Metaglossia: The Translation World

The Indigenous language of the Adelaide region is being revived after years despite no-one fluently speaking it and no voice recordings existing.

A dedicated team has spent 25 years trawling through historical documents to piece together the language of the Kaurna people.

Now entire conversations are being held in the long-forgotten tongue as part of the inaugural Kaurna Language Week.

When 'Aunty' Alitya Wallara Rigney became principal of an Aboriginal school in Adelaide in the late 1980s, she wanted to incorporate the Kaurna language into the syllabus but faced the dilemma of trying to find out more about it.

She contacted linguist Dr Rob Amery and their work began to put the Kaurna language back together and teach it in the school.

"We were learning it the night before we were teaching it the next day," she said.

"It was so exciting and it was such a challenge."

Language search went to Germany

As there were no voice recordings, the researchers had to rely on written documents and the search took them as far as Germany, where they met the family of missionaries who had worked in the Adelaide area.

"There was an Aboriginal school down on the Torrens [the main river through Adelaide] and I think there were three kids, three students there who wrote letters in Kaurna to the mission over in Germany," Ms Rigney explained.

"We've actually got them [letters] back in the museum. Isn't that great?"

Dr Amery said it was a slow process and their investigation often relied on "neighbouring" languages to work out how to pronounce Kaurna words.

But he said the language revival effort had far exceeded his expectations.

"I never thought that we'd reach the stage that we're at now," he said.

"We have three young Kaurna men who are able to conduct conversation in Kaurna language now without resorting to English," he said.

Father keen his young children learn Kaurna

South Australian Jack Buckskin is one of those three men and is now raising his children to know the Kaurna tongue.

"I speak the language with them, my daughter responds in English all the time, she's so cute, she's only three-and-a-half," Mr Buckskin said.

"I think she's trying to teach me a bit of English. The other one, he's four months old with his sister speaking a bit to him."

Mr Buckskin and several other Kaurna men performed a traditional welcome ceremony at the launch of the language week, which has a program of language classes, bus tours and exhibitions.

Dr Amery hoped the event could help promote the Kaurna people to the broader community.

"Hopefully this will become a regular feature, a time when people can stop and think, 'well this country I live in it does have another history, another language was spoken here'," he said.

'Aunty' Alitya Wallara Rigney said it was an important way to build self-esteem among Kaurna people.

"Culture and language go together and I set about doing it because I want my kids, the students in my school, to be the strongest they could be and I wanted them to learn identity from it too," she said.

Notes from the book closet on new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye.

“The Vulgar Tongue: Green’s History of Slang” (Oxford University Press), by Jonathon Green, out October 1st.Jonathon Green has been studying slang for more than thirty years and is the author of the three-volume “Green’s Dictionary of Slang,” published in 2010, which collected five hundred years’ worth of non-standard English vocabulary. This new book provides a history of slang, approaching it as “a ‘counter language,’ the language that says no.” “Born in the street,” Green writes, “it resists the niceties of the respectable.” Green identifies the common threads that have run through slang for centuries—the emotions and situations that consistently demand a less buttoned-up form of expression. He also describes how words that were once used only by the socially marginalized made their way into mainstream society, and why they found traction there. “Slang,” he argues, “represents humanity at its most human.”—A.D.

“A Brief History of Seven Killings” (Riverhead), by Marlon James, out October 2nd. James’s seven-hundred-page third novel is a prismatic story of gang violence and Cold War politics in a turbulent post-independence Jamaica. Opening with a four-page character list and narrated from multiple perspectives over three decades, the story centers upon an assassination attempt on Bob Marley before the Jamaican general elections of 1976, and the rumors that swirl through Kingston of possible political motivations behind the crime. In a recent interview with the Times, James, who grew up in Jamaica in the nineteen-seventies steeped in American pop culture, described himself as a “post-postcolonial writer” and cited the influence of Gay Talese and Roberto Bolaño.—R.A.

“Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis” (Pulp/Zest Books), by Alexis Coe, illustrated by Sally Klann, out October 7th. In 1892, a young woman named Alice Mitchell murdered another young woman, Freda Ward, with a razor. The two had previously been lovers with plans to get married (Alice was going to pose as a man), but they were forced to end their relationship after their families found out about it. The separation sent Alice into despair until, one day, she attacked Freda in the street and killed her. The murder was a national sensation at the time, but is little known today. Alexis Coe came across the case in a scholarly article while she was in graduate school and became fascinated by Mitchell and Ward’s story. She retells it here with the color and liveliness of a novel. Her account is accompanied by illustrations of the people, scenes, and artifacts that populate this story of forbidden love.—A.D.

“Nora Webster” (Scribner), by Colm Tóibín, out October 7th. This is Tóibín’s first full-length novel since 2009’s “Brooklyn,” which told the story of a young woman’s migration from Wexford, Ireland, to Brooklyn in the nineteen-fifties. “Nora Webster” is set in the nineteen-seventies, and its heroine is a recently widowed mother of four in Wexford, with two boys still at home, struggling through a period of grief. Instead of the alienation of immigration, Nora faces estrangement at home: “Nora found herself wondering if there was somewhere she could go, if there was a town, or a part of Dublin with a house like this one … where no one could visit them and they could be alone there, all three of them. And then she found her mind moving towards the next thought—that the possibility of such a place, such a house, would include the idea that what had happened could be erased, that the burden that was on her now could be lifted, that the past could be restored and could make its way effortlessly into a painless present.”—R.A.

“Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography” (Knopf), by Meryle Secrest, out October 7th. Between the First and Second World Wars, Schiaparelli revolutionized the way women dress, but today, Secrest writes, “the most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is … just a name on a perfume bottle.” Perhaps that is why Secrest—who has also written books on Frank Lloyd Wright, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Modigliani, among others—is the first to write a biography of the Italian couturiere. Born to a half-aristocrat, half-intellectual family in Rome in 1890, Schiap, as she was called, collaborated with surrealists like Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali, translating the concepts of surrealism into her designs—“pockets were made to look like drawers, necklaces became collections of insect specimens, handbags were shaped like balloons, and buttons could be anything: lips, eyes, or carrots.” After the war, Schiaparelli’s hard, sculptural style was overshadowed by the close-fitting, feminine looks of designers like Dior. Secrest portrays Schiaparelli as a “perpetually self-critical and dismissive” person who surrounded herself with fabulous friends but often avoided real intimacy; perhaps, Secrest writes, “she never considered the extent to which she had transformed a lowly craft into a high art.”—R.A.

“Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Jake Halpern, out October 14th. Jake Halpern first met the unlikely duo of Aaron Siegel (a former banker from a rich family) and Brandon Wilson (an ex-bank robber whom Siegel describes as looking like “Uncle Fester on crack”) while reporting a piece about a debt collector named Jimmy for The New Yorker in 2010. Siegel owns a debt-collection agency in Buffalo, New York, where more than five thousand people make their living in the collection industry. Wilson is one of Siegel’s top debt brokers—a job that entails everything from striking deals on debt portfolios to intimidating debtors into paying up to warding off rival collection agencies. In “Bad Paper,” Siegel and Wilson become Halpern’s guides to the wild, largely unregulated world of debt collection, in which debts are bought and sold while a motley assortment of financial whizzes and tough-talking enforcers hound people in financial distress into paying their delinquent bills.—A.D.

“The Woman Who Borrowed Memories” (NYRB Classics), by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella, out October 21st. The Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson is best known for her children’s stories about the darkly whimsical world of the Moomins*. But, later in life, tired of the demands brought on by the international fame of her kids’ books, she turned her attention to writing fiction for adults. She was particularly fond of short stories. (“I love the short story,” she wrote, “concentrated and united around a single idea. There must be nothing unnecessary in it, one must be able to hold the tale enclosed in one’s hand.”) The dangers and losses that always hovered around the edges of the Moomin stories are dealt with more directly here, but, as in the Moomin stories, she writes about these things with sparkling wit and a quirky sensibility. Lauren Groff, who wrote the introduction to the collection, calls the book “an aerial map of Jansson’s deepest concerns.”—A.D.

