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Charles Tiayon
December 1, 2011 4:18 PM
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IATIS Regional Workshops From 2012, IATIS will be introducing a new initiative to further encourage international academic cooperation among members o...
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
A union is needed to ensure that this vital communications tool retains quality interpreters and better serves the Deaf community.
"Rochester has one of the largest per capita Deaf communities in the world. ASL interpreter education programs at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Video Relay Service (VRS) call center are among essential resources.
VRS provides the most hours of interpreting services to Deaf communities nationwide, ensuring that the Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Deaf-Blind have equal access to telecommunications services. Unfortunately, the challenges of VRS have not been addressed adequately by the companies and the FCC—and I say this as someone with 18 years of experience in working in VRS. That’s why I’m joining with my colleagues in collective organizing with the Office and Professionals Employees International Union (OPEIU). We are working to organize VRS interpreters across the United States and Puerto Rico to ensure that this vital communications tool retains quality interpreters and better serves the Deaf community.
During my years of working in VRS, I have seen an increase in concern over the deterioration in the quality of service offered. Research has explored a lack of addressing those concerns. OPEIU organizing at Sorenson and ZVRS/Purple, the two largest employers, seeks to address interpreters training and supervision to hone their ethical decision making and emotional psychological resilience. Apparently the corporate model of VRS companies renders a primary concern with the bottom line, which has from my perspective been at the expense for the well-being of interpreters and impacting VRS users.
Most VRS calls go through Z/P and Sorenson. Z/P is now owned by sprawling French multinational Teleperformance (with its own track record of misconduct), and Sorenson is owned by Ariel Investments, a Chicago-based investment firm. While it does not own a stake directly in Sorenson, the New York State Teachers Retirement System has over $340 million invested with Ariel—meaning that they should play an active role in helping us win our union. We are seeking a card check neutrality agreement, which will allow workers to organize free of management interference. This is especially important as President Trump works to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board.
I received my bachelor’s in American Sign Language Interpreter Education from RIT. My interest in supporting the development of the field led me to get a master’s in interpreting studies from Western Oregon University.
In my studies I learned that the profession has a long history of attrition due to burnout. Research-based evidence has continued to identify VRS as the setting most impacted by attrition, hurting interpreters who have a passion for the field. Initially companies hired highly experienced and skilled providers but less experienced interpreters, recent graduates and students are recruited to meet demand.
The responsibility of interpreting trauma-based calls, including but not limited to 911 calls, is one explicit example contributing to attrition. From my own experience I feel that VRS companies do not prepare interpreters for trauma-based calls. A company-hired professional to provide employee assistance assessed the situation as “unconscionable.”
Rochester can play a critical role in organizing VRS to make it better—we need as many interpreters as possible at Sorenson and Z/P to join our efforts, and we need the Deaf community to be outspoken about concerns they have with VRS. If you are an interpreter please take our survey here, and if you are a member of the Deaf community, please reach out to info@aslunion.org. I hope that by organizing to address these issues positive change can happen.
Kathleen C. Holcombe
Signed Language Interpreter
By LETTERS TO THE BEACON | September 10, 2025
https://rochesterbeacon.com/2025/09/10/vrs-interpreters-need-union-representation/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Google's powerful search tool is now available in more languages
Following its official introduction earlier this year, AI Mode in Google Search has evolved a great deal and picked up some key features over the last few updates. It's pretty clear at this point that Google wants AI Mode to be a prominent force in Search, and the company is moving forward with that ambition by adding support for five new languages.
Google announced in a blog post that AI Mode now supports five additional languages, namely Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese, with the changes also reflecting on the AI Mode support page. This takes the total number of supported languages to six (including English).
While it's a decent set of languages that covers millions of users around the world, several other languages are still missing from the list. However, it shouldn't take long for Google to remedy that in subsequent AI Mode updates...
Since Google began focusing more on AI Mode and its functionalities, there was a feeling that the company might make this the default search experience, thereby replacing Google Search. This notion gained a lot more traction over the weekend as Google's Logan Kilpatrick appeared to partially confirm that AI Mode could be the default "soon" (via Search Engine Land).
However, in response to Search Engine Land's reporting, Google VP Robby Stein suggested that it won't be the case, adding that the team is "focusing on making it easy to access AI Mode for those who want it."
This exchange occurred after Google launched the updated AI Mode URL last week (google.com/ai), offering easier access to the powerful tool. This was a minor revision, though, as AI Mode was previously available via the google.com/aimode URL.
While this episode doesn't rule out the possibility of AI Mode being the default search product in the future, it's clear there are no immediate plans for the AI-powered search experience to replace the classic Google Search. Perhaps Google can devise a way to make AI Mode the default for those who need it, while offering the traditional search experience for everyone else. But for the time being, both AI Mode and the older search experience will continue to coexist."
By Chethan Rao
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-search-ai-mode-new-languages-added/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"En Veracruz se requieren intérpretes de las 15 lenguas indígenas y 31 variantes en procesos judiciales o atención médica.
Miércoles 10 de Septiembre de 2025
Para Magdalena Hernández
Hernández, titular de la Oficina de la Representación del Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas en Veracruz (INPI), en Veracruz se requieren intérpretes de las lenguas y sus variantes que se hablan en el Estado, sobre todo en los procesos judiciales o atención médica, para que exista una buena comunicación. La funcionaria precisó que en Veracruz se hablan 15 lenguas y 31 variantes, y apenas se cuenta con un registro de 39 intérpretes que colaboran con la Fiscalía General y el Poder Judicial del Estado en los juicios, así como con la Secretaría de Salud cuando las personas reciben atención médica. Sin embargo, destacó que hacen falta muchos más para poder dar cobertura total a las necesidades que se presentan todos los días. "En el Padrón Nacional de Traductores e Intérpretes hasta el año pasado nosotros aquí en Veracruz, sólo en Veracruz, teníamos 39 intérpretes de diferentes lenguas. Lo justo es que hubiera un intérprete y un traductor para cada una de las variantes o, por lo menos de los distritos judiciales que estuvieran adscritos los intérpretes y traductores que hablan las lenguas de esos lugares", aseguró. De igual forma, destacó la necesidad de que existan defensores que conozcan la lengua y la cultura de las comunidades indígenas. Refirió que el Poder Judicial de Veracruz tiene un Padrón de Traductores e Intérpretes mismo que está inscrito en el Registro Estatal de Peritos. Concluyó que los intérpretes y traductores de los que habla son del INPI no del Poder Judicial del Estado o de la Fiscalía General del Estado."
viernes 12 de septiembre de 2025
Para Magdalena Hernández
https://www.gobernantes.com/vernota.php?id=491491
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"After 16 years of English-only support, the writing assistant now corrects grammar, rewrites paragraphs, and translates across Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.
Grammarly has launched spelling and grammar correction in 5 different languages and in-line translation across 19 different languages. The writing assistant that's helped polish English prose for 16 years now supports Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Italian. It brings the signature red underlines and one-click rewrites to languages spoken by over a billion people globally. Ailian Gan, Director of Product Management at Grammarly, says,
"Our customers have been asking for multilingual support, and we're meeting them where they are, not just in the 500,000 apps and websites where Grammarly already works, but also in the languages that they think, learn, and communicate in daily."
Grammarly mentioned in its official blog post that nearly one in five Americans speaks multiple languages. Moreover, Grammarly's 40 million daily active users regularly switch between languages throughout their workday. Until now, that meant constant platform-hopping and second-guessing whether that email to Barcelona colleagues struck the right tone.
Luke Behnke, Grammarly's VP of enterprise product, notes that some beta users discovered the new features by accident. "The rollout took some users by surprise when the familiar red lines suddenly appeared under text written in their native language," he said to The Verge. That unexpected delight speaks volumes about how long users have been waiting for this moment.
The beta release includes three key capabilities across the five new languages:
Grammar and Spelling Corrections: Those trusted red underlines now appear whether you're writing in German or Italian, catching everything from basic typos to complex grammatical errors.
Paragraph-Level Rewrites: One click transforms casual language into the same six different languages... for professional prose, maintaining the nuances that make native speakers sound, well, native.
Real-Time Translation: The platform now translates across 19 languages directly within your workflow. It needs no more copy-pasting between Google Translate tabs.
Grammarly's expansion continues with Spanish users getting advanced clarity suggestions later this year, followed by other languages in 2026. The company, fresh off acquiring productivity startup Coda and launching new AI features, plans to integrate multilingual support directly into its AI-native writing surface.
This is a technical progress and an authentic connection across linguistic boundaries. After 16 years of English-only support, Grammarly's multilingual debut feels like a long-overdue reunion. For millions who think in one language but write in another, the message is clear: your writing assistant finally speaks your language."
Arpit Dubey
September 11, 2025
https://www.mobileappdaily.com/news/grammarly-expands-5-languages
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Reflecting on Europeana’s summer translation internships
This summer, the Europeana Foundation was delighted to welcome four students from four European countries to complete internships on translation. Each student worked on translations for Europeana.eu, in total translating 65 stories of European heritage. They reflect on their experiences and what they learned.
Gábor Juhász: new insights into translation practice
My time at Europeana was one that I will never forget. It was not only a remote translation internship, but a glimpse into what my professional life might possibly look like - and that, for me, was an invaluable experience.
Next to my work translating editorial into Hungarian, during my internship I also evaluated and validated multilingual search results to support SEO. Through this work,, I realized that I was not just a translator at Europeana, but a Hungarian language expert. My skillset being so valuable allowed me to take on different tasks other than only translation, and it was an experience I am quite sure I could not get anywhere else. Despite being only a graduate student, I was treated with respect and dignity in this great amalgamation of various languages and cultures.
I also learnt that the best way for me, personally, to translate is to do blocks of four to five hours at a time, when I can truly immerse myself in the work and achieve deep focus. This was made possible by the flexible working hours provided, another benefit of this type of internship. Furthermore, I finalised my translation workflow: just write! You can always perfect text later. I also learned that if a segment proves to be too complicated, I could always skip it and come back to it later after the rest of the text is done. The same goes for editing my work: I will need the text to ‘rest’, so that when I come back to it I can take a look at it with a fresh mind.
My overall experience was extremely positive, and I am very grateful to have been able to work at Europeana, even if it was for a short period of time.
