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May 22, 9:03 PM
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"Joana Urtasun '22 Publishes Translation of Poetry Collection, 'Between Fish Scales' By Carly Polistina May 18, 2026 Joana Urtasun '22 has published a translation of Between Fish Scales by Basque poet Leire Bilbao. The collection, published by World Poetry Books, marks Urtasun’s first book as a translator and Bilbao's English language debut. Urtasun grew up between Basque and the UK, making her the perfect candidate to translate Bilbao’s work. Writer Kirmen Uribe said of the collection, “If Sharon Olds dreamed in Basque, her dreams might sound like Leire Bilbao.” “Leire Bilbao’s poems, in Joana Urtasun’s English, are cadenced flows from a fluid economy of birth, motherhood, water and blood, of food from the oven and smells of sea," said Poet Erín Moure. The translation and publication of Between Fish Scales was supported by the Etxepare Basque Institute, an organization dedicated to enhancing “the international presence and visibility of the Basque language and contemporary Basque creativity, to promote international cooperation and to foster exchange and communication between creators, professionals, stakeholders and public institutions.” The book also received a grant from Spain’s Ministry of Culture, through the General Directory of Books, Comics, and Reading. According to the publisher, the poetry collection explores the depths of femininity, and, through her use of language, Bilbao can expertly, “turn a mother into a mollusk, an eye into a buoy, and a newborn into a thief in the span of a moment.” Urtasun is a writer and translator based in New York. She received her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine, METAL Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal, among others, and she was a finalist in The Sewanee Review’s sixth poetry contest." https://arts.columbia.edu/news/joana-urtasun-22-publishes-translation-poetry-collection-between-fish-scales #metaglossia #metaglossia_mundus
Are humans the only beings on the planet that use language to communicate?
"Burg Giebichenstein
Kunsthochschule Halle
“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.” George Steiner
Are humans the only beings on the planet that use language to communicate? Can we decipher the nonhuman world around us without harnessing it to our own socialization, syntax, and lexicon? Is interspecies communication even possible? Translation has been described as a precondition that underlies all (human) cultural transactions upon which communication is based. It also is inherently political and stands at the forefront of so many of today’s questions around identity, gender, post-colonial criticism, feminist critique, machine translation and canon creation, yet its connection within the context of the nonhuman turn, interspecies communication, and eco-criticism has not yet been fully explored.
Whether we are talking about classic linguistic and literary translation, or any number of related fields including: language and literature, cultural studies, performance, visual and media arts—the core question that translators and theorists of translation have been debating about for centuries remains the same: is it possible to translate without interpreting? Is linguistic and cultural equivalence even possible? These questions become all the more urgent in the limit-case of interspecies communication. Can we apply empathic modes of translation to nonhuman articulations, wherein translation involves a form of metamorphosis, not of text, but of the translator. As such, translators are something of a hybrid species with one foot in each culture and language, and whose very existence revolves around traveling between worlds. Translators have something of a mythical being about them, akin to a chameleon or centaur. In this course, we will not be engaging in a scientific exploration of interspecies communication, but examining theories around empathic translation-- a process that sees translation not merely as the transformation of a text, but of the translator themself.
Emerging and classical theories of translation can offer a paradigm for engaging with plant and animal articulation, not language as such, but different forms of articulation perceived through the senses, one in which our hearing and seeing,“once intertwined and attentive to the calls and cries of animals, all but disappeared with the invention of the alphabet, retreating into a kind of silence.”
In David Abram's words: “By giving primacy to perception we can see the natural world, not as inert and passive, but as dynamic and participatory. The winds, rivers and birds speak in their own way (if we listen), the sounds of nature not only have informed indigenous languages, but language in general--humans are but one being intertwined with other beings and ‘presences.’ This perspective sees the landscape as a sensuous field, and human perception as but one point of view that is in reciprocity, in expressive communication, with other points of view and ways of being.”
How can theories of translation help us make sense of this new view of a world teeming with language and sentience? What theories abound in reference to multiplicity of “language,” even as Walter Benjamin would argue for a “universal (human) language.” What practical tools does translation studies offer, and what bridges can it forge between the disciplines? The first half of the seminar focuses on key theoretical concepts relevant to the history and practice of translation. In the second half, students will engage in translation experiments that intersect with their own artistic/design practice. A final project should be considered a first draft of something that could develop later into a larger project.
The course will be taught in English and German.
This seminar is ideally suited to students interested in: Literature, Translation Theory / Translation / Cultural Studies / Critical Theory, Creative Writing/ Post-humanism, Trans-humanism, Eco-criticism, the More-than-Human Turn.
Teachers
Dr. Zaia Alexander"
https://www.burg-halle.de/en/course/l/talk-with-the-animals-translation-in-a-more-than-human-world
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
#métaglossie
"Let’s start with some low-hanging fruit. When, in Henry V, the king inspires his army before Agincourt, the Danish translator – here, Niels Brunse – can hope for a relatively easy win: ‘Vi fa, vi muntre fa, vi flok af brodre.’ Or, in the classic Schlegel-Tieck version of Macbeth, now rooted in German literature, the cursed usurper finds that tomorrow and tomorrow ‘Kriecht so mit kleinem Schritt von Tag zu Tag’. Linguistic kinship, comparable speech rhythms, shared verse forms: sometimes the happy not-so-few, the global band of brothers (and sisters) who translate Shakespeare out of English, face a stiff but still feasible task.
Even in familiar languages, though, pitfalls await in every line. Surely, Richard III’s opening soliloquy will slip smoothly into French? Well, now: ‘Maintenant’ sounds a draggy word to launch a torrid play. Enter Jean-Michel Déprats, raiding an older French word hoard: ‘Ores voici l’hiver de notre déplaisir’. Lear’s bleak quintuple ‘Never’ could easily become the Spanish ‘Jamás’, except that the syllabic stress would shift. So Vicente Molina Foix pivots, and retains those trochees of sheer despair: ‘Núnca, núnca, núnca, núnca, núnca.’ Besides, the natural pick may not quite work. A dozen eminent Spanish translators have Hamlet ponder ‘Ser o no ser’; not one of them has the Prince consider the (obvious) ‘pregunta’. Instead, ‘enigma, problema, dilema, duda’, even ‘cuestión’.
What about The Merchant of Venice in Japanese? Macbeth in Swahili? Othello in Azeri? Romeo and Juliet in Thai? A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hindi? Or Julius Caesar in Latin – where ‘Et tu, Brute’ becomes, thanks to the Victorian scholar Henry Denison, the (probably more authentic) Greek ‘Kai su, teknon’: you too, son? Daniel Hahn’s funny, learned and invigorating book about translations of Shakespeare scours the planet and beyond for its evidence. We even hear about a translation of Much Ado About Nothing into Klingon. Endlessly erudite, never pedantic, the author dives deep into Shakespeare’s reinvention not just in neighbour languages but those where few or no basic markers – pronouns, syntax, grammar, word order, punctuation – have close parallels in English.
Shakespeare can do ‘wondrous things with a monosyllable’, for sure, but many languages don’t feature that lexical concision. In Greek, the only one in a core list of 100 everyday words that might fit is the borrowed ‘keik’ (say it). Still, there’s plenty of gain as well as loss. Agglutinative tongues can roll entire Shakespearean phrases into a single word. The murderer Macbeth may say that ‘I have done the deed’; in Swahili he simply has to growl ‘Nimelifanya’. Orsino in Twelfth Night demands ‘Give me some music’; but in Georgian one word could suffice: ‘Momasmeninet’.
Puns, wordplay, tongue-twisters, verbal gags – they are never ‘untranslatable’ (Hahn scorns the notion), but invitations to seek ‘not exactitude of meaning but equivalence of effect’. Portia in The Merchant of Venice wants to be ‘light’ in the sense of radiant, not flighty: in Sho Kawai’s Japanese, she can be bright (‘akarui’) but not weightless (‘karui’). As Hahn puts it: Chapeau! The Greek play literally known as ‘Love’s Barren Struggles’ may seem to have missed a trick in its transition until you realise that (thanks, Errikos Belies) it’s ‘Agápis Agónas Ágonos’.