“The Lost Book of Mormon: A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), by Avi Steinberg, out October 21st. “The Book of Mormon” is a religious text that few non-Mormons have read or been taught about in school, and one that is rarely taken seriously as a work of literature. As Steinberg writes, “To be a fan of The Book of Mormon is to walk a lonesome road.” Yet, as a young writer who had spent his childhood in a religious Jewish community in Jerusalem, Steinberg found himself fascinated by the quest of young Joseph Smith to publish his alternate biblical history: “I was enthralled by Joseph’s stories, and particularly by his impressive run as an underdog, an underground American writer.” Steinberg’s efforts to learn about the book led him on a literary pilgrimage in the steps of its characters, from Jerusalem and the Mayan ruins of Central America to the Hill Cumorah, in upstate New York, where, according to the story, Smith dug up the gold plates bearing his biblical history. Steinberg, the author of “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian” and a contributor to Page-Turner, writes that Smith’s discovery on the hill “can be seen as a founding myth for American letters: Joseph, a frontier peasant boy … unearths a book from deep in the soil of the country, the promised land, and discovers a story written in the language of the Old World but shaped by the landscape of the New.”—R.A.

“Yes, Please” (Dey Street Books), by Amy Poehler, out October 28th. Poehler’s contribution to the burgeoning genre of funny-women memoirs is, she writes, the product of a “war between my jokey and protective brain and my squishy and tender heart.” Tracing her path from lower-middle-class Boston to “Saturday Night Live” and “Parks and Recreation,” Poehler bounces, from one sentence to the next, between frank examinations of her experience as a woman in show business and freewheeling funny stuff. (Her empowered take on being eight months pregnant while performing on “SNL”: “Your hormones are telling you you are strong and sexy, everyone is scared of you, and you have a built-in sidekick who might come out at any minute. There should be some kind of pregnancy superhero movie. Calling Hollywood now. What’s that, Hollywood? It’s a weird idea and also you don’t do movies with female superheroes? Copy that.”) The book contains sections with advice-y titles like “Calling People Sweetheart Makes Most People Enraged,” a poem about plastic surgery, and guest entries from such luminaries as Seth Meyers and her mom.—R.A.

“There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In” (Penguin), by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Anna Summers, out October 28th. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s works, which were suppressed for years in Soviet Russia, deal with the grinding tragedies of everyday life. She tells stories that, the translator Anna Summers writes, Russians would call extremal, that is, “too extreme for casual tale-swapping, suitable only for furtive whispering.” This book collects three novellas. The first, “The Time Is Night,” is relayed through the diaries left behind by an old woman, Anna, after her death. Anna is poor and has a fraught family life—she takes care of her young grandson, who was abandoned by his mothe

Azilal, Morocco There is currently a long-running debate about the merits of diversity within societies.  One of the arguments that keeps reverberating is that diversity — whether cultural or linguistic — is a double-edged sword, with definite pros and cons, some “happy” and some “unhappy.”

This article lands on the side of “unhappy talk” about linguistic diversity in Morocco. It highlights how language differences are employed to suppress and stigmatize “minor” (in terms of power) languages such as Tamazight, one of Morocco’s indigenous languages. Not only is Tamazight seemingly not socially recognized, but it carries with it political, academic, and institutional stigma, and has been subject to “linguistic terrorism” over the years in Morocco. This article sets out to unravel how the Tamazight language is a source of anxiety for the dominant culture expressed in Arabic, and how it has therefore had to be suppressed.

“Linguistic terrorism” is defined by anthropologists as “the suppression of the mother tongue [of a group of people] by another dominant group” (De katzew, 14).  In the Moroccan “melting-pot” society, “minor languages” such as Tamazight are subject to stereotypes. Tamazight is discredited and “demonized” and frequently associated with the concepts of being “illegitimate,” “bastard,” “different” and “orphan.” Amazigh people perceive their language as “inferior” because it is made to be seen as inferior by the prevailing culture articulated in Arabic. Thus, Amazigh people are looked down upon because they speak a “different” language, causing them to hide their identities and feel ashamed. This fact manifests itself (as in Hegelian philosophy) in different everyday contexts such as in administrations, hospitals, schools, courts, and markets.