Katerina Bizirtsaki: enhancing editorial for Greek audiences
My internship was centered on translating Europeana's English articles into Greek. The themes of the texts widely varied, from architectural wonders and botanical research to literature and food myths. What made the experience even more special was the freedom to select my translation projects according to what I thought would be relevant and interesting to the Greek audience.
The primary challenge I faced was preserving the writer's original tone while ensuring the translation would feel natural and captivating to a Greek reader. Throughout this month-long internship, I not only gained valuable experience translating different themes but also explored the richness of the European cultural heritage and learned many interesting facts that I probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
One of the most rewarding parts of this internship was experiencing firsthand Europeana's multilingual and multicultural work culture. Working from Greece, I felt completely connected to a team spread all over the globe and found out how harmoniously a remote system can run. Everyone was so kind and welcoming that I immediately felt comfortable exploring, asking questions, and being creative with my translations. I am especially grateful to the Audience Engagement team, who truly made us interns feel like a part of Europeana for however short that time was. By inviting us to their weekly meetings and always explaining how things worked, I felt like I was able to delve deeper into the complexity of Europeana's vision, far beyond my specific task of translation.
It was truly an honour to offer my services as a translator to make more of the collections made available through Europeana.eu accessible to a Greek audience and to experience such a supportive work environment. This internship has not only enhanced my translation skills but also taught me how to function in a remote and multilingual workplace.
Jessica Kuster: refining translation skills
During my internship at Europeana, I had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of translation tasks (from English to German) and I can honestly say that I enjoyed every moment of it. What made this experience especially rewarding was the sheer diversity of the texts I worked on. The topics ranged from historical events and cultural heritage to more contemporary themes. This variety not only kept my work fresh and engaging but also significantly expanded my historical, cultural, and general knowledge.
One of the main professional benefits of the internship was the chance to refine my translation skills. Beyond simply transferring text from one language to another, I learned to adapt content for specific audiences, making sure the tone and style matched the needs of the readers. I also had the chance to improve my proofreading abilities, which required a keen eye for detail and a focus on linguistic accuracy and consistency.
Another exciting aspect of my work was using the content platform Contentful. Before this internship, I had never worked with this tool, but I enjoyed figuring out how it worked, and I quickly saw the advantages it offered. One major benefit was being able to see my translations directly on the website once they were published. This gave me a strong sense of accomplishment and made the process even more satisfying.
A highlight of my time at Europeana was working with such an international team. Even though the internship was fully remote, I always felt part of the group. My colleagues came from various cultural and professional backgrounds, and this exchange of knowledge and perspectives added an extra layer of depth to the experience. I was also very grateful for the support I received from my supervisors.
Mario Pueblas Madueño: the nuances of translation
My main task during this internship was to translate articles from English into Spanish. While I have experimented with different types of translation during my career, the translation of art and culture was one that I was unfamiliar with. I am grateful for the opportunity to hone my translation skills and to get a glimpse of what a corporate job can be like.
The main challenge for me was adapting to all the different topics each article discussed. I translated articles about all sorts of things: history, fashion, football, literature - the list goes on. Due to this variety, I often needed to investigate a topic further before starting the translation because of my lack of prior knowledge or in order to ‘get in the zone’ after translating something completely different in theme and tone.
I also tried to keep each author’s style present in my translations, and some articles were much more difficult in that regard because of the way they were originally written. The longest translation I completed during the internship, ‘A queer tour,’ was especially challenging. It is full of metaphors, historical references, and expressions that don’t translate well into Spanish directly, so I needed more time than usual to translate and to let the text ‘marinate’ in order to ensure that the Spanish version was a pleasant read.
One of the aspects I enjoyed the most outside of translation was the multicultural work environment and how willing to help people were. Everyone comes from different professional and personal backgrounds, and I believe that added to the dynamic nature of the whole team. The weekly team meetings allowed me to see how I was contributing to Europeana’s goals and helped me feel a valuable part of the foundation. I would especially like to thank Adrian Murphy, my supervisor."
Adrian Murphy
Europeana Collections Manager , Europeana Foundation
https://pro.europeana.eu/post/reflecting-on-europeana-s-summer-translation-internships
Un nouvel ensemble de données contenant des langues africaines devrait améliorer l'accès à l'IA pour des millions de personnes sur le continent.
"Bien que l'Afrique abrite une grande partie des langues du monde (bien plus d'un quart selon certaines estimations), beaucoup d'entre elles sont absentes du développement de l'IA.
Cela s'explique à la fois par un manque d'investissement et par le manque de données facilement accessibles.
La plupart des outils d'IA utilisés aujourd'hui, tels que Chat GPT, sont entraînés en anglais ainsi que dans d'autres langues européennes et chinoises.
Ces langues disposent d'une grande quantité de textes en ligne sur lesquels s'appuyer.
L'IA en Afrique : les experts veulent combler le fossé linguistique - BBC News Afrique"
Author,Pumza Fihlani
Role,BBC News Johannesburg
8 septembre 2025 https://share.google/KoWg1Xa8VPJUqS7qa
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The words we use to talk about nature are disappearing. Here’s why that matters.
We’ll need to do more than "touch grass" to revive them.
Kate Yoder
Senior Staff Writer
Sep 05, 2025
Once upon a time, the English language was full of stories with “blossoms,” “rivers,” and “moss.” But these words are disappearing from our vocabularies — and along with them, our connection to the natural world they describe.
A study published in the journal Earth earlier this summer found that the use of nature-related words declined more than 60 percent between 1800 and 2019. The study’s author, Miles Richardson, a psychology professor at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom, looked at 28 everyday terms related to nature, including “bud,” “meadow,” and “beak,” using a Google database that tracked the frequency of words in English-language books over time.
“These words reflect what people noticed, valued, and wrote about,” Richardson wrote in a blog post.
As part of the same study, Richardson developed a computer model to capture how people had lost touch with nature over time. The simulation played out across generations as cities grew and green space disappeared. When he compared the model’s projections to the nature-word data, he found that the two graphs matched extremely closely, with less than 5 percent error between them.
Nature is disappearing from our language and our lives
Since 1800, there’s been a sharp decline in nature-related words in English language books. It closely matches a simulation of nature–human interactions.
...
Experts have been raising the alarm over our growing disconnect to nature for decades, often by pointing to how our language has changed. In its 2007 edition, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, widely used in classrooms in the United Kingdom, removed dozens of entries related to the natural world, including “acorn,” “bluebell,” and “magpie,” to make room among its 10,000 entries for modern inventions like “blog,” “chatroom,” and “MP3 player.” The decision eventually drew sharp criticism from a group of authors led by Margaret Atwood. More than 200,000 people went on to sign a petition for the dictionary to reinstate the nature words that had gone missing.
But the editors didn’t budge, since a dictionary’s purpose is to describe language as people use it, not as we wish they did. Older dictionaries had lots of flower words because children lived in semirural environments, but that wasn’t the case anymore, the head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press explained when the words first disappeared. But the anxiety over the loss of nature language points to a bigger question, once posed by the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle: “What happens to a species that loses touch with its habitat?”
Experts say that detachment from nature is at the root of many of the environmental problems the world faces today, from biodiversity loss to climate change. “We’ve put a lot of effort into treating the symptoms of environmental crisis, rather than looking at the root causes,” Richardson said. Just as you’re more likely to help a friend than a stranger, you’re more likely to care for nature if you have a relationship with it, he said.
This disconnection hurts people, too. Spending time in nature is good for your physical and mental health, creating opportunities for exercise as well as lowering stress levels, making our brains more creative, and even improving sleep. “There is overwhelming data that nature is good for us,” said Pelin Kesebir, a social psychologist who’s a fellow at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There’s also research showing that spending time in nature as a kid tends to translate into environmental concern later in life.
To understand how our relationship with the natural world has shifted, many researchers have turned to studying the media we produce. In 2017, Kesebir and her sister identified a steady drop in references to nature in song lyrics, fiction books, and movie storylines since the 1950s. Another study found a marked decline in references in books to 134 common species names such as “bee,” “goose,” and “honeysuckle” over the course of the 20th century. Across children’s picture books and Disney films, portrayals of natural settings have been on the decline.
“When nature disappears from culture, then all these opportunities to evoke appreciation for nature, respect for nature, interest in nature — those disappear,” Kesebir said.
It’s not just we’re talking about nature less; the feelings behind those words have also changed, according to Robert Poole, a professor of English at the University of Alabama. “I want to know not how many times we say it,” he said, “but when we do invoke it, are we saying it’s beautiful, distant, deadly, savage?”
Poole has studied how the way Americans write about trees and forests has changed over the past 200 years. Nowadays, “we’re just less likely to use majestic words — ‘lofty,’ ‘stately,’ ‘noble’” — to describe forests, he said. That could be due to people spending less time around trees, or perhaps forests just aren’t as healthy or grand as they used to be.
As our language around forests became less reverent, Poole noted that people began using more scientific and economic terms to describe trees. In other words, people began viewing forests as something from which to extract value, not inspiration.
Richardson’s research found that the decrease in the use of nature words became particularly pronounced after 1850, around the time that industrialization and urbanization grew rapidly. When people move closer to cities, where concrete has covered over forests and meadows, it becomes harder to access green spaces. The other side of the coin is industrialization, where nature gets stripped for parts: forests into timber, meadows into farms. The United Kingdom is one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe. As the British Empire expanded, so did its industrial model. Research has shown that places such as Australia, the United States, and Hong Kong, all shaped by British colonization, have some of the lowest levels of connectedness to nature today.
Technology may also be a factor: Kesebir’s research tied dwindling references to nature to the spread of the TV and other entertainment on screens. Whereas previous generations may have spent their leisure time playing outside, we now spend much of our free time head-down and phones up, playing video games or scrolling TikTok.
The solution isn’t as easy as encouraging people to walk outside and “touch grass,” though that small step is still good for your mental health (no, really, researchers have studied it.) Even efforts to plant more trees and expand parks, while helpful, probably won’t be enough on their own. Richardson’s study found that the most important factor in predicting what happens next is the attitude that parents pass down to their children. As one generation loses its connection with nature, their children begin life with lower levels of connection, a self-perpetuating cycle.