When Lear ambiguously mourns that ‘my poor fool is hanged’ (the Fool himself, or Cordelia?), Brunse’s Danish can seize on its single-letter gap between ‘little fool’ and ‘little darling’: ‘lille nar/lille nor’. One scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor riffs on rude schoolboy twists on Latin phrases; in French, Déprats and Jean-Pierre Richard ‘made a list of all the Latin words that made them giggle at school’ and ran riot with them. As Hahn says, translators should be ‘faithful to the laugh’.
If This Be Magic is both enormous fun and an intellectual treat. Hahn could have trawled translation history (Dutch gained The Taming of the Shrew as early as 1654, Gujarati the same problematic piece in 1852) and delivered a very interesting study that nonetheless kept readers at a distance. Rather, this accomplished and versatile translator in his own right (Portuguese, Spanish, French) has found a smarter way. Exchanges with colleagues anchor a witty and spirited dive into Shakespearean translation topics ranging from metres to genders, names to accents and commas (inflexible in German) to puns. It succeeds as a workshop, a masterclass and a practical taster, as Hahn makes us spot verbal shapes, sequences and patterns even in the lines of non-Latin scripts, from Thai to Korean. Chapeau, too, to Canongate’s typesetters for their virtuoso performance.
What about Macbeth in Swahili? Othello in Azeri? Romeo and Juliet in Thai?
‘Nobody reads more closely than a translator’, and this celebration of their art also illuminates the texts that they transform. Shakespeare’s words present translators with a ‘multi-dimensional choice’, but theatre doesn’t live by words alone. Hahn acclaims and analyses translations that convey the full package – ‘meaning and music and detailed dramatic effect’. When Lady Macbeth asks her indecisive spouse ‘Are you a man?’, the withering resonance of that ‘man’ is, we learn, notoriously tough to transmit. Kudos to Te Haumihiata Mason, translating into te reo Maori, for her ‘He raho ranei ou?’ ‘So have you got balls, or what?’
It is the close-up, fine-grained case studies – with a bravura chapter devoted to one scene in Twelfth Night – that make this polyglot panorama so special. Yet Hahn (whose Brazilian great-grandfather translated Hamlet into Portuguese) widens his focus with essays on Shakespearean music and art, the making of literary canons and the ominous ascent of AI translation – ‘a handy tool for humans, not a bargain substitute for them’. He even examines various schemes to translate Shakespeare into English, from fixes snuck in by directors in order to sidestep obscurities to the dismal efforts to ‘simplify’ or ‘modernise’ his language. One supposedly up-to-date Hamlet has the Prince ponder: ‘To live or not to live. That is the issue.’
Got something to add? Join the
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/05/macbeth-in-swahili-there-might-even-be-improvements/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
The research questions guiding this project are: (1) Does a multimodal translation module have an impact on the development of students’ Critical Language Awareness (CLA)? If so, how? (2) Do students’ translation competences evolve throughout the module? If so, how? (3) Are there changes in students’ attitudes toward linguistic varieties and their own linguistic identities?
"Even though research on Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) has increased the use of more critical pedagogies (Beaudrie & Wilson, 2021; Leeman & Serafini, 2016), there is still very limited empirical evidence on how functionalist translation can be used as a critical tool to develop heritage learners’ (HL) Critical Language Awareness (CLA). Most of the existing studies have focused on lexical acquisition, without exploring how translation, from a functional and multimodal perspective, can develop critical reflection on linguistic ideologies, power structures, and identity.This study seeks to address this gap by analyzing the impact of a pedagogical intervention in an SHL course at the University of Arizona. The proposed module is based on a functionalist approach to translation (Nord, 1997) within a multiliteracies framework (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2005, 2010), using CLA lenses for both instruction and analysis. A mixed sequential design (Creswell & Creswell, 2018) was used to collect data. The study gathers both quantitative and qualitative data through questionnaires, interviews, translation tasks, critical reflection activities, and classroom observations. Thirty-four students participated: 23 were assigned to the experimental group, which completed the translation module, and 11 to the control group, which followed the regular course sequence. The research questions guiding this project are: (1) Does a multimodal translation module have an impact on the development of students’ Critical Language Awareness (CLA)? If so, how? (2) Do students’ translation competences evolve throughout the module? If so, how? (3) Are there changes in students’ attitudes toward linguistic varieties and their own linguistic identities? The aim is to investigate the effects of this module on students’ CLA and translation competence. In doing so, the study contributes to the advancement of empirical research in heritage language pedagogy and translation studies, providing evidence of how translation can be meaningfully integrated into SHL curricula as both a linguistic and sociopolitical practice. The results show significant improvements in the development of CLA and in the strategic subcompetence of translation competence in the experimental group. Participants in this group progressed from translations focused on linguistic equivalence to more contextualized productions oriented toward audience and translation purpose. Also, positive changes were observed in attitudes toward linguistic diversity and Spanglish, whereas the control group showed no significant transformations."
https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/680256
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"A comprehensive look at lesser-taught languages (LTLs) in multilingual education, seeking to broaden existing notions of minority languages and elucidate key issues and challenges specific to them in educational settings.
The volume is organized around different sections, structural characteristics, and the implications for teaching, methodological considerations, issues around language and identity, and language policy and planning. Case studies from a range of settings are considered, including formal and informal educational contexts, community literacy activities, and out-of-school language classes. In so doing, the book seeks both to bring a critical perspective at the historical and epistemological foundations underpinning existing research and innovative insights into important connected themes for future study.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, language education, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and language policy.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Framing Lesser-Taught Languages in Contemporary Multilingual Contexts
SERAPHIN KAMDEM AND GILLES FORLOT
PART I: Variation
1 Minority Language Instructors as Agents of Standardization: Confronting Variation during the Introduction of Picard in Schools
JENNIFER COX
2 Teaching for Variation in a Sacred Language: Beyond Pluricentricity in Dakota/Lakota Language Revitalization
ANKE AL-BATAINEH
3 The Place of Variation in Maya as a Second Language Classes: A Comparative Analysis between Merida (Mexico) and Paris (France)
MARGARITA VALDOVINOS
PART II: Learning & Teaching
4 Analysing Secondary Students’ Note-Taking in Basque: Implications for Immersion Education
ROBERTO ARIAS-HERMOSO, ENERITZ GARRO LARRAÑAGA, AND AINARA IMAZ AGIRRE
5 Language Ideologies and Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Reading Education in Philippine Classrooms
JACKSON G. ORLANDA AND PORTIA P. PADILLA
6 Longitudinal Relationship between Vocabulary and Word Reading Fluency in Multilingual Kapampangan-Filipino-English Speakers
PORTIA PADILLA AND ALEXANDRA GOTTARDO
PART III: Language and Educational Policies
7 The Teaching of Mə̀dʉ̂mbɑ̀, Nda’nda’, and Yemba in Secondary Schools of the West Region of Cameroon: Assessing the Challenges and Issues Faced in Teaching Lesser-Taught Languages
HUGUES CARLOS GUECHE FOTSO
8 Creating Equitable Hybrid Interaction Spaces to Revive Okpella, a Nigerian Language
ABDULMALIK YUSUF OFEMILE
9 Nigeria’s Indigenous Languages and the National Policy on Education: The Case of Efik in Primary Schools in Calabar Metropolis
EYO MENSAH AND UCHENNA AJAKE
10 Spanish as a Lesser-Taught Language in Los Angeles: Family Socialization, Educational Discontinuity, and Bilingual Agency in a Contact Zone
ERIC ALVAREZ
Lesser-Taught Languages in Multilingual Contexts: Focus on Language Va https://share.google/R6hw71PPF4DQQJX0N
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"DeepL lance sa traduction vocale en temps réel pour vos réunions
DeepL lance une suite complète de traduction vocale en temps réel pour les réunions, appels et conversations de groupe, accompagnée d'une API ouverte aux développeurs externes.