In this same line of thought, the term “Berbers” that is used to refer to Imazighen is “linguistically violent.” In history, this term was originally used by the Greeks to indicate people who spoke languages other than classical Greek. Eventually, the same term was used to refer to “people in North Africa who didn’t speak Latin,” a practice that was adopted by the Arabs that later settled in North Africa and referred to [Imazighen] as ‘Barbar’” (El Allame, 181). ”The Berbers”thus became a derogatory term, a “political definition” and “a violent word; speakers of the Tamazight language prefer to be called Imazighen.

Politically, Tamazight does not enjoy full recognition in the Moroccan Constitution, an issue to which the current government has turned a blind eye. Tamazight is politically excludedand is afforded attention only in moments of political tension and electoral campaigns. Morever, religious factors have contributed to the development of stereotypical representation and suppression of Tamazight. These include the belief that Arabic is the only language of Islam, which leads people to build a strong link between Arab ethnicity and the essence of Islam. For these people, to be Muslim, one should belong to the Muslim community and the pan-Arab nation.

Because of the above historical, political, and religious factors, the dominant group in Morocco constructs and enhances negative attitudes towards Tamazight language and identity. These attitudes are replete with stereotypical representation and “violent words” which, in one way or another, affect the Amazigh self-perception and perception of (the other) The statements uttered by the non-Amazigh about Tamazight illustrate this constructed social stigma. These taken-for-granted statements — which are proudly and thoughtlessly made — include: “Tamazight is a prehistoric language,” “Tamazight is useless and is not going to help you ‘earn your bread,’” and “Tamazight is not a language as the cat is not a bird.” Subjectively and stereotypically informed, these statements reveal the imprisoned frames of mind that construct solely negative qualities about Tamazight. The attitude that “Tamazight is useless” denies the pivotal role language plays in informing its speakers’ identities. For those with such a negative attitude, the idea that “I am what I speak” is not the common sense.

These attitudes impact Imazighens’ perception of themselves, their language, and their identity. In an attempt to avoid “the psychological and social unrest and the fear of being excluded from the social group, [Imazighen] abandon their language and minimize their linguistic and ethnic identity” (El Allame, 187). As a consequence, Amazigh feel ashamed of themselves and their language which they label in such shameful statements as “learning Tamazight is a fiasco,” “Tamazight is a bastard language,” and “Using Tamazight derides one’s social status.” All these statements are reveal the degree to which the Amazigh people have internalized the feeling that they will not be socially acknowledged unless they abandon their language and use Arabic instead. This further emphasizes their “inferiority complex” as they perceive the Arabs and the Arab language as enjoying a “higher position” within society.

Lastly, insufficient support from the State plays a pivotal role in Tamazight’s stigmatization and denial. For example, Tamazight is given less importance and is almost absent in the Moroccan education system. Schools have been a tool for Tamazight’s suppression, since Arabic is the only language used for communication and thus denying the Amazigh any chance to learn their own language and impeding their learning process. Amazigh people then stop transmitting their language to their children, for they believe it is a source of an “inferiority complex” if their children go to school without knowing Arabic (EL Allame, 184). This makes Amazigh children feel locked outand too ashamed to deal with their instructors.

In fact, some instructors themselves hold a negative attitude towards Tamazight and its speakers. This impacts the psychology of students and breeds low self-worth and the fear of being unacceptable because of the “different” language one speaks, Tamazight. Once again, students feel ashamed of their language, and they start “blaming themselves” for a language that their mother transmitted to them in their early life (El Allame, 2009). In fact, all these feelings develop from the perception and derogatory words of the dominant group towards the Tamazight language and Amazigh identity.