Jackie Morris, a British illustrator and author, has seen that problem firsthand. Inspired by the controversy with the Oxford Junior Dictionary, she had the idea to write a children’s book highlighting the missing words. The Lost Words, illustrated by Morris and authored by the nature writer Robert Macfarlane, turned into a bestseller and “cultural phenomenon” after its release in 2017. With it, Morris hoped to re-enchant kids with the plants, birds, and critters that had fallen out of their vocabularies. When the book first came out, Morris recalls, TV crews went into schools and asked kids to identify the names of these living things by their pictures. “What I said was, ‘Well, you should have taken them ’round your own office, really, because the reason kids don’t know is because the parents don’t know,’” Morris said.
For Morris, addressing our disconnect with nature starts with what she calls “rewilding our imagination.” She remembers, as a child, recognizing birds for the first time, seeing the bright light in their eyes and desperately wanting wings herself.
“Watching birds was just such a joy to me when I was young,” she said. “And it shocks me that there are many people who just don’t see them.”
Grist is the only award-winning newsroom focused on exploring equitable solutions to climate change. It’s vital reporting made entirely possible by loyal readers like you. At Grist, we don’t believe in paywalls. Instead, we rely on our readers to pitch in what they can so that we can continue bringing you our solution-based climate news."
https://grist.org/language/nature-word-language-disappear-culture/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"TOWARD AN INCLUSIVE APPROACH TO LINGUA-CULTURALLY DIVERSE STUDENTS’ LANGUAGE IN SYSTEMATIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS RESEARCH
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) fundamentally embraces inclusivity, as it legitimizes different language varieties as contextualized, socially contingent categories along a horizontal continuum. It also conceptualizes grammar as a set of linguistic resources for meaning-making, rather than as rigid rules that dictate grammatical “correctness.” However, much SFL-based research on lingua-culturally diverse students’ language use has tended to rely on monolingual native speaker norms. This tendency often reinforces deficit discourses by portraying students as linguistically deficient or lacking, clashing with the increasingly recognized perspective of translanguaging, which affirms the legitimacy of students’ language practices on their own terms. This article critically examines how much of SFL-based research on students’ language use reflects a monolingual orientation and then explores how insights from translanguaging can inform more inclusive approaches to studying student language within SFL scholarship. The article argues that moving away from external monolingual standards in analyzing and assessing students’ language use, and shifting the analytical focus from formal “correctness” to meaning-making, can help re-center SFL’s original commitment to inclusivity. To illustrate how such analytical and methodological adjustments can be implemented in research, it reviews an SFL study on Chinese postgraduate students’ use of grammatical metaphor that adopts the approach of treating learner language in its own right. The article also discusses the benefits of this inclusive approach in light of recent trends in applied linguistics and its implications for future SFL research in particular, and language-related research more broadly."
August 2025
Quantum Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities
6(4):56-68
DOI: 10.55197/qjssh.v6i4.739
License: CC BY 4.0
SONG HU
M. H. Chau
Nurul huda Binti Hamzah
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395127689_TOWARD_AN_INCLUSIVE_APPROACH_TO_LINGUA-CULTURALLY_DIVERSE_STUDENTS%27_LANGUAGE_IN_SYSTEMATIC_FUNCTIONAL_LINGUISTICS_RESEARCH
A federal judge ordered a shake-up of Google's search engine in an attempt to curb the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly while rebuffing the U.S. government's attempt to break up the company and impose other restraints.
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Afrique : des IA en langues locales pour réduire la fracture numérique
INTELLIGENCE ARTIFICIELLE
Des initiatives sont en cours en Afrique du Sud, au Kenya et au Nigeria pour créer plus d’outils d’IA en langues africaines. Des chercheurs ont déjà enregistré plus de 9 000 heures de discours local afin d’élargir l’accès à cette technologie révolutionnaire sur le continent.
Alors que l’utilisation des modèles de langage basés sur l’intelligence artificielle (IA) explose, avec de nombreux sites web alimentés par l’IA intégrés dans la vie quotidienne, certains en Afrique craignent que leurs populations soient exclues des logiciels principalement occidentalisés.
Malgré la richesse linguistique de l’Afrique, où plus d’un quart des langues mondiales seraient présentes selon certaines estimations, cette diversité est encore peu représentée dans le développement de l’IA.
La principale raison ? un manque d’investissement et de données accessibles. La majorité des outils d’IA, comme ChatGPT, sont entraînés sur des textes en anglais ou dans d’autres langues européennes et chinoises, qui disposent d’immenses bases de données en ligne.
Or, de nombreuses langues africaines, principalement orales, ne disposent pas de suffisamment de textes écrits pour alimenter l’apprentissage automatique, ce qui limite leur intégration dans ces technologies. Résultat : des millions de personnes sont laissées de côté.
Une avancée majeure : un jeu de données unique
Les chercheurs ont récemment publié ce qui serait le plus grand ensemble de données linguistiques pour les langues africaines. « Nous pensons en nos langues, rêvons en elles et interprétons le monde à travers elles. Si la technologie ne reflète pas cette réalité, une partie de la population sera laissée pour compte », explique le professeur Vukosi Marivate de l’Université de Pretoria, qui a pris part au projet.
L’initiative « African Next Voices » a rassemblé linguistes et informaticiens pour créer des jeux de données adaptés à l’IA dans 18 langues africaines. Bien que cela ne couvre qu’une fraction des plus de 2 000 langues parlées sur le continent, les participants espèrent étendre cette base dans le futur.
En deux ans, ils ont enregistré 9 000 heures de discours dans des contextes quotidiens liés à l’agriculture, à la santé et à l’éducation, à Kenya, au Nigeria, et en Afrique du Sud. Parmi les langues enregistrées figurent le kikuyu et le dholuo au Kenya, le haoussa et le yoruba au Nigeria, ainsi que l’isiZulu et le tshivenda en Afrique du Sud.
« Il faut une base de départ. C’est ce que fait African Next Voices. Ensuite, d’autres pourront construire dessus et innover », précise le professeur Marivate. La collecte a été rendue possible grâce à une bourse de 2,2 millions de dollars de la Fondation Gates. Les données seront en accès libre pour permettre aux développeurs de créer des outils de traduction, de transcription ou d’interaction en langues africaines.
Des innovations concrètes
Plusieurs exemples illustrent déjà l’impact potentiel de ces technologies. À Rustenburg, en Afrique du Sud, la fermière Kelebogile Mosime utilise une application appelée AI-Farmer. Elle reconnaît plusieurs langues locales, comme le sotho, l’isiZulu et l’afrikaans, pour lui venir en aide dans ses tâches agricoles.
« En tant que cultivatrice débutante, je fais face à beaucoup de défis », explique-t-elle. « Grâce à cette application, je peux poser des questions en Setswana, ma langue maternelle, et obtenir des réponses utiles. C’est précieux pour moi, surtout en zone rurale où l’accès à la technologie est limité. »
Une autre startup sud-africaine, Lelapa AI, conçoit des outils en langues africaines destinés à des banques et des télécoms. Sa PDG, Pelonomi Moiloa, déplore que les options actuelles soient très restreintes. « L’anglais est la langue de l’opportunité. Pour beaucoup, ne pas le parler peut signifier manquer des services essentiels comme la santé, la banque ou l’aide gouvernementale. On veut changer cela », affirme-t-elle.
Selon le professeur Marivate, ces initiatives ne relèvent pas seulement d’un enjeu économique ou pratique, mais touchent aussi à la justice sociale. Sans un effort concerté en faveur des langues locales, certains craignent que des inégalités linguistiques ne s’accentuent, laissant derrière eux une partie importante de la population africaine face aux évolutions numériques."
https://fr.africanews.com/2025/09/05/afrique-des-ia-en-langues-locales-pour-reduire-la-fracture-numerique/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Art of Proofreading in the Digital Era: Challenges and Technologies That Work
Proofreading is an indispensable element of crafting any paperwork. It helps to achieve clarity and consistency and make content error-free and engaging. The impact of digitalisation, which has seeped into all areas, has caused polishing texts to evolve, with new approaches being introduced. Among other things, these include the integration of AI instruments. And as much as some of us wouldn’t like the artificial intelligence to find a place in this niche, it may come in handy.
Nowadays, technological advancements and traditional methods blend to simplify the process of proofreading to achieve top-quality texts. However, certain challenges still remain.
How Proofreading Has Changed Over The Years
Proofreading stands behind every scientific article, social media post, or magazine column one can come across. The earliest mentions of text checking date back to the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Greece. In that time, people relied on rudimentary knowledge to transcribe texts properly.
The times have changed, and so has the role of proofreading in publishing texts. During the Industrial Revolution, the importance of delivering information consistently and accurately was reconsidered. A few decades ago, making content went digital, and people started using computer software for checking errors and typos.
And nowadays, digital proofreading is having a second birth due to the integration of online checkers based on AI. These revolutionise the industry, allowing us to review texts faster to keep up with the pace of the modern world.
AI Proofreading Tools That May Come In Handy
AI instruments are already integrated into almost any sphere of human life: education, medicine, customer support and even new UK online casinos. Writing and publishing were among the pioneers in utilising software based on artificial intelligence. Here are popular tools for automatic error detection and correction that may come in handy and facilitate a proofreader’s work:
Grammarly. It’s one of the basic instruments for checking grammar, spelling, and punctuation. No repetitive word or incorrect verb form will hide from it. Additionally, it helps to boost the text clarity and accuracy. This writing assistant points out confusing or overly long sentences and gives suggestions on how to change them into simpler alternatives. Another strong side of Grammarly is adjusting text to the style one needs: casual, formal, academic, etc.
QuillBot. Except for correcting the same text aspects as Grammarly does, QuillBot is known for its paraphrasing tool. While its grammar checker is a bit weaker, QB works better for improving text flow and reducing redundancy. If you want to make your text sound more neutral or shorten long writing while keeping the key ideas, this is the way to go. Many use the above-mentioned tool jointly for better results.
Hemingway Editor. This software was inspired by the style of the famous writer. Hemingway Editor is a valuable aid in enhancing the flow and directness of written texts. It does not offer efficient grammar checks and does not paraphrase sentences. Instead, the tool helps reach good readability and make content accessible for readers. It highlights sentences that are hard to read, like confusing structures of passive voice or unnecessary adverbs. Each text gets a score: from 1 to 9 (easy level), 10 to 15 (difficult one and needs improvement), or post-graduate (too complex text or sentence). The desktop app allows people to use the editor without Wi-Fi.