DeepL a bâti sa réputation sur la qualité de sa traduction de texte. Ce mercredi, l'entreprise allemande franchit une étape différente en lançant une suite complète de traduction voix-à-voix en temps réel. Les entreprises multilingues constituent la cible principale. Une API ouverte aux développeurs externes accompagne le lancement.
Réunions, appels, conversations de groupe : ce que la suite vocale de DeepL permet objectivement
La suite couvre trois usages distincts. Pour les réunions en ligne, DeepL propose des modules complémentaires pour Zoom et Microsoft Teams. Les participants peuvent ainsi entendre une traduction en temps réel pendant que les autres s'expriment dans leur langue, ou suivre une transcription traduite à l'écran. Ce programme est actuellement en accès anticipé, avec une liste d'attente ouverte aux organisations intéressées.
Le deuxième usage cible les conversations mobiles et web, en présentiel ou à distance. Le troisième s'adresse aux sessions de groupe en entreprise, comme les formations ou les ateliers. Les participants rejoignent via un QR code et reçoivent une traduction dans leur langue. La suite intègre par ailleurs un système d'apprentissage du vocabulaire personnalisé, couvrant les termes métier spécifiques, les noms d'entreprises et les noms propres. Au total, DeepL Voice prend en charge plus de 40 langues, dont les 24 langues officielles de l'Union européenne.
Au-delà des intégrations prêtes à l'emploi, DeepL lance une API permettant à des développeurs et des entreprises tiers de créer des solutions sur mesure. Les centres d'appels multilingues constituent l'exemple le plus direct. «Après tant d'années en traduction textuelle, la voix était une étape naturelle», a déclaré Jarek Kutylowski, PDG de DeepL, selon TechCrunch. Le dirigeant souligne que la traduction vocale répond aux difficultés des organisations à recruter des agents qualifiés dans certaines langues, souvent rares et coûteux.
Cette ouverture traduit une ambition de positionnement à long terme. DeepL contrôle l'intégralité de sa chaîne technique vocale. Le système actuel convertit la parole en texte, applique la traduction, puis reconvertit en voix. L'entreprise vise toutefois un modèle bout-en-bout qui supprimera cette étape intermédiaire. Dans des évaluations indépendantes menées par Slator, 96 % des linguistes ont préféré DeepL Voice aux solutions natives de Google, Microsoft et Zoom, citant une meilleure fluidité et une précision contextuelle supérieure.
Le défi technique central reste l'arbitrage entre latence (le délai entre la prise de parole et la restitution traduite) et précision. DeepL estime que ses années d'expertise en traduction textuelle lui donnent un avantage sur ce point par rapport aux acteurs plus récents du secteur."
23 Mai 2026
Auriane Polge
https://www.science-et-vie.com/technos-et-futur/lentreprise-allemande-deepl-lance-sa-traduction-vocale-en-temps-reel-pour-vos-reunions-237047.html
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
2026 World Cup will include sign language interpretation broadcasts for every match...
"The FIFA has announced that the 2026 World Cup will include sign language interpretation broadcasts for every match, marking a major expansion of accessibility services for fans with disabilities.
In a statement published on its website on Friday, FIFA said the initiative is designed to ensure that all supporters, whether in stadiums or watching remotely, can fully experience matches.
The governing body said the move reflects its commitment to inclusion, adding that the World Cup should be accessible to “all fans, including those with disabilities and their families and friends.”
FIFA noted that the new system goes beyond traditional interpretation, with sign language commentary capturing live match action as well as emotional and environmental cues such as crowd reactions, referee whistles and stadium atmosphere.
According to FIFA, interpreters will provide region-specific sign language coverage, including American Sign Language for matches in the United States and Canada, and Mexican Sign Language for games in Mexico.
During the knockout stages, American Sign Language will be used for most matches, while Mexican Sign Language will be applied to selected fixtures involving Spanish-speaking teams.
The organisation also said fans will be able to access the service through the official World Cup app by selecting accessibility settings and activating a dedicated sign language broadcast feed.
The announcement follows earlier accessibility measures introduced at the 2025 Club World Cup, including sensory bags and audio-descriptive commentary services.
FIFA said the enhanced package is part of its long-term effort to make global football more inclusive and improve the match-day experience for all supporters."
FIFA Introduces Sign Language Broadcasts and Expanded Accessibility Features for 2026 World Cup - Nigeria Info FM https://share.google/66dMR2rZSrgoWJZAn
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Ask AI or just Google it? Google makes a big change to a little search box
NPR | By John Ruwitch
Published May 22, 2026 at 12:05
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai speaks during the tech titan's annual I/O developers conference on May 14, 2024, in Mountain View, California. Google on Tuesday said it would introduce AI-generated answers to online queries made by users in the United States, in one of the biggest updates to its search engine in 25 years.
The search giant is updating its famously minimalist homepage. But what looks like a tiny design change is a very big deal.
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The company this week announced significant changes to its search box — that austere, single-line input field on its homepage that has been the world's most popular entry point into the web for around two-and-a-half decades.
The new version looks similar to the old one-line text box, but it's dynamic, expanding with longer queries. Users can also drop videos, pictures and files into it for what Google calls "multimodal" search.
Behind the scenes, a bigger shift is under way. Google is merging artificial intelligence and traditional web search in a move that Liz Reid, who oversees search at Google, said brings "the best of web and the best of AI together."
Critics say folding AI deeper into search risks further muddying the waters around the provenance of information gleaned from the web, and could take agency away from users. A chatbot is likely to return a summary with only a few links to further information, unlike a web search that returns many pages of links.
But the shift is, in some ways, not surprising, given Silicon Valley's hard pivot toward AI, with Google and others investing billions in the technology and refocusing corporate strategies around it.
For about a year, Google has put "AI Overviews" — short summaries — at the top of some search results. "What we've seen with AI Overviews is that people don't want either just an AI or the web. They want a mix of both," said Reid.
She said she's noticed that users have started to ask longer questions, with more natural language, rather than fragments or key words. "They're asking the question that they really have," Reid said.
For Google, that potentially unlocks new understandings of user intentions. "If you start using more natural language, if you're having a conversation, when you've shifted from researching into buying, you've sort of indicated that. And so we can put better ads because we understand what that is," Reid said.
Google is also introducing agentic functionality to search, so that users can ask it to do tasks over time — like search for theater tickets at regular intervals, or send shoppers a notification when something goes on sale, or conduct a weekly scan of the internet for local events.
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.
"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.
Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.
"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
Sarah T. Roberts, director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, said the algorithmic underpinnings of Google's web search results have long been "by design, inscrutable to end users" and there's more to it than simply the best of the web floating to the top of any given search. Adding AI will only make the system more opaque, she said.
"What's happening now with AI is that that complexity that already existed will be further obfuscated and even more difficult to unpack," she said.
She noted episodes where Google's AI has provided bad results, including advising putting glue in pizza and eating rocks. "Those gaffes shouldn't be forgotten as Google makes this transition," she said.
And critics say that driving more Google users from web searches to interacting with AI will exacerbate the risks of the so-called "Google Zero" scenario, where the growth of AI queries kills off web search and suffocates the internet click economy as we know it. That includes online shops, web advertisers and news organizations that all depend on referred traffic from Google.
While the redesigned box will be the same for all Google users, there are various tricks and tips online for people who want to disable or avoid some AI functions when using Google."
https://www.ijpr.org/npr-news/2026-05-22/ask-ai-or-just-google-it-google-makes-a-big-change-to-a-little-search-box
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Translator Beware: On the Myth of the Finicky English Reader
Anton Hur Discusses the Future of Literary Translation
When I started my career as a professional literary translator, I began coming up against a mysterious “English reader” whom academics and editors kept referring to when they looked over my work, leaving comments like, “the English reader will find this line awkward” or “I understand, but we need to make things more accessible to the English reader” and so on.