The misconstruction of cultural and linguistic differences within societies is often times fueled by a deficiency in reasoning and thinking. The other’s difference is equated with ‘wrongness’ and ‘illegitimacy’ by the dominant group. In order to peacefully and serenely live side by side and appreciate diversity, we must respect and accept the language, culture and identity of others. Such respect and acceptance will diminish  linguistic terrorism’ (use double quotes as you have been the rest of the article) and ‘clash of cultures’ between people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy

She single-handedly launched Al-Bawtaka Review (The Melting Pot Review) the first and only outlet for Arabic translations of contemporary English-language literature, made available completely free of charge online. But she's not stopping there. Hala Salah is now venturing onwards to new grounds with her latest audiobook project, sponsored by UNESCO and entitled This is Not Chick Lit: Stories by Ordinary Women in and Beyond Turmoil. The project is set to provide translated texts available to the blind in the form of audiobooks, in what is probably the first major effort to make literature widely available to the blind.

We speak to her about her history with Al-Bawtaka Review, the audiobook project, and her reasons behind launching both.

Tell us a little about yourself. 

I was brought up in Tanta, in the Delta. I'm 36-years old, I studied English literature. I have a Bachelor of Arts from Tanta University. Through my university years I learned practically nothing. I'm basically self-taught when it comes to literature and translation.

When did you start translating, and what are the main texts you have worked on? 

I started translating ten or eleven years ago. My first encounter with translation was translating the english text of a novel titled An Artist of the Floating World by a Japanese-British novelist called Kazuo Ishiguro.

I then translated a short story anthology called The Gilgul of Park Avenue: An Anthology of American Short Fiction. I also translated a book by Jihane el-Sadat. It was originally written in English, titled My Hope for Peace. 

When and how did you start Al-Bawtaka?

I started Al-Bawtaka Review in April 2006, more than eight years ago. It started as a monthly review for almost a year, then I had a small amount of money and then I decided to obtain copyrights. During my first year, it was just one story, then I took some literary agency from the author, so I was basically stealing. So I summoned the courage and with that amount of money I had I thought I would try my luck and see what happens.

Surprisingly I did very well with copyrights. I obtained permission for almost all the stories for free, or I paid a very small fee of about $50-100. In July 2010, I established a small publishing house back in Cairo. I only produced four books, all translated anthologies.

How have you sustained Al-Bawtaka? 

I won five grants for Al-Bawtaka until now; two from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, two from the British Council in Cairo, and one from UNESCO's International Fund for the Promotion of Culture.

While I was cooperating with the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture I produced four books: Sharp Senses, Ghosts With No Maps, Hidden Faces and A Brush With Fate.

Tell us about your latest audiobook project.

I actually never thought of working on the ground for the blind, but it all started after the January 25th Revolution. Back then, emotions and patriotism were soaring. You always feel this void or space when demolition takes place, so it basically throws back in your face your responsibility to build.

My plan initially wasn't for audiobooks at all, it was to print books in braille. It was right after Gaddafi fell, and with Benghazi so close to us I really racked my brain to try to find socially oriented ways that Al-Bawtaka Review can carry out a project there. I just wanted to integrate the social factor with the cultural factor. So it hit me when I was signing copyright contracts with some of the American agencies. I found a few of them giving me the rights - without even asking - to print stories in braille, or in big letters.

However, printing books in braille turned out to be surprisingly really expensive. I could have looked for funding forever and I still wouldn't be able to do it. After I spoke to the people at the Blind Association Downtown, you could actually feel [the blind people's] resentment. They feel as though they are second-class citizens, because they are forced to be in that position. There are no alternatives.

When I saw the UNESCO grant I was unsure whether I could do it, because I wanted to print 10,000 copies in Egypt and Libya, and when I calculated everything it didn't seem promising that they would fund me, so I though of audiobooks. We will produce 10,000 copies, and distribute them equally between the Blind Associations in Cairo and Benghazi.

Why was this project important to you? 

The whole idea of translating the text is that people have been translating for forever now. I don't mean to brag but if you search for any translations of contemporary English literature you will only find Al-Bawtaka. There are no other doors to knock on. Sometimes you get short fiction translated in Gulf magazines, but they are very short and old, not contemporary. The old masters have taught us a lot, but I just can't grasp that people are still translating Edgar Alan Poe.