This area of the market is evolving with more companies releasing AI-based solutions to simplify editing. But proofreaders must remember that all these tools are here to complement human efforts, not to replace them.
Common Challenges in Digital Proofreading
Proofreading software could seem like a solution that revolutionises the process of polishing texts and even replaces the human eye. However, there are still some challenges which prevent facilitating tools from becoming a win-win way to edit writings:
Auxiliary instruments and programs cannot understand the context properly. Hence, the suggested corrections may be inappropriate.
Accurate facts and verified data may be corrected by the digital proofreaders (inability to do the quality fact-checking).
Prolonged text reading may cause eye strain that results in missing some significant errors and typos.
Excessive emphasis on language rules leads to marking the word combinations and sentences that are actually correct.
There’s no way to get quality feedback on suggested corrections from proofreading software.
Text-checking tools may make the text lose personalisation and the unique tone of voice maintained by the writer.
Well, the key pitfalls here relate to creativity and contextual understanding, which is yet difficult for digital software.
Traditional Techniques That Still Work
The abundance of tools makes people do less work themselves. However, a range of proven methods for text-checking is still powerful enough. Some of these are:
Read out loud to locate the style inconsistencies.
Read the text backwards to find spelling errors.
Print the text on paper to notice the mistakes and typos.
Check for one type of error in a proofreading session.
The human eye can still play an important role in publishing the written work. At the same time, overlooking endless opportunities provided by AI tools is the road to nowhere. People and technologies should go hand in hand if we want the content to adhere to the highest quality standards."
https://redditchstandard.co.uk/lifestyle/proofreading-in-the-digital-era-tools-and-challenges/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Interembodiment and Language: Deaf Language Practices as Resistance
•Language is both a vehicle for interembodiment and an interembodied process.
•Signing animates bodily entanglements with others differently than speaking.
•Semiotic repertoires are co-constructed and shared among and across individuals.
•Informal interpreting helps deaf immigrants navigate the immigration system.
Abstract
This article approaches language as both a vehicle for interembodiment and as a fundamentally interembodied process. Drawing from approximately 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with deaf immigrants in the northeast United States, this article explores how interembodiment emerges through language forms and practices; and how deaf language practices entangle interlocutors, sometimes bodily, with others. As intelligibility can only be achieved relationally, this article likewise asserts language as a fundamentally interembodied process. Meaning in communicative encounters is made among and across interactions (not individually). Given the inherent interdependence of language, I detail how deaf immigrants co-construct meaning with family members and friends through practices of informal interpreting and how, through informal interpreting, deaf immigrants can better navigate an immigration system that is ill designed to address their complex communication access needs. In this way, interdependent and embodied deaf language practices become a form of resistance to policies and procedures that traditionally marginalize or exclude those whose bodyminds are considered non-normative."
Erin Mellett
Cite
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118544
Get rights and content
Highlights
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953625008755
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"WHEN it comes to African literature, translation has mostly meant translating work from European languages into African ones. Translation from African languages into English has been long overdue.
Now it appears that a shift in the movement of stories across languages is underway. Works first written and published in African languages are increasingly being translated into English for a wider readership.
As an academic specialising in African literature and publishing, I am optimistic about the launch of a new book series African Language Literatures in Translation by the University of Georgia Press edited by US-based academics Christopher Ouma and Alexander Fyfe.
The Mad is one of the inaugural titles in the series. It’s a translation of Zimbabwean author Ignatius Mabasa’s much loved novel Mapenzi/Yhe Mad. The Mad has been jointly released in the UK and Zimbabwe by Carnelian Heart Publishing and amaBooks in July 2025.
Mapenzi is written in Shona, but the ambitious series aims to translate a range of significant African works from other languages too, including Kiswahili and Sesotho.
This helps shift the terrain of African literature. It allows English readers to encounter African novels as they were first imagined, in the rhythms, idioms, and sensibilities of African languages. It helps counter the erasure of African languages in world literature.
When Mabasa’s debut novel Mapenzi appeared in 1999, it was recognised as a landmark text in Shona literature. Shona is a Bantu language widely spoken in Zimbabwe.
Mapenzi tells the story of a disillusioned young war veteran who becomes the uncensored witness to the false promises of independence in Zimbabwe. He witnesses the collapse of social values, and the madness of a society trapped between hope and despair.
The novel’s daring style and unruly humour drew comparisons with Dambudzo Marechera, Zimbabwe’s literary provocateur. And with the stylistic innovations of Charles Mungoshi, the great craftsman of both Shona and English prose.
Mapenzi quickly won accolades and was adopted as a school text for a generation that came of age at the turn of the millennium. Since then, Mabasa has become a central figure in the promotion of indigenous African writing.
His commitment and investment was shown when he became the first academic to write and submit a PhD in Shona at Rhodes University in South Africa. Mabasa is also a translator in his own right and most recently he helped translate Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions into Shona.
His career has been a reminder that languages such as Shona are not minor, but vibrant mediums for complex thought and artistic innovation.
Now, more than two decades later, Mapenzi can be read in English for the first time.
The Mad
The Mad was translated by J Tsitsi Mutiti and most unfortunately there is no information about her in the book - not even a cursory internet search yields little to nothing.
In works like this, that cross language, culture and geography, the translator plays a crucial role, not just in the text’s language but in shaping its tone, context and accessibility. A translator’s note would have provided insight into the challenges and decisions involved in the process. Instead, the translator and the process of translation remain invisible.
This lack of acknowledgement overlooks the labour and interpretive skill required to bring such a work to life in another language. The hope is that future editions will correct this omission. Leaving it unaddressed risks diminishing the very cross-cultural understanding that translation seeks to foster.
Translating Mapenzi is no small task. Mabasa’s prose brims with poetry, satire and linguistic play. Its cadences are deeply rooted in Shona idiom. The novel’s innovative structure includes chapters titled after characters, abstract concepts, places and song lyrics, pushing the boundaries of form and style in Shona literature.
In her translation Mutiti meets this challenge with remarkable skill, sustaining Mabasa’s lyricism and rhythm without smoothing out its texture. The result is a translation that feels alive, attentive both to the sense and the spirit of the original.
That said, there are occasional lapses into flatly literal translation, particularly in the dialogue. These moments feel more like direct transpositions from the Shona than deliberate stylistic choices in English. As a result, the translation at times struggles to assert a voice of its own.
Translation as decolonisation
Nonetheless, the publication of The Mad highlights how translation in African literature is not just a tool for accessibility. It is also a critical, interpretive and archival practice that reshapes the canon, its circulations and readerships. The Mad contributes to African literature’s global visibility and intellectual vitality.
For decades, the global image of African literature has been shaped largely by writers who chose or were compelled to write in colonial languages.
Kenyan author and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who recently passed away, has been one of the most famous advocates for writing in African languages. He insisted that the struggle for decolonisation could not be separated from the struggle over language. Yet, as he himself often admitted, African-language writing has remained marginal in the circuits of publishing and translation.
A series like this aims to help change that. Other forthcoming titles include Zanzibari writer Ali Hilal Ali’s Mmeza Fupa (translated as The Swallowers of Bones by Meg Arenbeg), Kenyan novelist and sociologist Katama Mkangi’s Walenisi (translated as They Are Us by Richard Prins), Lesotho writer and teacher Ntseliseng Masechele Khaketla’s Left Behind (translated by Makafane Tsepang Ntlamelle), and Halfani Sudy’s Kirusi Kipya (translated as New Virus by Jay Boss Rubin).
In this context, The Mad is more than an English version of a Shona classic. It is part of an invitation to rethink what African literature is and where it comes from. Mabasa’s novel, in Mutiti’s supple translation, demonstrates how much vitality lies in the vernacular imagination, and how translation can open doors without erasing the local textures of language.
With The Mad, a new and vital moment begins.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is assistant professor at the Harvard University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license."
Culture / 2 September 2025
Translation as decolonisation
As African novels are being translated to English in a bold new trend, TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU puts into wider context the publication of Ignatius Mabasa’s The Mad (Mapenzi)
TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/translation-decolonisation
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"September 8th marks International Literacy Day, and Tekeyla Friday’s journey is a testament to the power of literacy to transform lives. As a resident of southwest Saskatchewan and a Métis artist, Tekeyla has proven that the quest for increased literacy, for oneself and for others, can take you far.
Tekeyla is a multi-talented individual – a puppeteer, children’s book author and publisher, and stop-motion and Claymation artist.
Her struggles with reading, including dyslexia, have shaped her career in the arts and literacy.
Currently working on a stop-motion project to be completed in time for International Literacy Day, Tekeyla reflects on how literacy became crucial to her life as a young girl.
Health issues and dyslexia presented challenges at various times in her life, but Tekeyla found that literacy offered a pathway to a better and changed life.
She credits her love of learning and literacy to a teacher from her youth, Roberta Coulter, who recognized her reading issues.
Her favourite childhood book, “Boney Legs” (a children’s fairy tale), sparked her interest in fantasy books, which she enjoys writing about today.
Tekeyla’s increased love of literacy led her to pursue post-secondary education, first in the Maple Creek region and then in Swift Current.
Her journey also took her to the Chinook Regional Library, where she volunteered and eventually worked.
There, she helped with the summer reading program, which aimed to keep “brains active over the summer” and make children “more ready” for school in the fall.
Tekeyla emphasizes the importance of literacy and reading for children as they grow up.
She believes that reading time is “quality bonding time” with parents or caregivers.
When asked about her favorite book among her own written works, Tekeyla replies that she can’t choose, as “each one has unique characteristics.”
While acknowledging the role of technology in literacy learning, Tekeyla stresses the importance of moderation.
She notes that technology has its place in society, but books remain her passion.
Unlike technology, books have no password to log in, no charging required, and can go anywhere with you.
As a reader, you can be transported anywhere, and that’s the magic of books."
Literacy can shape your world, no matter where you’re from
by MBC News | Sep 2, 2025
By Shaynee Modien
https://www.mbcradio.com/2025/09/literacy-can-shape-your-world-no-matter-where-youre-from
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"National Deaf Awareness Month: Meet Joy Harris, the Eagles' sign language interpreter
Sep 01, 2025 at 05:00 AM
Chris McPherson
Joy Harris
Before the start of the 2018 season, the Eagles hung the first Super Bowl Championship banner in franchise history.