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This was very puzzling; I am an English reader, I’ve been reading English the whole of my reading life. I have a master’s degree in Victorian poetry from a prestigious university and worked professionally for years in literary translation, which means, frankly, I tend to be more normative in my English usage, if anything. Look at this paragraph, for example; I sound practically archaic.
But I kept coming up against this hypothetical English reader, and not just in terms of language. When acquiring editors invoked the English reader, they would say things like, “English readers won’t go for that sort of thing” or “English readers don’t like short story collections.”
But who was this English reader, and why did he hold so much sway over my practice? He (he seems to be a he) is actually a minority in the reading world, but everyone in publishing defers to him. Women read more than men, and translated fiction outsells English fiction in the UK, but the Mythical English Reader won’t read women writers or non- European translations (which begs the question: Then why should I care about him?!). He is incredibly finicky, in a way that suggests people have been indulging him all his life instead of challenging him or encouraging him to try new and different things. What he likes seems to be other white men and whatever other white men produce; if he reads translated literature, he might read an obscure dead white male from Germany or Italy, or even some author from a non-European country if at least the translator is white. He likes very few things and hates an awful lot of others.
He likes very few things and hates an awful lot of others.
Over the years, I would constantly be nudged or told outright to write like “the English reader,” to think like “the English reader,” to like the things he likes and disdain the things he disdains, to make the world comfortable for him, my sentences and content easier for him. And soon, this constant presence of outside voices seeped into my inside voice until I found myself automatically trying to fit into the Mythical English Reader’s ideas of what my work should look like.
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It was a long time before I realized that the problem wasn’t my flawless English or the amazing books I tended to pick to translate; saying, “the English reader won’t like this,” really just meant, “You’re not white.” Proper English wasn’t proper because it followed a set of rules per se, proper English was proper because that was the way white people spoke, and whatever I said was incorrect by default until it was approved by a white person. While this revelation came as something of a shock, perhaps it isn’t so surprising to you.
If you’re a person of color reading this essay in English right now, chances are you grew up under the pervasive and ubiquitous gaze of the Mythical English Reader and understand it very well. I didn’t grow up like that, or at least, not to any meaningful extent. I grew up mostly in Korea, have lived my entire adult life so far in Korea, and even when I wasn’t living in Korea, I was mostly living in Asia. Throughout my life I couldn’t care less what white people thought because white people had nothing to do with the grades I got in school, what my clients paid me, the men I dated, or what I thought of myself. Then I fell into this “literary translator” job and suddenly I had to figure out exactly what white people thought—and fast.
They are truly a different people from us Koreans. First of all, as far as I can tell, “white people” seem to be a colonial invention, an identity that almost only appears when they go up against brown-skinned people in their conquests and exploitation. In America, while there are still people there who talk about being Italian or Irish etc., white people are for the most part a very distinctive and cohesive monolith who are mostly defined by the fact that they are Not Brown. It was historically important that they were white because being not-white meant being a target of Indigenous genocide, a slave in the chattel slavery system, or a second-class brown person who was treated differently from a white person who does the same job and pays the same taxes and dues.
I say “historical,” but all the above systems continue to be perpetuated in America in some form today (for example, just look at who does most of the forced labor in the US prison-industrial complex). Whiteness craves power and money and is unwilling to concede that power and money to non-whites. Sometimes, it will throw a bone to a few brown people when it looks like they’re going to stage a revolution—aficionados refer to this as “tokenism”—but for the most part, whiteness will bend over backwards trying to keep people of color in line.
Given that such white supremacy still exists in the Anglosphere, of course it would exist in the world of letters as well.The Mythical English Reader is, therefore, not a form of benign snobbery (if snobbery can ever be benign) but serves as a superego of whiteness, policing all literature so that it continues to affirm the superiority and cultural capital of whiteness, because in the end, cultural capital leads to actual capital, and the goal is to keep the money within the family.
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An Asian American writing instructor once warned me that the Anglophonic literary world used phrases like “the beauty of the language” as a reactionary code for excluding writers of color from the center of the establishment. I wondered what he was talking about at the time, but understood well enough as I entered the industry and kept on encountering weird situations where “beautiful language” honors were conferred on some truly mediocre white writing that followed the style of the status quo—which is a kind of flat and overly “clear” pseudo-Hemingway pastiche of workshop-ready minimalism—while anything else was branded as “bad writing” or “awkward.”
They are the white gaze manifested into flesh.
Note the mention of Hemingway here (talk about a white person going up against brown skinned people in his conquests and exploitations). Hemingway, because of his privileged-expat life among brown people, was the whitest of all white authors, the god of all Mythical English Readers, and this is why his DNA runs so deep in American letters today.
In the end, “awkward,” for me, always invites the question: awkward to whom? (White people.) And what makes it awkward? (A white person didn’t write it.)
I was once asked to submit to a publisher who is infamous in Koreanist circles for pairing Korean translators with white monolingual writers, as “co-translation” teams. These are setups where the Korean translator gets stuck with doing a crib translation and the white monolingual does some editing and gets credit for imbuing “artistry” (whiteness) on the work of the Korean translator, who is relegated to being a mere technician. I had just come off a similar “co-translation” where an editor was given co-translator credit despite only having been an editor of the work. It was a completely insulting process from beginning to end (interestingly, the edits flattened the prose dramatically).
I also had to practically bludgeon this editor repeatedly about getting the paperwork for my payment, which just goes to show how little they cared about my work, my time, and my rights as a translator. In cases like this, the Mythical English Reader becomes a literal English reader, a living, breathing reader who has the power to change the very words of your translation merely because they are white and you are not. They are the white gaze manifested into flesh. And in this case, they take your credit and your very real money and advance their own interests by exploiting your labor.
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Or ruining it. A literary translation school in Korea, without bothering to inform me, once replaced me with a white instructor who immediately alienated my former students by openly disparaging Korean women writers in his first session, and proceeded to destroy the workshop I had painstakingly helped to build up over the years. The fiasco left aspiring translators in Korea, most of them people of color, with one less route into the profession, further enabling white people’s social and actual capital to be kept within their possession.
Submitting my sample, I told the publisher that I was aware of his publications that engaged in this heinous practice, and that I was categorically unwilling to engage in it. He rejected the manuscript.
In recent years, I have come to the realization that if we want to change the way our translations are published, the way to do it is not only through individual action but through changing the entire landscape of publishing. The best way to help yourself is to change the system for everyone, instead of aiming to become another token for the perpetuation of whiteness. We all have limited time and energy, but there are still many ways to identify the cracks in the system that we can shove a wedge into or the points of leverage we can place a fulcrum upon, and it’s going to take all of these little efforts and opportunities combined into a movement to make changes that will truly benefit individuals.
This is your time now. You have entered the landscape. You’re the realest thing in it.
Examples of this include Indonesian author Khairani Barokka’s refusal to italicize non-English words in her writing, translator Rosalind Harvey offering free mentoring slots specifically for translators of color, and joining a translator collective or creating one yourself (you only really need three people to make a collective). I’m currently in three, and each makes a big difference to how I think about my practice.
For example, the ALTA BIPOC Caucus, founded by some talented translators whom I deeply admire, provides a treasure trove of information and connections, not to mention an easy way to give back to the BIPOC translator community in various ways. Collectives make sense for translators; our work is inherently collaborative (we deal with virtually every level of publishing, from rightsholders to editorial to publicity to readers), and the publishing world is so opaque that you need all the help you can get to pass the gatekeepers.
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Point being, we need a movement to make real changes in the landscape, and movements mean collective action, the sum of all of our individual efforts coalescing into a single, anticolonial direction.
