.
No Indigenous language has nearly that amount of data, so the capacity of AI to address Native language endangerment is limited. Moreover, many Indigenous communities are wary of AI due to concerns over data sovereignty and cultural property rights."
The author, Andrew Cowell: ... success in helping revitalize Native languages depends on researchers building long-term relationships with Native peoples and, ideally, speaking Native languages. Only then can new technologies be applied most productively.
Article originally published on The Conversation."
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/online-database-for-indigenous-languages
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
" Translation Prize Shortlist Highlights the Year’s Best Japanese Books Published in English
A prizewinning novel from the perspective of a disabled woman, a family story with a 1970s setting, a classic mystery, and a memoir of life with a pet cat have earned their translators nominations for the 2025 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize.
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Four Books and Translators Nominated
The shortlist for the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize was announced on December 1, including both fiction and nonfiction translated from Japanese into English. This year, the prize—run by the foundation in association with the Society of Authors—considers books published in Britain between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025. The results are due to be announced in February 2026; the translator of the winning title will receive £3,000 and the runner-up £1,000.
In the third year of the award, all four of the nominated translators appear for the first time on the shortlist. Hunchback is translated by Polly Barton from Ichikawa Saou’s 2023 novel about the sexual desires of a severely disabled woman. Ichikawa’s work won the Akutagawa Prize, and the translation was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Mina’s Matchbox is Stephen Snyder’s sixth book-length translation of a work by Ogawa Yōko. The narrator Tomoko looks back on her childhood in the 1970s with her fragile, book-loving cousin Mīna.
The Little Sparrow Murders, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, is the sixth of Yokomizo Seishi’s classic mysteries featuring the detective Kindaichi Kōsuke to appear in English. This installment sees links between a children’s song and a series of murders. Mornings with My Cat Mii (Mornings Without Mii in some markets) is translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori from a 1999 memoir by the poet and writer Inaba Mayumi about the 20-year relationship with her cat.
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize Shortlist (2025)
Hunchback translated by Polly Barton from Hanchibakku (2023) by Ichikawa Saou
Mina’s Matchbox translated by Stephen Snyder from Mīna no kōshin (2006) by Ogawa Yōko
The Little Sparrow Murders translated by Bryan Karetnyk from Akuma no temari uta (1959) by Yokomizo Seishi
Mornings with My Cat Mii translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori from Mī no inai asa (1999) by Inaba Mayumi
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize is one of nine Society of Authors translation prizes for 2025.
(Originally published in English. Banner photo © Natalie Thorpe.)
Books Culture Dec 2, 2025
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/bg900574/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Language Mixing Scale scores across studies. Credit: Behavioral Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.3390/bs15101371
Parents in bilingual and multilingual families can wrestle with when and how to expose infants and toddlers to words in different languages. However, a new paper from the Concordia Infant Research Lab shows that language mixing does not harm a child's ability to learn words.
In fact, switching languages, even mid-sentence or to introduce a single word, is considered both a common and flexible way to communicate in multilingual homes.
"We found that language mixing is often an intentional strategy rather than something parents do subconsciously," says Ph.D. student Alexandra Paquette, the study's lead author.
"There was no strong evidence that vocabulary size was tied to language mixing. We found that children were able to successfully navigate two languages, even when they appeared in the same sentence. Parents don't need to worry that mixing harms their child's ability to learn new words."
Franglais begins at home
The study, published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, looks at data from almost 400 Montreal children being raised in bilingual homes. The Canadian metropolis benefits from a linguistically diverse population. French and English are both societal languages, meaning large portions of the population speak one or both. The city's linguistic makeup is also enriched by its significant immigrant population, who speak multiple heritage languages. The most common are Spanish, Arabic and Italian.
The researchers analyzed two groups: French-English bilingual families and families who speak a heritage language along with English and/or French. Parents completed detailed questionnaires about how often they mixed languages, their reasons for doing so and how much of each language their child heard. They also documented their children's understanding and use of words.
The results show that language mixing is common, but its frequency varies depending on the family's linguistic background. French-English parents tended to mix less than heritage-language parents, likely because both societal languages are well supported in Montreal. Heritage-language parents mixed more often, especially borrowing English or French terms while speaking their heritage language.