They also introduced a sign language interpreter for the National Anthem at home games.
"The Eagles were looking to lead the way in creating a more inclusive experience for fans, and I knew right away I wanted to be a part of that," said Joy Harris, who has held the role since its inception. "It felt meaningful, not just as a professional role, but as a chance to help open the gameday experience to more people in a very impactful way.
"So now, I have the privilege of interpreting the National Anthem at every home game. It's beyond rewarding to play a small part in making the game more accessible for everyone. It is an honor to be part of the Eagles family."
Harris is a nationally certified sign language interpreter. She doesn't have anyone who is Deaf in her family. Instead, she felt called to become a sign language interpreter.
"As a little girl, I thought sign language was cool. Fast forward to college, when I was in my undergrad, I took my first sign language course at Temple and loved it," Harris said. "After graduation, I continued to learn sign language and enrolled in an interpreter program. I love my job. I can't imagine myself doing anything different.
"The most fulfilling part of my job is leveling the playing field so Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people can participate 100 percent. We interpreters work to break down barriers, communication barriers. As you know, sign language interpreters are more commonly seen in media and at different events. Think about what you do as a hearing person every day – doctor appointments, business meetings, births, weddings. Deaf people want to participate in those fully, just like you do. Interpreters facilitate communication so that Deaf people can participate fully. We see the most private and intimate parts of Deaf people's lives, and that's not to be taken lightly."
No two days are the same for Harris as a sign language interpreter because of the innumerable environments and situations she works in. She certainly never envisioned herself on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the Parade of Champions in February following the Super Bowl LIX victory over the Chiefs. As National Deaf Awareness Month kicks off, Harris wants to help quell the myths and misconceptions regarding the Deaf community.
"The list is endless," Harris said. "I wish the hearing world knew what a rich, linguistic culture and history the Deaf community has. That the hearing world didn't look at them as broken or impaired. Deaf people can do everything you and I can do except hear.""
https://www.philadelphiaeagles.com/news/national-deaf-awareness-month-eagles-sign-language-interpreter-joy-harris
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The Jamaica Association for the Deaf (JAD) has taken issue with the quality of sign language interpretation provided during Tuesday's economy debate.
Executive Director of the JAD, Kimberley Marriott-Blake, says members of the deaf community were not adequately served.
"There was definitely an issue and it became a lot more evident as persons who, as they were saying online, with no knowledge of sign language were seeing where the interpreter was just not able to keep up. Respectfully, you are in a situation where you're trying to condense a very heavy response in two minutes and ensuring that the community is not disadvantaged in getting that information. And it is quite a bit of information coming at an interpreter very quickly and you don't want to misrepresent what's being said in the same way that verbally you wouldn't want to misrepresent what is being said by any individual presenting themselves in a debate," he noted.
She pointed to the need for exposure to the language and terminologies to effectively communicate.
"A lot of the interpreting skill is something that's harnessed do over time. It's something that you don't necessarily get in certain spaces unless you have that experience in those spaces. And particularly when it comes on to certain jargon, development and political jargon, and the way that even in politics, certain things are said, but a hearing person knows that's in jest or it implies a particular thing. You have to ensure that that is expressed very clearly for the community. And that I think is where the challenge really was," suggested Mrs. Marriott-Blake."
https://radiojamaicanewsonline.com/local/jad-takes-issue-with-quality-of-sign-language-interpretation-in-economy-debate
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Google Translate is making it easier to have a back-and-forth conversation and practice a new language...
The first tool, for live translations, lets you have a back-and-forth conversation with someone by surfacing audio and text translations as you speak, so you can easily follow along. Advanced Gemini models allow for support of more than 70 languages, including Arabic, French, Hindi, Korean and Spanish. Google says its voice and speech recognition models are trained to isolate sounds, so the live translation feature should also work in noisy environments like an airport or a cafe.
I gave the Arabic translation a spin, and it did a good job picking up on even unconventional Iraqi slang. Judging from my intermediate knowledge of Spanish, it also translated my rambling well. I also like that Translate offers both text and audio translations, so you can go with whichever medium you prefer or revisit what was said via the on-screen text.
A second feature is designed to help you practice a new language. You can choose whether you currently have a basic, intermediate or advanced understanding of the language you're learning and then set a goal. For example, I noted that I wanted to practice Spanish so I could get around the city and have casual conversations (hearkening to my days at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona when I ambitiously dusted off my high school Spanish).
Translate will then surface recommended scenarios like asking for the nearest bus stop, greeting a neighbor or chatting about your hobbies. You can then choose either a listening or speaking exercise. In the listening sessions, you'll tap the words you hear, and in the speaking one, you can practice having a back-and-forth conversation. The language learning feature is currently available for English speakers practicing Spanish and French, and for Spanish, French and Portuguese speakers practicing English.
"These updates are made possible by advancements in AI and machine learning," Google Product Manager Matt Sheets said in a blog post. "As we continue to push the boundaries of language processing and understanding, we are able to serve a wider range of languages and improve the quality and speed of translations. And with our Gemini models in Translate, we've been able to take huge strides in translation quality, multimodal translation, and text-to-speech capabilities."
This comes as Google adds other language-specific features like Voice Translate on the Pixel 10 series. That feature can also translate what someone is saying in real time, but while chatting on the phone, and goes the extra mile of mimicking the sound of their voice, instead of superimposing a robotic one. Gemini Live can also have a back-and-forth conversation in a handful of languages. And last year, Google Translate added 110 new languages thanks to AI advancements.
How to access Google Translate's new tools
The live translate and language learning capabilities in Google Translate are rolling out now on iOS and Android. Live translations are currently limited to users in the US, India and Mexico..."
Abrar Al-Heeti
Aug. 28, 2025 2:25 p.m. PT
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/googles-ai-live-translation-and-learning-tools-are-here-how-to-use-them/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
A new study shows that genetic evidence of historical contact between populations reveals consistent patterns of language change.
"They found that in instances of genetic contact, there was an increased probability of linguistic sharing in unrelated languages of 4-9%...
Genetics Reveal How Human Contact Shapes Language Evolution
FeaturedGeneticsNeuroscience·August 30, 2025
Summary: A new study shows that genetic evidence of historical contact between populations reveals consistent patterns of language change. By combining genetic data with linguistic databases, researchers found that unrelated languages became 4–9% more similar after human contact.
These exchanges occurred globally, across both ancient migrations and recent colonial encounters, highlighting that social dynamics often override linguistic constraints. The findings reveal that contact can drive both convergence and divergence, reshaping how we understand the evolution of languages.
Key Facts:
Genetics as a Tool: Over 125 instances of population contact were traced through genetic evidence.
Consistent Convergence: Languages tend to become 4–9% more similar after contact, regardless of location.
Unexpected Divergence: In some cases, groups emphasized differences, making languages less alike.
Source: University of Zurich
Throughout human history, there have been many instances where two populations came into contact – especially in the past few thousand years because of large-scale migrations as a consequence of conquests, colonialization, and, more recently, globalization.
During these encounters, not only did populations exchange genetic material, but also cultural elements.
When populations interact, they may borrow technologies, beliefs, practices, and also, crucially, aspects of language.
With this, sounds, words or grammatical patterns can be exchanged from one language to the other. For example, English borrowed “sausage” from French after the Norman conquests, while French later borrowed “sandwich” from English.
However, studying these linguistic exchanges can be challenging due to the limited historical records of human contacts, especially on a global scale. As a result, our understanding of how languages evolved over time through such interactions remains incomplete.
To address this gap, researchers are now turning to genetics, which keeps the record of ancestral contacts.
In this new study, a research group from the University of Zurich is using for the first time genetic evidence of historical mixing between populations to investigate the effects of contact on language, and to uncover the systemic patterns of language change.
Using genetics to solve linguistic questions
“By using genetic data as a proxy for past human contact, we were able to get around the problem of missing historical records and we could detect over 125 comparable instances of contact across the globe,” says Anna Graff, lead author of the study and linguist at the University of Zurich.
The multidisciplinary research team combined genetic data from over 4,700 individuals across 558 populations with two major linguistic databases that catalogue grammatical, phonological, and lexical features in thousands of languages.
They found that in instances of genetic contact, there was an increased probability of linguistic sharing in unrelated languages of 4-9%.
“This opens up new ways of understanding how languages evolve through human interaction,” the researcher adds.
“What surprised us most is that no matter where in the world populations come into contact, their languages become more similar to remarkably consistent extents,” says Chiara Barbieri, senior author and population geneticist at the University of Cagliari.
“Genetic contact can involve populations from different continents, for example in recent colonial situations, or populations from the same continent, for example during ancient Neolithic migrations.
“Our results show that languages are similarly affected by contact, regardless of its geographic and social scale, showing consistent links between population history and language change.”
A closer look into language dynamics and society
However, while the rates are similar, the specific features behind them differ strongly. While some elements like word order or consonant sounds are easier to transfer – more so than other features of grammar or sound – the research team did not find consistent borrowability principles.
“This challenges long-standing assumptions about what makes a linguistic feature more or less borrowable,” explains Balthasar Bickel, senior author and Director of the NCCR Evolving Language.
“It suggests that the social dynamics of contact like power imbalances, prestige and group identity easily override any constraints previously thought to be at play when people learn a new language and start to borrow from it.”
In some cases, the team even found the opposite of borrowing: features becoming less similar after contact. This phenomenon occurs when groups emphasize linguistic differences to assert distinct identities.
“While contact usually makes languages converge, sometimes it makes them diversify,” says Graff. “Our results suggest that both convergence and divergence are part of the global story of language evolution.”
The findings shed new light on how we understand the history of the world’s languages – and what might lie ahead. Contact between populations has long been linked to language loss, but this study shows that it can also erode deeper layers of linguistic diversity.
In our increasingly globalized world and in the face of the climate crisis, land use expansions and demographic displacements may further intensify these processes, fragmenting the linguistic record of the human past.
About this genetics and language research news
Author: Melanie Nyfeler
Source: University of Zurich
Contact: Melanie Nyfeler – University of Zurich
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact” by Anna Graff et al. Science Advances
Abstract
Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact
When speakers of different languages are in contact, they often borrow features like sounds, words, or syntactic patterns from one language to the other, but the lack of historical data has hampered estimation of this effect at a global scale.