When I’m translating, I always imagine the author across the table from me, telling me the story in Korean. I never feel alone when I translate, and by the end of the book I feel as if the author and I have been sitting and working together for a long time.It is always a shock to meet the author in person because I feel extremely close to them but they haven’t spent nearly as much time with me. It’s really the author whom I’m thinking of when I translate, and it’s really me for whom I’m translating—I am the true English reader.
So, the next time someone tries to gaslight you by asserting the authority of a mythical being over your own reading, call it out. No, you may not use that excuse, you need to come up with a real reason. No, either take ownership of your own prejudices or stay silent. This is your time now. You have entered the landscape..."
Anton Hur
May 18, 2026
https://lithub.com/translator-beware-on-the-myth-of-the-finicky-english-reader/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Expanding the reach of global literature through translation, a grant program and a literary award are open for submissions.
"Translation is an incredibly important part of the global publishing industry. Two opportunities – a grant and an award – are currently open for submissions.
PEN Presents x SALT
PEN Presents is a grant program created by English PEN that seeks to expand the landscape of translated literature by supporting sample translations, funding the unpaid work of creating samples, and giving publishers in the UK access to titles from underrepresented languages and regions.
This year’s PEN Presents is a partnership between English PEN and the South Asian Literature in Translation project (SALT). The deadline for submissions for the next session of PEN x Salt are closing May 31, 2026.
The grant is open to translators anywhere in the world in any stage of their career who have written in any official or unofficial languages of South Asia; whose authors are citizens of a South Asian country; resident in South Asia or of south Asian heritage; and for work of any form, genre, style and era. The work must also not have an English translation published in any territory.
A shortlist of 24 applicants will receive grants of £500 to create 5,000-word sample translations of their proposed works, with a final selection of 12 samples.
In April, the last round of winners was announced.
“These projects brought together an expert panel and gave them the delightful challenge of selecting winners from numerous brilliant projects across a range of languages, many of which are hugely underrepresented in English translation,” said Preti Taneja, English PEN Translation Advisory co-chair.
“The writing we present here has great potential to open readers’ minds to the richness of South Asian storytelling, poetry and nonfiction. This is politically urgent, humanely thought-provoking, lyrical, and even profoundly humorous work. Agents and editors now have the wonderful task of taking these samples forward to full publication, and I could not be more excited to see what comes next for these works, their authors and their translators.”
For more information on the program or submission guidelines, visit the website here
Sheikh Zayed Book Award
Earlier this year, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the Arab world celebrated its 20th anniversary.
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award, which is organized by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre (ALC) under the auspices of the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi), looks to further Arabic literature and culture around the world.
Since its founding, the award has received more than 33,000 submissions and honored 144 laureates. The Translation Grant, which was founded in 2018, has also supported the translation of over 48 titles into 12 languages.
The 21st submission cycle marks a defining milestone as the Sheikh Zayed Book Award enters its third decade and continues to play a pivotal role in advancing the global reception of Arab culture.
The Award includes ten categories, five of which are open to non-Arabic books – Arabic Culture in Other Languages; Translation; Publishing and Technology; Manuscripts, Encyclopedia, and the Lexicon; and the Cultural Personality of the Year.
“Marking twenty years of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award is not only a moment to reflect on its legacy, but also an opportunity to look ahead to its next chapter. As the Award enters its third decade, we invite authors, scholars, translators and publishers from around the world to contribute to a renewed era of literary and intellectual excellence,” said His Excellency Dr Ali Bin Tamim, Secretary-General of the SZBA and Chairman of the ALC.
“Through its international reach, the Award continues to serve as a global platform for distinguished voices across generations, strengthening the presence of Arabic literature and culture on the world stage.”"
By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox
https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/05/politically-urgent-humanely-thought-provoking-furthering-translation-projects-around-the-world/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Safety, cost and climate dominate travel planning – but research from Zurich Insurance Group suggests language quietly steers more decisions than many travelers realize.
By Ines Bourbon
Not all borders appear on maps. Some quietly shape where people choose to travel. Language is one of them.
It might happen in a train station, standing in front of a ticket machine covered in unfamiliar words. Or at a pharmacy counter, trying to explain a problem in a language that suddenly feels far more important than expected. In those moments, the reality of travel becomes clear: crossing a border is easy; navigating what comes after can be harder.
The invisible filter
When travelers plan a trip, familiar factors usually guide their decisions. Safety, cost, climate and attractions dominate the conversation. Yet communication quietly shapes those decisions as well.
According to Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich), roughly one in three travelers say language and ease of communication influence where they choose to travel. The pattern appears across all markets surveyed but is most pronounced in Canada, Mexico, Singapore, the UK and the U.S. Language doesn’t rank alongside safety or cost, but its consistent presence suggests it shapes choices more than many people openly acknowledge.
Other research adds detail to the picture. A survey by language-learning platform Preply found that a similar proportion of American travelers intentionally choose destinations where English is widely spoken. The study goes further, identifying the countries Americans find most linguistically intimidating: China (37%), Japan (34%) and South Korea (23%) top the list. Separately, a global survey from Booking.com found that 44 percent of travelers say language barriers discourage them from considering certain trips altogether.
At first glance, these numbers may seem surprising. Translation apps are widely available, English is commonly used in airports and hotels, and many destinations offer multilingual services. Yet travel rarely unfolds exactly as planned. Beyond booking flights and accommodation, travelers must navigate unfamiliar systems – reading transit maps, asking for directions or explaining a problem. When communication breaks down, even routine tasks can become stressful.
That uncertainty can influence destination choices. Travelers may gravitate toward places where communication feels easier or more predictable, particularly those who prefer structured travel experiences.
When things go wrong, words matter most
Communication becomes even more important when something goes wrong. Travel disruptions are common: flights are delayed, luggage is misplaced, connections are missed. Travelers also worry about more serious incidents, including medical emergencies, cybercrime or theft. Zurich’s Business Travel Outlook 2026 highlights how frequently disruptions occur during trips. For instance, in 2025, four in five business travelers (80 percent) experienced disruption and more than half (53 percent) encountered incidents or emergencies abroad. When unexpected situations arise, the ability to communicate clearly can make resolving problems faster and far less stressful.
This is where assistance and protection services – including travel insurance – play a practical role. Financial reimbursement is only part of the support. Travelers often rely on assistance teams and apps to guide them through unfamiliar systems and coordinate help locally. In those moments, clear communication can be just as important as the coverage itself.
Bridging the language gap
The influence of language varies across travelers. Younger travelers often lean on translation apps and navigation tools and may feel more comfortable in unfamiliar linguistic environments. Others place greater value on predictability and reassurance, particularly when they travel internationally less often.
These patterns have implications for the travel industry. Tourism boards, airlines and hospitality providers increasingly recognize that communication plays an important role in the traveler experience. Many destinations now invest in multilingual signage, translated information and digital tools designed to help international visitors navigate local infrastructure.
For instance, LVMH launched a dedicated Mandarin-speaker retail training program in New York, partnering with Parsons School of Design to prepare Chinese-American staff for its luxury stores — a direct response to the volume of Chinese tourists visiting its boutiques. In London, Harrods offers Arabic-speaking personal shoppers as part of a tailored experience for Middle Eastern clients. Japan, which welcomed a record 36.9 million tourists in 2024, has responded by rolling out multilingual signage, digital translation tools and language support across hotels, transport networks and tourist attractions.
These efforts don’t just improve convenience – they help travelers feel confident enough to explore unfamiliar places.
Yet communication challenges rarely prevent travel altogether. Millions of people visit destinations every year without speaking the local language. Tourism has always crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries. As international travel continues to grow, discussions within the industry often focus on infrastructure, connectivity and emerging destinations. But behavioral factors matter too.
Sometimes the real border is not the one you cross at the airport – it’s the moment when the words around you stop making sense."
https://www.zurich.com/insights/travel/lost-in-translation
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Legal AI is increasingly capable of producing outputs that look correct, not only linguistically, but also terminologically. Definitions align with established usage, translations follow accepted conventions and explanations reflect familiar legal structures. In cross-border work, this is often where the problem begins rather than ends.