Parents of all backgrounds said they switched languages for several reasons: they could not find the right word in English, French or their heritage language; no good translation was available; or they wanted to introduce a new word to their child. Parents in French-English families with older toddlers were more likely to deliberately mix languages to encourage language development.
The researchers point out that language mixing had almost no effect on a child's vocabulary score in either French-English or English- or French-heritage language families. Even if parents mixed often, children knew the same number of words.
A unique linguistic environment
Montreal's particular makeup as a city with two status languages supplemented by many heritage languages shapes how parents raise their bilingual children. Language mixing is a byproduct of a cultural context in which language mixing is common in daily life in both English and French communities.
"This project shows us how flexible children are when it comes to language development," says co-author Krista Byers-Heinlein, a professor in the Department of Psychology.
"Rather than confuse children, language mixing can be a real teaching tool that parents have in their toolbox. Parents are strategic about it, and our research finds that it is either neutral or beneficial when it comes to vocabulary.""
by Patrick Lejtenyi, Concordia University
edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-language-negative-effect-toddlers-vocabulary.html
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
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"Les romans de l'écrivaine Han Kang, lauréate du prix Nobel de littérature 2024, sont présentés dans un espace qui leur est dédié, dans une librairie Kyobo du centre de Séoul, le mercredi 16 octobre 2024. A 9h du matin ce mercredi, les ventes réalisées par les romans de Han depuis qu'elle a remporté la prestigieuse récompense avaient atteint 1,03 million d'exemplaires. Les ventes des versions numériques de ses livres auraient également dépassé le seuil des 70.000 exemplaires. (Photo d'archives Yonhap)
SEOUL, 06 août (Yonhap) -- Les ventes à l'étranger d'œuvres littéraires coréennes traduites ont fortement bondi l'année dernière, illustrant l'intérêt croissant du lectorat étranger pour la littérature coréenne après l'obtention du prix Nobel de littérature 2024 par la romancière Han Kang, a fait savoir ce mercredi l'Institut coréen de la traduction littéraire (LTI Korea).
Environ 1,2 million d'exemplaires d'ouvrages de littérature coréenne traduits et publiés avec le soutien du LTI Korea se sont vendus à l'étranger l'an dernier, soit un bond de 130% par rapport à l'année précédente. Les ventes moyennes pour chaque traduction ont ainsi atteint le niveau record de 1.271 unités. Parmi ces ouvrages, 45 se sont vendus à plus de 5.000 unités, dont 24 ont même dépassé les 10.000 exemplaires.
LTI Korea a attribué ce bond au succès des œuvres de la lauréate du prix Nobel de littérature 2024, Han Kang. Ses écrits ont été traduits en 28 langues avec le soutien de l'institut pour un total de 77 ouvrages. Pris ensemble, leurs ventes ont dépassé les 310.000 exemplaires rien que l'année passée. En regardant les ventes des 19 traductions publiées avant 2023, celles-ci ont vu leurs ventes quintupler en passant d'environ 30.000 unités en 2023 à 150.000 en 2024.
Des romans d'autres auteurs ont également obtenu de bons résultats à l'étranger, comme «S'aimer dans la grande ville» de Park Sang-young, «Kim Jiyoung, née en 1982» de Cho Nam-joo et «Lapin maudit» de Chung Bora, qui a été retenu parmi les finalistes pour le prix international Booker 2022 et le National Book Award for Translated Literature 2023.
LTI Korea a noté que l'élargissement du lectorat en Amérique du Nord et Europe encourageait les maisons d'édition étrangères à «présenter plus activement des livres coréens», tout en ajoutant que «les réseaux de distribution de ces maisons d'édition et leur puissance marketing ont considérablement amélioré l'accès à la littérature coréenne à l'étranger».
lsr@yna.co.kr"
Ventes record des traductions de romans coréens à l'étranger après le Nobel de Han Kang
06.08.2025 à 14h16
https://m-fr.yna.co.kr/view/AFR20250806001400884
#metaglossia_mundus