We break out of this impasse by using genetic admixture as a proxy for population contact.
We find that language pairs whose speaker populations underwent genetic admixture or that are located in the same geo-historical area share more features than others, suggesting borrowing.
The effect varies strongly across features, partly following expectations from differences in lifelong learnability, partly responding to differences in social imbalances during contact.
Additionally, we find that for some features, admixture decreases sharing. This likely reflects signals of divergence (schismogenesis) under contact."
https://neurosciencenews.com/genetics-language-evolution-29644/
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Discover why embracing the Filipino language in education can unlock creativity, critical thinking, and national progress, empowering future generations to thrive.
"...As we navigate a complex future, it's time to ask a critical question: What if the key to unlocking our true national potential isn't about perfectly mastering a foreign tongue, but about fully embracing our own?
The obsession with English as the primary key to success is understandable, but it’s a dated mindset.
English is a powerful tool, a bridge that connects us to the world — no one disputes that. But a bridge is meant to be crossed; it’s not where you build your home. When we force a child to learn complex concepts like science, mathematics, and history through the filter of a foreign language, we’re adding an unnecessary barrier. We are asking them to perform two tasks at once: first, translate the language, and second, understand the concept. It’s an intellectual handicap we impose on ourselves.
Using our own language for instruction isn’t some sentimental, backward-looking idea; it’s the ultimate life hack for national development. It’s the express lane to genuine understanding and innovation. Look at the countries we admire. Did Japan build its technological empire by teaching its future engineers in English? No, it was forged in Japanese. Did South Korea launch its cultural and economic tidal wave by sidelining Korean in its schools?
Absolutely not. Germany's world-renowned engineering prowess was, and still is, taught and perfected in German. These nations understood a simple truth: real learning... happens most powerfully in the language of one's heart and home.
When a student learns about gravity or democracy in the language they use to tell jokes, to argue with their siblings, and to dream, the lesson sticks. It becomes part of them, not just a set of terms to be memorized for an exam. This creates a nation not of rote learners, but of true thinkers. It empowers a future scientist to not just pass a test, but to one day explain a new discovery in a way that every Filipino can understand and feel proud of. It allows a future leader to articulate a vision that resonates deep within the soul of the people, not one that just skims the surface.
Our language is the DNA of our identity. It carries our shared history, our unique humor, our collective spirit, and our deepest values. Making it the foundation of our education isn't about closing ourselves off from the world. It’s the exact opposite. It’s about building a stronger foundation from which we can confidently engage with it.
So, as we look to the future, let's rethink what a national "upgrade" truly means. It’s not just about faster internet or taller buildings. The most profound upgrade we can make is to restore the Filipino language to its rightful place at the center of our children’s education. True progress isn't just about speaking the world's language; it's about giving our own people the clearest possible voice to shape that world."
https://tribune.net.ph/2025/08/30/language-is-the-dna-of-our-identity
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"Reading the news and social media might lead you to think the only liturgical issue Catholics are concerned about is the Latin Mass. But there is another language problem in the Catholic liturgy that affects many more Catholics: The current liturgy in English is terrible.
Scores of social media accounts trumpet the wonders of the traditional Latin Mass, the order of service used prior to the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Before Vatican II, the entire Mass was said in Latin, with the priest facing the altar, his back to the congregation.
After the council, the reformed Mass in the vernacular replaced the traditional Latin Mass, or TLM, but for pastoral reasons the local bishop was permitted to allow limited use of the TLM. The hope was that it would gradually fade away as Catholics got used to the new liturgy.
For the most part this happened. Only 3% of American Catholics attend a traditional Latin Mass once or more a month, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Eighty-seven percent of American Catholics have never attended a traditional Latin Mass in the past five years.
There is even less interest in the traditional Latin Mass outside the United States.
Related: Where is Pope Leo leading the church? Thomas Reese sees clues in speeches
But rather than fading away entirely, the Latin Mass has continued to attract a small cadre of followers, including among young adults. Some ultraconservative Catholics deny the legitimacy of the new Mass, while others simply find more devotion in the old way. Some of these TLM fans promote it as a more pious and devotional approach to the Mass.
Conservative Catholics cheered in 2007 when Pope Benedict XVI allowed any priest to say the traditional Latin Mass when and where he wanted, and many complained bitterly in 2021 when Pope Francis restored the authority of the local bishop to control whether a priest was allowed to celebrate it.
Francis felt that traditional Latin Mass supporters had become divisive in the church and wanted to quiet the dissenting spirit of the TLM. He forbade its use in parish churches, allowing it only in chapels. He also forbade the ordination of priests unwilling to celebrate the new Mass in the vernacular.
Conservatives hope that Pope Leo XIV will restore Benedict's policy allowing any priest to say the traditional Latin Mass.
But Benedict's edicts on the TLM pale in comparison to his effect on the Mass most American Catholics hear each week. As the church's doctrinal arbiter, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger insisted on a word-for-word translation of the Latin, rather than one that conveyed the meaning of the text but was understandable when spoken aloud to contemporary Americans.
A file photo shows clergymen concelebrating the extraordinary form liturgy, commonly known as the Tridentine or traditional Latin Mass, at St. Joseph Shrine in Detroit. St. Joseph Shrine is one of four regional sites in the Archdiocese of Detroit that will continue to offer Masses according the extraordinary form starting July 1, 2025. (OSV News/Detroit Catholic/Valaurian Waller)
In 1963, English-speaking bishops' conferences set up the International Commission on English in the Liturgy to conform to Vatican II's order to render the Mass (and the other sacraments) in the vernacular. In 1973 the same body, known as ICEL, produced a translation of the new rite that everyone quickly acknowledged needed to be improved. A new translation was published in 1998 after years of work by scholars and translators.
Rather than a word-for-word translation, however, they produced one that could be proclaimed and understood by contemporary English-speaking Catholics. The 1998 ICEL sacramentary also included new prayers. For example, the opening prayer on each Sunday was written to go with that Sunday's Scripture readings.
The ICEL translation was well received by the English-speaking bishops around the world. However, Ratzinger, a native German speaker, vetoed the translation and insisted that a new word-for-word translation be used.
The Vatican was not interested in listening to reason. When the U.S. bishops asked to send a delegation to Rome to argue their case, the Vatican reluctantly agreed but told them not to bring Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, who was chair of ICEL. Pilarczyk had a doctorate in classical languages and could run circles around the Vatican "experts."
While some non-English-speaking bishops, notably the Italians, successfully fought off Vatican-imposed translations, the American bishops caved. In 2002, the executive director of ICEL was replaced by someone who would produce a translation acceptable to Ratzinger. That translation, which we still use today, was implemented in Advent of 2011.
It is time to get a better English translation of the liturgy. We do not have to begin translating all over again. We can simply give the 1998 ICEL translation another try.
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The good news is, we now have a pope whose first language is English and who might appreciate the problems of the current translation. The head of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, Cardinal Arthur Roche, of the United Kingdom, is also a native English speaker, but since he was chair of ICEL when the current translation was developed, he may not be open to replacing it.
On the other hand, he was involved in writing Magnum Principium ("The Great Principle"), a letter issued in 2017 by Francis giving bishops' conferences more authority in determining liturgical translations and limiting the role of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Sacraments (then the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments). Francis issued this letter because he didn't want the Dicastery for Divine Worship micromanaging translations as in the past. The document, Francis said, "concedes to episcopal conferences the faculty of judging the worth and coherence of one or another term in translations from the original."
The presumption is that the bishops know what they are doing. Under Magnum Principium, the Vatican would have to allow the 1998 ICEL translation if a bishops' conference requested it.
But this will not happen unless priests and laity push for it. The American bishops are naturally conservative when it comes to liturgy. They fear upsetting people with change. Negative reaction from the laity could be avoided if we kept the current translation of the responses said by the congregation. It is the prayers said by the priest that most need to be updated.
Other English-speaking bishops' conferences should not wait for action from the U.S. bishops. These conferences should lead the way by asking the pope for approval to use the 1998 ICEL sacramentary in their countries.
Related: Can Pope Leo XIV be a compassionate pastor and a hard-nosed administrator?
In the United States, we need to create a grassroots movement calling for approval of the 1998 ICEL sacramentary. We need to make as much noise as the supporters of the traditional Latin Mass.
Every time a bishop visits your parish, ask him when the bishops are going to ask for approval of the 1998 ICEL translation. Every time the priests' council meets with the bishop, tell him you want to use the ICEL translation of the sacramentary.
When the priest prays out loud during the Eucharist, he is praying for the entire congregation, and he should pray in a way that is understandable by the people in the pews. The people of God deserve better than what they are hearing in church today. It is time for a better translation of the liturgy, and the ICEL sacramentary is ready if the hierarchy will implement it."
THOMAS REESE
August 29, 2025
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/its-time-better-english-translation-liturgy
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"The China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters (CATTI) is a state-level vocational qualification examination administered by CICG Academy of Translation and Interpretation. Listed in China's national vocational qualifications catalog, CATTI is a unified, nationwide certification for translators and interpreters which assesses candidates' translation and interpretation competence and skills. Since launching in 2003, CATTI has been offered in nine languages: English, Japanese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Korean and Portuguese. The exam has already registered 2.3 million applicants, with about 280,000 passing, making it the world's largest examination of its kind. As a national-level talent evaluation system, CATTI has, for more than 20 years, remained closely aligned with China's international communications needs. To meet the goal and the specific requirements of the state for evaluating translation professionals, CATTI has set clear professional standards for evaluating translators and interpreters, established a national benchmark for talent assessment, and brought together top talent and industry resources to support exchanges between China and other countries. To promote reciprocal international recognition of its results, CATTI held its first overseas Russian-language exams in Belarus and Russia in 2019. Exams for English and Portuguese were introduced in Macao, China in 2021, followed by English exams in Hong Kong, China in 2022. CATTI currently has five overseas testing sites: Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, Minsk in Belarus, and Hong Kong and Macao, China. CATTI exams were held in Hong Kong and Macao in June this year. The next exams are scheduled for late November this year in Russia and Belarus, covering Russian-language, with test centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Minsk. Registration opened Aug. 18, and overseas candidates may choose their nearest site to take the exam. The CATTI test material draws from real-world translation and interpretation scenarios across fields including international politics, economics, history, culture, science and technology. The broad-content based exam evaluates candidates' ability to deliver precise translation and interpretation while adapting to different cultural contexts. It aims to cultivate translation professionals with practical skills. CATTI is a professional accreditation. But it also serves as recognition of language proficiency and a driving force to promote cross-cultural communications. The exam provides a platform for global language professionals to demonstrate their skills and serves as a bridge for linguistic and cultural exchanges worldwide. Contact: Fang Fen Tel: 008610-68994548 E-mail: ffang@cicg.org.cn"
China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters Becomes the World's Largest Translation Test
BEIJING, Aug. 25, 2025 /PRNewswire
https://www.taxtmi.com/news?id=53676
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The Israeli writer Etgar Keret has talked to NPR about the importance of stories in a time of war. Keret tells Scott Detrow why he recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the need for a whole new language after the war.