In professional settings, correct terminology is usually taken as a reliable signal of accuracy. When a term is widely used and consistently translated, there is a natural tendency to assume that the underlying meaning travels with it. In law, that is a risky assumption. Legal concepts aren’t defined by their label alone, but also by their purpose, scope, conditions of application and, ultimately, their legal consequences.
Two concepts can align closely at the level of terminology and still diverge materially in practice, particularly across legal systems. One example is the relationship between liquidated damages in common law jurisdictions and contractual penalty clauses in many civil law systems. Translation-based systems will map one term to the other without hesitation, producing a result that reads cleanly and appears professionally sound. Yet in common law jurisdictions, liquidated damages are enforceable only if they represent a genuine pre-estimate of loss, whereas in many civil law systems, penalty clauses are generally enforceable even where they go beyond compensatory loss, subject in some cases to judicial adjustment. In other words, correct terminology is not the same as correct legal meaning, particularly where legal consequences diverge.
This would be manageable if legal terminology operated in isolation. In practice, however, it doesn’t. For a lawyer, a term carries a set of embedded assumptions about enforceability, remedies, procedural context and interpretation. When a familiar term appears, those assumptions are automatically activated. Readers fill in the gaps without necessarily realising that they are doing so.
This is where the real risk emerges. Wording may be correct but still invite the reader to apply an incorrect legal framework. The problem isn’t simply an imperfect translation. Rather, it is that the output triggers a line of reasoning that doesn’t hold in the target jurisdiction.
Errors of this kind are difficult to detect because texts look credible and precise, and follow patterns lawyers are trained to recognise. Under time pressure, or in routine workflows, it is easy for such output to pass review without deeper scrutiny.
The source of the problem sits in the data, not in how the output is reviewed. Foundation models are trained on large volumes of legal text, but not necessarily on structured representations of how legal concepts relate to one another across jurisdictions. They don’t carry explicit mappings of where concepts overlap, where they only partially align or where they lead to different legal outcomes. Faced with a gap, the model produces the most plausible approximation.
Prompting, interface design and retrieval can improve presentation and relevance, but don’t solve the problem. If a system doesn’t contain information about how two concepts differ in scope or effect, it has no basis on which to flag those differences. Output remains fluent, but the underlying legal position is incomplete.
This raises an uncomfortable point for lawyers and legaltech providers: legal AI can produce the right words and still point to the wrong answer. The closer the terminology appears to be, the easier it is to miss the gap.
Since the problem sits in the data, it has to be addressed there. Legal meaning needs to be represented explicitly, with attention to purpose, scope and legal effect, and with clear identification of where concepts don’t align cleanly. Such information doesn’t emerge automatically from large corpora. It has to be constructed, curated and maintained.
At TransLegal, we build structured, human-curated legal datasets that map concepts across jurisdictions and capture relevant distinctions directly in the data. We also use AI systems to generate additional layers of comparative legal data, with experts in the loop to review, validate and refine the output. This extensive data can then be used to help AI systems surface differences rather than smooth them away, and to give users the information they need to recognise where apparent equivalence breaks down.
As legal AI becomes more widely used in cross-border contexts, the quality of terminology will matter less than what sits behind it. Outputs can look entirely correct and still lead the user in the wrong direction. This problem sits directly in the path of cross-border legal work and is already shaping outcomes."
By Michael Krallmann, CEO, TransLegal
https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2026/05/20/when-legal-terminology-is-correct-but-the-answer-is-still-wrong/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"What role do translators play in an increasingly globalized world threatened by authoritarianism and AI?
At the 2026 World Voices Festival, translators Michael Eskin, Annelise Finegan, Tess Lewis and former translator for the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly Abdelgabar Mohieldin gathered to discuss the cultural and political significance of their work today as well as their hopes and worries for the future of the industry.
Here are some of the reflections the experts shared throughout the panel, titled “The Changing Role of the Translator,” which translator Sandra Smith moderated.
On the Value of Translation
At the beginning of the talk, Smith quoted from PEN America’s 1969 Manifesto on Translation, which states that “translation should not be a profession but an art.” “But today, in our globalized world, the translator has far more responsible goals,” she said. “We become cultural ambassadors, especially when the author is not living or, sadly, representing authors whose works are censored in their own countries.” She asked the panelists to describe the aspects of their work as translators they deemed most important.
Eskin: “Translators undoubtedly can be said to possess great power: the power to determine central aspects of an entire culture with real-life consequences, good and bad, for their members, depending on who they happen to be. One mistranslated word can be to the benefit of one person or group and the great detriment of another.”
Lewis: “There are changes in the ideological and political environment which make the role of the translator no less necessary, perhaps even more necessary. When I first started, one of my main motivations as a translator was to combat cultural provincialism. … If you don’t know the context of words, you have no way of gauging the original context that the text is operating in, and what does that mean for the reception of the text from your language?”
Mohieldin: “I developed my own cross-cultural approach to translation, seeing translation as building blocks for sustainable culture, for peace, conflict resolution, peace building, and respect for human rights.”
On the Rise of AI
Smith asked the panelists to reflect on the danger that AI poses to their profession.
Finegan: “The challenge with AI translation is that it trends toward a mean, it trends toward an average. And it gets worse because studies are now showing that it is starting to make us write like that too. The only bright side is that it suddenly made translation really visible, and it raises the expectation for massive translation, that everything be available, and that’s fantastic.”
Lewis: “The danger that I find most immediately threatening … is that it will lower everyone’s expectations and standards. You can read a fabulous translation of a 500-page novel that would have taken time and cost money. Or you can just give the gist by putting the whole thing through AI. … That is my concern: our writing being flattened, our attention spans being shortened, our standards are being lowered as well as our tolerance for complexity.”
Mohieldin: “Creativity needs a human heart and human emotions and human imagination. AI is just a machine. It doesn’t have all of that.”
Eskin: “We can’t assume that translation as such generates good translators. … Just like there are not many really, really good authors among the millions who write, there also are not really many very good translators. Now, if you happen to stumble on a really good one, of course, that probably AI can’t do.”
On Their Relationships With Writers
An audience member asked the translators whether writers choose their translators and what the working relationship between the two professionals looks like.
Smith: “Very often, the author has no say in who the translator would be, unless you have a relationship. So, for example, if you do one book and it’s a hit, then the publisher will normally come back. … If you’re lucky, they will come to you and ask you to do it, or if you work with a particular author, they will request you to the publisher.”
Lewis: “It’s very case-specific. Some writers absolutely trust their translators. Others really want to know [more]. … It’s as varied as the authors themselves and their egos.”" "
https://pen.org/translators-value-their-profession/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"...Rosemary Okui Arocha has firsthand experience of how a single mistranslation can irreparably change someone's life forever.
Her ordeal started on a chilly morning in mid-November 2021 in Matsusaka, Mie Prefecture.
Okui, 45, made breakfast for her son, who was 11 at the time, and opened the door of her apartment to go to work.
She found herself surrounded by a group of about 10 police officers.
Okui, who came to Japan at age 17 to support her family and worked as a dancer and a factory worker, was showered with unfamiliar words and accusations such as "stimulant" and "transfer for profit."
She was arrested on suspicion of selling stimulant drugs to her acquaintance, although she had no idea of how she was tied to the allegations.
She was detained until just prior to her acquittal in March 2024.
When Okui claimed her innocence in an interrogation room at the prosecutors' office, an interpreter sitting next to a prosecutor in front of her just seemed to have scoffed.
After the questioning session, the interpreter told her that the interrogation would be over sooner if she told the truth.
She felt as if the interpreter assumed she was guilty of the allegations.
MISTAKEN EVIDENCE
What was submitted as the "evidence" of the crime was a message sent to Okui's smartphone by her male acquaintance who had been arrested on suspicion of violating the Stimulants Control Law.