"Israeli writer Etgar Keret talks about the need for a new language to discuss the war
The Israeli writer Etgar Keret has talked to NPR about the importance of stories in a time of war. Keret tells Scott Detrow why he recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the need for a whole new language after the war.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The beloved Israeli writer Etgar Keret says it is important to tell stories in times of war. Speaking to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED just weeks into the ongoing Gaza war back in 2023, he said art can be the hiding place for your emotions.
ETGAR KERET: Go read a story. Go read a poem. Go write a poem. Because if you try to interact with people and bring your complexity, you know, they're going to rip you to pieces.
DETROW: Nearly two years later, Keret is finding those interactions even harder than ever. He sees people in his country talking past each other, struggling to listen. He recently wrote about an experience he had at a silent vigil for Palestinian children killed during the war. It's something he and his wife have taken part in each week for a while now. Etgar Keret joins us to talk about it. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
KERET: Hi.
DETROW: Tell me what happened.
KERET: I can tell you that every week when we go, it's the kind of a tradition that we stand with the photos of the dead Palestinian children. And people pass by, and we're silent. And it's amazing because you see a lot of different reactions. You know, it could be like, people looking at the picture while passing and crying, you know, while they're on the way to go somewhere, or people that stop and look at them. And there are other people that, you know, that can say, why are you holding this stuff? They're not real children. It's all AI. It becomes a little bit like a post in Facebook, which turns into some kind of a confession and always starts with hatred and ends with confusion and pain - like, saying, you know, you don't know what happened to me. I was in reserve duty. My nephew is in Gaza. I don't sleep at night. You know, [expletive] you, you know? But it's really like - it's not an argument. It seems like, you know, somebody really - I don't know - calling to his gods to save him.
DETROW: There's this broad-scale rather than confront a reality that we don't want to confront or that questions our point of view or anything like that, the answer is just default, well, that's not real; that's fake.
KERET: And the thing is that, you know, in Israel, the mainstream media and the TV, you know, hardly ever shows coverage from Gaza. So I think that, you know, that if you're an Israeli who kind of buys to the narrative and you watch your news, then, you know, you hear people talking about the 7 October from when you see the horrible thing being done to the kidnapped people, basically, you know, the death of those people in Gaza are not there. They're only there in the news if somebody complains about them.
DETROW: Well, let me ask you - there are so many conversations about what happens next when and if this war ever ends. And there are so many big-picture geopolitical questions. But there's also the question that you're raising of just how people can interact with each other better and talk to each other better and accept the same reality better. Do you have any sense what a first start is on a person-to-person basis on that front?
KERET: Well, I must say that, you know, the (inaudible) silent vigil, it taught me something that actually, you know - let's say, in this case, when I shut up for a minute, I hear something that I wouldn't have heard if I would argue back, you know? And I can say that, you know, that I think that for the past two years, I found myself in a situation where people were insulting me, and I was insulting them back. And I'm much better than them when it comes to insults, so I felt I was winning. But in the end, nothing happened, you know? Nothing happened. And I really feel that there was something at this vigil that I meet many people who don't have my opinion, but the fact that I look at them, and I disagree with them, and I want them to change their way, but I stopped kind of seeing them the ultimate evil - maybe it's the first step somewhere.
DETROW: I thought it was interesting that you compared all of this to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which of course is a story about human arrogance, among other things, and the effort to build a tower to heaven and the way that God stops that project flat by making everybody speak different languages.
KERET: Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, the Tower of Babel today is our Facebook or social media feeds because what happened is that - is then we all talk about stopping war in Ukraine and all those kind of thing. And it seems as if, you know, we're getting closer. We're getting up. We're getting up. We're getting up. But we're doing it while not looking at anyone around us, just like in the Tower of Babel. You so - you want to reach the sky, but if you don't see the person next to you, then, you know, it's going to end horribly.
DETROW: Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer. His latest book is called "Autocorrect." Thank you for talking to us again.
KERET: Thank you."
AUGUST 24, 20255:16 PM ET
By
Scott Detrow,
John Ketchum,
Henry Larson,
Daniel Ofman
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/24/nx-s1-5511441/israeli-writer-etgar-keret-talks-about-the-need-for-a-new-language-to-discuss-the-war
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
"« Le Phonétographe » : premier roman d’une trilogie d’Ali Saad, autour de la langue
Ali Saad, fondateur du café poème Livraisemblable et des Poèmes bleus, à Douarnenez (Finistère), vient de publier, « Le Phonétographe ». Premier livre d’une trilogie autofictionnelle, il y raconte l’histoire d’Ilje, tiraillé entre deux langues et deux identités, tout comme lui. Il sera en dédicace ce samedi 30 août 2025, à la maison de la presse de Douarnenez, de 10 h à 12 h 30.
Président des Poèmes bleus et gérant du café-poème-librairie Livraisemblable à Douarnenez (Finistère), Ali Saad vient de publier son premier roman. | OUEST-FRANCE
Ouest-France Chloé GOUPIL.
Publié le 29/08/2025 à 16h48
Président de Poèmes bleus, la maison de la poésie, et gérant du café poème Livraisemblable à Douarnenez (Finistère), Ali Saad vient de publier son premier roman, « Le Phonétographe ». Il porte le nom d’une invention : une machine capable de « transformer chaque mot français, prononcé dans un micro, dans le phonème correspondant d’une autre langue, à l’écrit », explique l’auteur.
Son inventeur, c’est Ilje, un jeune garçon en quête d’identité par sa langue. Ne parvenant pas à comprendre le dialecte de sa mère, il imagine le phonétographe « pour créer son propre dictionnaire ». Ilje (mélange de « il » et de « je ») est tiraillé entre deux identités : « La langue c’est la maison de l’être, quand on est confronté à deux langues, on est confronté à deux maisons », détaille l’auteur, qui n’y est pas inconnu.
Comme en témoigne son sous-titre « journal de ma diglossie », « Le Phonétographe » est une autofiction. Ali Saad s’est inspiré de sa vie et de son tiraillement entre le berbère et le français, pour écrire son histoire. « La langue de mes parents a toujours été un grand mystère », confie-t-il.
Un choix impossible
Ali Saad est né et a grandi en France, où ses parents, kabyles, se sont installés. Jusqu’à ses douze ans, il ne connaîtra ses racines que par les récits et la langue de ses parents. À l’école, il apprend le français : « J’en tombe amoureux. La grammaire, l’orthographe, le vocabulaire… C’était mon butin », se remémore-t-il.
Comme de nombreux binationaux, son quotidien est fait d’une dualité. À cette histoire, s’ajoute la guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962) : « Comment avoir une éducation bilingue quand une langue fait la guerre à l’autre ? », questionne l’auteur.
Baisse des subventions à la culture : craignez-vous un appauvrissement de l'offre culturelle ?
Ainsi, à 74 ans, Ali Saad, ne se résout pas à décider entre l’une ou l’autre de ses cultures : « Le choix c’est quelque chose de terrible ».
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Ce livre est le premier d’une trilogie, publiée par les Vibrations éditions. Basée à Plonévez-Porzay, c’est « la plus proche maison d’édition de Douarnenez », commente l’auteur. « Le Phonétographe » sera suivi par « Le roman de Caco. Le quartier des enfants fragiles » en 2026, puis « Les chemins d’Ilje » en 2027.
Ali Saad réalise une séance de dédicaces samedi 30 août, de 10 h à 12 h 30, à la Maison de la presse de Douarnenez, au 35, rue Voltaire."
https://www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/douarnenez-29100/le-phonetographe-premier-roman-dune-trilogie-dali-saad-autour-de-la-langue-1978df1e-8189-11f0-a070-ec6a7f83d549
#Metaglossia
#metaglossia_mundus
Nathalia Rio Preto made a big leap when she left her native Brazil to pursue her master’s degree at the Middlebury Institute, and yet another one when she transitioned from localization back to interpretation after the pandemic. She has no regrets.
"August 28, 2025 | by Nathalia Rio Preto TILM ‘21
Nathalia Rio Preto MATILM ’21
Middlebury Institute graduates discuss where they work today, how the Institute helped them get there, and what advice they’d give to current and future MIIS students.
My name is Nathalia Rio Preto and I graduated with a translation and localization management master’s degree from the Middlebury Institute in 2021, also completing the full coursework of the Spanish into English interpretation curriculum. My language combination is English/Spanish/Portuguese and I am currently a freelance interpreter and translator based in Washington, D.C.
Most recently, in addition to private clients, I’ve been working as a translator and interpreter for the Organization of American States (OAS), which has been an incredibly fulfilling experience. I have long aspired to interpret for international organizations, so having the opportunity to contribute to high-level discussions in this context has been both professionally and personally rewarding. One recent highlight in my career was interpreting for Brazilian Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso and for former U.S. president Bill Clinton. It was a really remarkable experience.
Nathalia Rio Preto interpreted for the We Are Guardians film crew at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (DCEFF). The documentary examines deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
I’m especially drawn to assignments related to human rights, Indigenous peoples, environmental protection, and international cooperation. Over time, I’ve been intentionally shifting my focus toward work that feels more meaningful to me—assignments where I can serve as a bridge for inclusion, advocacy, and giving voice to people and causes.
The support and connections I had through the Middlebury Institute were instrumental in opening important doors, most notably with the Organization of American States (OAS).