It read "Brad, may damo ka?" ("Brad, do you have any grass?").
"Brad" is a slang for "brother," mainly used to refer to a man.
The smartphone had been also used by Okui's roommate and his friend at the time.
But the Japanese translation of the word by investigators was "Aiko," her nickname, when it should have been "kyodai" (brother).
As a result, she was identified as the recipient of the message.
According to a ruling by the Tsu District Court, the interpreter in charge of the translation asked the sender who "Brad" was. The man said it was "Aiko," and the interpreter translated the word the way he replied.
The ruling said the original text must be translated accurately and faithfully, adding that "Brad" didn't mean "Aiko."
In addition, the court said Okui's smartphone had been mainly used by a man who was living with her at the time and his friend.
The man told the court that he received a drug from this friend.
The court acquitted Okui, saying that there was a possibility that the smartphone was used by other people.
Prosecutors decided to abandon the appeal.
After more than two years in detention, Okui's previously talkative son became reserved.
"Even though I was acquitted, I can't return to my previous life," she said. "I want judicial bodies to retain competent interpreters. That is because our lives depend on it."..."
JIN HIRAKAWA/ Staff Writer
https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/16290361
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Centered on the most widely spoken Indigenous language in South America, the documentary Runa Simi raises awareness about the limited access to audiovisual content and linguistic exclusion, contributing to a wider conversation on Indigenous rights and cultural preservation.
What began as Fernando Valencia’s personal initiative evolves into a powerful example of how media can serve as a tool for empowerment, education, and policy dialogue. Through the intergenerational narrative between father and son, the film highlights the importance of engaging younger generations in preserving linguistic heritage. It also demonstrates the transformative impact of small, community-driven efforts in sustaining and revitalizing a language, ultimately conveying a message of cultural survival, pride, and continuity across generations.
The film is supported by an impact programme that extends beyond the screen through community, and school screenings with guided discussions, as well as workshops introducing youth to dubbing. It also connects and trains Indigenous voice artists, strengthening professional networks. Reaching audiences in 41 cities worldwide, the initiative fosters youth engagement, promotes linguistic pride, and expands access to Quechua content, while supporting education, identity, and intergenerational knowledge through community-led approaches.
This creative project conveys that preserving and celebrating Indigenous languages is an act of cultural pride, empowerment, and continuity for future generations and, therefore, strongly resonates with the objectives of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022–2032), promoting the use of Indigenous languages across media, education, and cultural spaces.
By dubbing a globally recognized animated film, Runa Simi shows how these languages can thrive in contemporary formats, in line with the Decade’s Global Action Plan’s call for accessible and engaging content. It also highlights the importance of creating content for children, showing how hearing their language in beloved stories fosters pride, identity, and belonging, with the participation of Fernando’s son, Dylan, exemplifying the Decade’s focus on youth as vital agents of language revitalization."
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/revitalizing-indigenous-languages-through-film-story-runa-simi
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Taiwan Travelogue by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated into English by Lin King, won the 2026 International Booker Prize. The winner was announced May 19, 2026, at Tate Modern, London. The novel is framed as a translation of a rediscovered manuscript by a Japanese writer traveling through Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s. At its center is a love story between two women, set against questions of empire, identity, and what gets lost—or altered—in translation. It was the first book by a Taiwanese author to win the prize. The book was originally published in Mandarin in 2020. Yáng is also the winner of the 2021 Golden Tripod Award, one of Taiwan’s most prestigious literary honors. She is a writer of fiction and pop culture criticism. King, who holds both Taiwanese and U.S. citizenship, won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers in 2018. Her 2024 translation of Taiwan Travelogue also won the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature..."
👇🏿
https://www.britannica.com/question/Who-won-the-2026-International-Booker-Prize
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"...An upcoming live-translation tool from T-Mobile will require no new software or even a phone that can do anything more than connect to that carrier’s 5G network. But it may demand a little more trust in the network and the humans behind it.
That’s because the Live Translation service that T-Mobile announced Wednesday employs an agentic AI platform hosted on its “5G Advanced” network to serve as a real-time interpreter of 50-plus languages. In fewer words: The network is the computer, or in this case the protocol droid.
“When language gets in the way, the network gets reduced to just a signal—and that’s not who we are,” T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan said in a statement.
To use Live Translation, one person on a call needs to be on T-Mobile’s 5G network and then press or tap 87 to activate it. That service-code interface preserves compatibility with feature phones; it also doesn’t risk having a voice-driven interface detect a wake word that nobody actually said, a problem that Amazon, Apple, and Google have run into with smart speakers and personal-assistant apps."
https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/163098/tmobile-debuts-ai-backed-live-language-translation-beta-no-app-needed
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"What challenges have there been in Stockholm in reaching out to groups whose first language is not Swedish with information about COVID-19 and vaccination?
The Covid-19 pandemic brought the need for broadly inclusive health information into sharp focus. It became clear early on that people with a migrant background and a low level of integration into Swedish society were over-represented among those infected and those who died. Shortcomings in how official information has been adapted to the needs and living conditions of these target groups have been highlighted as a contributing factor to why they have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic.
The project is based on the premise that there is a need to ground health and crisis communication in an ongoing dialogue with the various target groups, in order to identify their specific needs for information that is relevant and comprehensible. What challenges have there been in Stockholm in reaching out with information about COVID-19 and vaccination to groups whose first language is not Swedish? What experiences do residents and civil society organisations in the multicultural areas of Järva and Södertälje have of information about COVID-19 and vaccination?
In a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, researchers at the Transcultural Centre and Uppsala University have, since 2022, been monitoring and analysing how Region Stockholm, in collaboration with a range of other societal actors, worked to disseminate up-to-date and target-group-specific health and crisis information during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is based on focus group interviews and in-depth individual interviews with staff who have been involved at various levels in the region’s health communication work and strategy, representatives of civil society, and residents of Järva and Södertälje.
The authors of the policy brief are Mattias Strand, Senior Consultant at the Transcultural Centre and Associate Professor at Karolinska Institutet, Sofie Bäärnhielm, associate professor, registered doctor, specialist in psychiatry, Baidar Al-Ammari, Health Communicator at the Transcultural Centre and Soorej Jose Puthoopparambil, Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health; International Child Health and Nutrition.
The policy brief is expected to be published in autumn 2026."
https://www.delmi.se/en/ongoing/intercultural-health-and-crisis-communication-lessons-from-the-covid-19-pandemic/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
It’s not clear to me on what moral basis I would refuse publication in Putin’s Russia while signing gratefully for Trump’s America
Sarah Moss
"...Some writers refuse to be translated into the languages of people whose state representatives they disdain. This works better for national than regional or global languages. If a writer for some reason believed that the people of, say, Hungary had set themselves beyond the bounds of decency (I don’t), it would be straightforward to decline Hungarian translation and thereby deprive monolingual Hungarians of a book.
But what if you’re happy with the electorate of Spain but object to the government of Argentina? More people speak French in West Africa than in Europe, so if a writer were to refuse French translation on some political grounds (I’m sure someone has reasons) the readers of Senegal would suffer as much. Languages, like other art forms, travel.
I am skirting the issue of English, because what I decided in the end is that if I’m okay with being published in the US – and I am more than okay with that, delighted and, like many Irish households, to some extent dependent on the American market – it’s not clear to me on what moral basis I would refuse publication in Putin’s Russia while signing gratefully for Trump’s America.
I read translated literature partly because it shows me the world through windows I’ll never see. Translation invites readers to new points of view and the understanding of ideas and perspectives we don’t encounter in daily life. We might say that literary translation is by definition an act of resistance to repression and autocracy, and by depriving ourselves and others of such acts of resistance we decline an opportunity to make a (tiny) difference.
If I thought my books tended to support acts of war and nationalist expansion, I would be right not to want them in the hands of people already that way inclined, or living under the rule of leaders that way inclined. Since I don’t think that, since I think that when I write I pay attention to the love of our shared world, I don’t fear that my books will buttress oppression or justify violence into whoever’s hands they may fall.
I dislike the politics of many world leaders, including those of the nations to which I might assert belonging, and so in all likelihood do most of my readers, anglophone and otherwise.
I don’t think that power-crazed old men running big countries are likely to read literary fiction by a European woman, but if they were to do so I’m confident that it wouldn’t make them worse. I don’t think it very likely that people who already support power-crazed old men will read my books either, though if they did, maybe their minds would be just fractionally changed. It’s much more likely that the (few) people who buy and read my work in Russia are, like the happily-not-so-few who buy and read my work in the US, dismayed by and ashamed of their leaders, reading for all the reasons people read fiction – which include resistance to corrupt reality.
The answer to dangerous bigotry is more art and more communication, not less..
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/05/18/some-writers-refuse-to-be-translated-into-the-languages-of-states-they-disdain-not-me/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Now in its fourth year, the Education Scorecard (a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and faculty at Dartmouth College) provides a mixed picture of American education: a post-pandemic math rebound and early signals that comprehensive literacy reforms are beginning to pay off, but signs that middle-income districts are lagging behind.
In its assessment of literacy scores, the report found that Science of Reading reforms are making a difference––but not everywhere. The recovery in reading appears to be related to state early-literacy reforms. All of the states which improved in reading between 2022 and 2025 were implementing comprehensive science of reading reforms (DC, IN, KY, MD, MN, MS, LA, and TN).
None of the states which had delayed literacy reforms as of January 2024 improved in reading between 2022 and 2025 (CA, GA, HI, MA, NH, NJ, RI, SD, WA, and WI). Nevertheless, many states which were implementing multiple elements of Science of Reading reforms have yet to turn around (e.g., AZ, FL, and NE). Evidence-based reading reform may be a necessary but insufficient path to improvement.
“The pandemic was the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” said Professor Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. “The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives. In this report, we highlight the work of a small group of state leaders who have started digging out by changing how students learn to read, and 108 local school districts that are finding ways to get students learning again. The recovery of U.S. education has begun. But it’s up to the rest of us to spread it.”
Professor Sean Reardon, faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and developer of the Stanford Education Data Archive, said, “From the early 1990s through 2013, public elementary and middle school students’ math and reading skills improved dramatically––by more than two grade levels in math, for example––and racial/ethnic achievement disparities narrowed. That shows that we can improve our public schools and equalize educational opportunity. But we haven’t been doing much of that for the last decade. It’s time now to make our public schools once again the engine of the American Dream.”"
https://languagemagazine.com/2026/05/20/science-of-reading-linked-to-improvements/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"La filière bretonne de l’école de L’immaculée se maintient
Les élèves de la filière breton à l’école de L’Immaculée. | ÉCOLE DE L’IMMACULÉE
Ouest-France
Publié le 15/05/2026 à 05h25
Il y a six ans, l’école de L’Immaculée inaugurait sa filière en langue bretonne. Pour un apprentissage cohérent du breton, nous avions fait le choix de ne prendre que deux classes, petites et moyennes sections. Nous faisions le pari de ne pas affaiblir la filière monolingue pour la filière bilingue. Pari réussi , se réjouit le chef d’établissement, François Thiébaut. Et cette année, les élèves de la première classe arrivent au terme de leur cycle, en classe de CM2.
« Les élèves de cette filière ont un esprit coopératif »
Les familles des enfants inscrits dans cette filière ne parlent pas breton. Elles sont attachées à la région et considèrent cet enseignement comme une richesse culturelle , constate Samuel Le Pottier, parent d’élève et président de l’antenne locale de l’association Divaskell. Laquelle soutient la filière bretonne et pourvoit ses besoins spécifiques (animation, matériel pédagogique…). Une réflexion est en cours avec le chef d’établissement du collège Saint-Yves pour poursuivre dès l’entrée au collège , envisage-t-il.
Pour ces élèves, 50 % du temps scolaire est en breton, réparti tout au long de la semaine, en matinée ou après-midi selon l’enseignant. Cette pédagogie implique une gestion différente de celle pour des classes multiniveaux. C’est à la fois une force, liée à la compétence des enseignants, et une difficulté, pour la gestion des emplois du temps, explique le directeur de l’école. Nous constatons que les élèves de cette filière ont un esprit coopératif, ont créé du lien entre eux. L’apprentissage facilité des langues se double d’une dimension humaine.
Soixante-trois enfants sont actuellement inscrits soit quarante-deux familles. La volonté actuelle est de maintenir une filière équilibrée avec trois classes, soit une classe par cycle... "
https://www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/mordelles-35310/mordelles-la-filiere-bretonne-de-lecole-de-limmaculee-se-maintient-126c2120-2cd9-4198-b915-3a72937f4a11
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Kenyan startup will this week attempt to run production-grade artificial intelligence on a US$5 server, one of several homegrown ventures competing for investor attention as East Africa’s largest technology event opens in Nairobi on Tuesday.
AI EVERYTHING KENYA X GITEX KENYA 2026 runs 20–21 May at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, drawing more than 100 investors from over 20 countries managing a combined US$50 billion in assets. The event arrives as Kenya recorded US$1.04 billion in technology investment in 2025, a 72 percent increase year-on-year.
Among the exhibitors, Aphorion Labs will demonstrate HeatherDB, billed as the world’s first natively intelligent database, running on a Raspberry Pi and a US$5 server, a direct challenge to the assumption that competitive AI requires expensive GPU infrastructure. Founder Edwin Nguthiru said the company is positioning Africa as a producer, not just a consumer, of foundational AI systems.
Signvrse, which has developed an AI-powered sign language accessibility platform using 3D avatar technology, will also exhibit. The Kenyan startup combines speech recognition, natural language processing, and generative AI to help Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities access healthcare, government, and education services. It was selected into Google.org’s Generative AI Accelerator cohort in 2025."
Startups Bring US$5 Server Intelligence and Sign Language Tech to GITEX Nairobi https://techtrendske.co.ke/2026/05/19/startups-bring-us5-server-intelligence-and-sign-language-tech-to-gitex-nairobi/
#metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
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"Joana Urtasun '22 Publishes Translation of Poetry Collection, 'Between Fish Scales'
By Carly Polistina
May 18, 2026
Joana Urtasun '22 has published a translation of Between Fish Scales by Basque poet Leire Bilbao. The collection, published by World Poetry Books, marks Urtasun’s first book as a translator and Bilbao's English language debut.
Urtasun grew up between Basque and the UK, making her the perfect candidate to translate Bilbao’s work. Writer Kirmen Uribe said of the collection, “If Sharon Olds dreamed in Basque, her dreams might sound like Leire Bilbao.”
“Leire Bilbao’s poems, in Joana Urtasun’s English, are cadenced flows from a fluid economy of birth, motherhood, water and blood, of food from the oven and smells of sea," said Poet Erín Moure.
The translation and publication of Between Fish Scales was supported by the Etxepare Basque Institute, an organization dedicated to enhancing “the international presence and visibility of the Basque language and contemporary Basque creativity, to promote international cooperation and to foster exchange and communication between creators, professionals, stakeholders and public institutions.” The book also received a grant from Spain’s Ministry of Culture, through the General Directory of Books, Comics, and Reading.
According to the publisher, the poetry collection explores the depths of femininity, and, through her use of language, Bilbao can expertly, “turn a mother into a mollusk, an eye into a buoy, and a newborn into a thief in the span of a moment.”
Urtasun is a writer and translator based in New York. She received her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine, METAL Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal, among others, and she was a finalist in The Sewanee Review’s sixth poetry contest."
https://arts.columbia.edu/news/joana-urtasun-22-publishes-translation-poetry-collection-between-fish-scales
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#metaglossia_mundus