— Nathalia Rio Preto MATLM ’21
Becoming a Certified Court Interpreter
Recently, I’ve started interpreting in court and immigration settings, which is new and quite challenging. The norms and guidelines differ from conference interpreting. For instance, you have to mimic sounds and hesitations. If they’re cursing, you’re cursing. If they’re using high register, you use high register. According to the code of ethics, you shouldn’t explain. That’s something I have struggled with because in my default way of operating, I want to make sure the person understands. These assignments have pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I’ve been dedicating a lot of time to studying legal terminology to prepare for the state certification exam. I just passed an immigration court exam, which was really demanding.
Nathalia Rio Preto interpreted for Brazilian Federal Deputy Dandara Tonantzin, left, and Fernanda Santiago, special advisor to Brazilian Minister of Finance Fernando Haddad, at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Conference.
Transitioning from Localization to Interpretation
After the pandemic, I created this resistance to things that drain my life too much. I had been working in localization project management and decided to shift to my first love—interpretation. I had an honest conversation with career advisor Winnie Heh and she encouraged me to stay in touch with alumni and to leverage the experience I already had under my belt. Taking the leap back to freelancing was scary, and my talk with her gave me confidence at that moment of transition.
When I moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., I reached out to my professional network—both fellow alumni from Middlebury and other colleagues—to let them know I was returning to freelance interpreting. Although I already had years of experience as an interpreter, entering a new market in a new city required some strategy. The support and connections I had through the Institute were instrumental in opening important doors, most notably with the Organization of American States (OAS). Having the experience and credibility certainly helped me gain traction, but the trust and recommendations of my network are what really got me in the room.
There are moments in interpretation when you truly feel the weight of the work. When you have a bad day interpreting, you feel like you will never know enough, and you’re never going to be good enough—no matter how much you know or how much experience you have. But the good days make it all worthwhile.
I’ve definitely experienced impostor syndrome, but you learn how to suppress those invasive thoughts when you understand how impressive the type of work you do actually is. I had a women’s leadership class at MIIS where they said to stand in front of the mirror in a Superman pose and say, ‘I can do it.’ I actually do that when I feel like I can’t.”
I love that interpretation is in a way an artisanal sort of work—it’s deeply human, and that’s what makes it powerful.
Nathalia Rio Preto interpreting at Apple Park in Cupertino, California.
My Career Advice: Make Friends
My best advice for current students is this: enjoy the ride while it lasts—being on campus and part of the Institute community is a truly special experience. Don’t get siloed and don’t underestimate the value of colleagues from other programs; they often become your strongest professional network and a source of great opportunities.
A career in translation and interpretation relies a lot on word of mouth. Many of the best opportunities come through referrals—colleagues who know your work, your professionalism, and your ethics. That’s why building a strong and trusted network of colleagues is essential. The most important lesson I learned from my years in this profession is that sharing knowledge with your peers and referring one another for assignments creates a cycle of opportunity that benefits everyone in the field.
Like many colleagues, I am wary about the growing impact of AI on the language industry. The changes we’ve seen in just the past few years—even between when I graduated and now—have been really meaningful. AI is undeniably reshaping our profession, and I believe it’s crucial to acknowledge that reality while adapting strategically.
For those launching a career in translation, localization, or interpretation, my advice is this: find ways to stay relevant. Look for niches where human insight, cultural nuance, and judgment are indispensable. Fields like diplomacy, legal, and medical work, as well as work with rarer languages, still demand a level of care and accountability that machines can’t replicate.
I encourage newcomers not to resist technology but to engage critically with it. Understand what it can and cannot do. Learn how to use AI tools to your advantage while continuing to build the human competencies that remain irreplaceable."
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/advancing-your-career/career-guide/how-i-got-hired-freelance-portuguese-spanish-english-court-and
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Revolutionizing intelligence through creativity
"The art of thinking differently
Revolutionizing intelligence through creativity
28 AUGUST 2025, ABHISHEK RAO
In the ever-increasing complexity of life, it has become imperative to think differently and adapt creatively. Creative intelligence, once shamefully seen as inferior to more esoteric intellectual knowledge, finds its very seat in growth, problem-solving, and emotional resilience. Art plays a crucial role in the development of such skills through its very structure of self-expression, exploration, and multidimensional thought. It presents an in-depth study of the transformational power of art education, incorporating research findings, quantitative data, and actual real-world examples for profound impact both on the individual and society at large.
What is creative intelligence?
Creative intelligence is the ability to produce new ideas, solve problems in an innovative way, and come at challenges from fresh perspectives. Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg (1985) described it as the ability to invent solutions, think divergently, and apply imaginative approaches to real-world situations. Unlike analytical intelligence, which focuses on logic and reasoning, or practical intelligence, which emphasizes adaptation to one's environment, creative intelligence thrives on originality and exploration.
The uniqueness of art education in fostering creative intelligence with the encouragement of uncertainty, engagement with materials, and finding inner thoughts as a visual form or performance kind of expression encourages not only flexible thinking but also emotional resilience, as there is learning associated with failure or iteration in one's creative ability.
Cognitive Impact of Art Education is worth mentioning. Enhancement of brain function can be achieved by engaging in artistic activities that stimulate the brain in different ways. Functional MRI scans have found that creating art activates both sides of the brain, thereby increasing connectivity between the logical left side and the intuitive right side of the brain (Ritter et al., 2014). The bilateral activation of the brain has been found to improve problem-solving skills, the ability to make decisions, and creative thinking.
Quantitative evidence supports the relationship between art education and academic performance. According to a study by Catterall et al. in 2012, students involved in arts programs score 20% higher on standardized tests of math and reading than their peers who did not engage in any arts programs. The report of the Arts Education Partnership (2015) points out that graduate students have a higher number from schools that emphasize their agenda of arts education more than those institutions that have less emphasis on arts in their curriculum. These, while comparing, graduate 12% more. Graziano et al. argue that music education develops spatial-temporal reasoning, which has great importance in the STEM fields (1999).
Emotional intelligence through art, widely known as EQ, is a broad term that defines self-awareness, empathy, and interpersonal skills and is significantly impacted by art education. Art is the safe space of students where emotions are processed, feelings articulated, and experiences reflected. Visual arts, drama, and music all help in showing complex emotions that cannot be defined by words alone. Goleman (1995) suggested that those people with high EQ are better able to deal better with interpersonal relationships and stress, which is the need for success in anything.
By exposing the students to other people's cultural stories and asking them to be in other people's shoes, art education helps to build empathy in the learner. Shared stories or understanding other people's experiences in shared art projects tend to promote a shared experience and therefore bonding among them.
Empathy and perspective-taking
According to the Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum, 2020, creativity topped the list after analytical thinking and active learning in terms of most important skills at work. And as automation took over routine jobs, human creativity is the quality that cannot be replicated by any machine. The art of storytelling is crucial for marketing and branding, the most creative-intellect-dependent industry.
Healthcare, a process commonly referred to as design thinking, applies principles from arts education that healthcare is taking up in hopes of better treatment and medical care. Both Google and Apple prefer creative and insightful problem-solving capacities among their personnel, preferring workers who exhibit it to the technologists with "the most standard" expertise.
Despite the continually growing need for creativity, educational institutions have not been making strides in this area. The 2019 Adobe survey stated that while 78% of educators and policymakers believe that economic growth relies on creativity, only 32% believe that schools are doing enough to promote it. It is a pressing appeal for art education to be treated as a strategic human capital investment.
The effect of art education on society in terms of the development of inclusive communities is no less.
Art brings unity to people concerning the linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic aspects. Community-based arts programs are reported to improve participative civic engagement together with feelings of belonging, like murals, plays, and installations in public spaces. Also, the contemporary sector of art therapy is adopting innovative practices in order to alleviate mental health distress. Research evidence suggests that artistic engagement lowers cortisol levels, which are indicators of stress, as well as promoting general well-being (Kaimal et al., 2016). Schools implementing art curricula have fewer cases of anxiety and depression among the students.
Looking at global examples like Finland, a country of creative dynamism, as it integrates art early on into their education curriculum and views creativity as one of its key skills. The system was helpful in molding Finland as an innovation nation around the world, which has actually consistently ranked them atop the list of the Global Innovation Index by the OECD, 2020.
The STEAM movement also indicated that the role of arts is supplementary and completes the technical streams. The school bodies that adopted the STEAM-based curricula found increased engagements with students while enhancing test scores by 15 percent—a group that falls under science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
However, there are certain challenges faced in arts education. Cuts in funding are one of the most well-known problems. Art programs are always the first casualty of budget cuts, especially in poor districts. According to the 2021 Arts Education Monitoring Project, 40% of schools in low-income communities have no permanent art teachers. Such inequality perpetuates the educational gap and denies marginalized students the life-changing power of art education. Art is still, in most cultures, a luxury item and not a need. In most education systems, this aspect results in its devaluation. What is required for this is the advocacy and raising of awareness concerning the practical gains from art education.
For full unlocking of the potential in art education, changes have to occur on a systemic level. To start with policy reform, the funds should be passed on to the governments via arts programs focused on disadvantaged communities. Professional development programs should be set up to enable the teachers with creative practices across disciplines. Schools, cultural institutions, and businesses can offer opportunities and resources to students in terms of engaging with the arts.
Parents will be encouraged to appreciate and support arts education, which would make the environment better for creative expression.
In conclusion, art education is not just an activity after school hours, for it innovates, develops a person emotionally, and propels progress in society. It prepares people to face a fast-changing world because it stimulates the creative intelligence within. The outcomes of art education, from building the brain to developing emotional muscles, go well beyond the classrooms.
As we look forward into the future, education systems need to rethink learning in an innovative way parallel to academics. It is not a mere investment in the individual but an investment in collective potential for all of humanity.
References
Catterall, J. S., Dumais, S. A., & Hampden-Thompson, G. (2012). The arts and achievement in at-risk youth: Findings from four longitudinal studies. National Endowment for the Arts.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.
Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants' responses following art making. Art Therapy, 33(2), 74-80.
Ritter, S. M., Damian, R. I., Simonton, D. K., van Baaren, R. B., Strick, M., & Derks, J. (2014). Creativity in art and science: Are there two cultures? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(1), 8-15.
World Economic Forum. (2020). The future of jobs report. Geneva: World Economic Forum."
https://www.meer.com/en/92562-the-art-of-thinking-differently
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