You can read Al-Bawtaka review online, for free here

Earlier this year, the first mind-to-mind communication took place. Hooked up to brain wave headsets, a researcher in India projected a thought to a colleague in France, and they understood each other. Telepathy went from the pages of science fiction to reality.

Using electroencephalography(EEG) sensors that pick up and monitor brain activity, brain wave technology has been advancing quickly in the last few years. A number of companies already sell basic brain wave reading devices, such as the Muse headband. Some companies offer headsets that allow you to play a video game on your iPhone using only thoughts. NeuroSky'sMindWave can attach to Google Glass and allow you to take a picture and post it to Facebook and Twitter just by thinking about it. Even the army has (not very well) flown a helicopter using only thoughts and a brain wave headset.

Despite the immense interest in brain wave technology, little attention has been paid to what translation apps--such as Google Translator--will mean to an upcoming generation that will likely embrace brain wave tech. Youth will surely ask: What is the point of learning a second language if everyone will be communicating with brain wave headsets that can perform perfect real-time language translations?

The question is valid, even if it's sure to upset millions of second language teachers and dozens of language learning companies, like publicly traded Rosetta Stone. Like it or not, sophisticated brain wave headsets will soon become as cheap as cell phones. A growing number of technologists think the future of communication lies in these headsets, and not handheld devices or smart phones.

However, the question of whether it will be useful to learn a new language in the future is about far more than just human communication and what technological form that takes. Different languages introduce us to other cultures, other peoples, and other countries. This creates personal growth, offering invaluable examination on our own culture and how we perceive the world. The process broadens who we are.

Being proficient in other languages also offers certain nuances that knowing only one language cannot. French offers far more romantic and poetic gist than English ever can. But Arabic is steeped in more historical imagery and connotation than French. And nothing compares to Hungarian's ability to effectively curse in ways that all other languages fall far short of.

Perhaps most importantly, learning a second language offers the physical brain a chance to grow in new and meaningful ways. The study of a new language, for example, is often suggested to early on-set Alzheimer's patients to help stimulate the brain's proper functioning.

Ultimately, the most quintessential question rests on whether there are more important things to be doing in today's busy world than learning a new language. With radical transhumanist tech changing our most basic functions like communicating, is society better off pushing its youth to learn how to write code, or to speed read, or to play the violin? In hindsight, I would've rather spent my time becoming a proficient martial artist than the six years I studied Spanish in school.

Whatever your opinion, the future of learning languages and how we communicate is in flux. Speaking at the 2014 World Future Society conference in Florida, Singularity University Professor Jose Cordeiro said, "Spoken language could start disappearing in 20 years. We'll all talk with each other using thoughts scanned and projected from our headsets and maybe even chip implants. This will radically increase the speed and bandwidth of human communications."

Twenty years isn't that far off. I'm not ready yet to drop my 4-year-old daughter's Chinese lessons, but I am keeping my eye on whether technology is going to change some of our basic communication assumptions, like the value of learning a second language.

One of the great assets of any global academic or training program is the national, regional, social or economic diversity of its participants. In its still relatively young EMBA program, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership has enrolled participants from more than 50 countries. That diversity helps people expand their individual networks and to join (or deepen their place in) a global community of creative professionals. Another positive outcome is learning from different markets around the world through sharing experiences, insights and challenges. More specific to the creative communication industries, which are undergoing extraordinary transformation, diversity among participants gives people more perspectives to navigate changing technologies, client relationships and business models.

Facilitating the exchange of experiences and fostering the professional relationships among participants is one of the key responsibilities of executive programs. More formally, we teach the major approaches to ‘cross-cultural leadership’ as part of the EMBA curriculum. The research, tools and models for understanding conventional national and cultural differences remain vitally important to the success of creative leaders.

Many of these are more widely familiar:

• High- and low-context communications, anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s classical approach to understanding how much or little implicit knowledge is required in different cultures to communicate information effectively

• Key dimensions to cultural interactions, identified through longstanding research by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, and including Individualism/Collectivism, Feminine/Masculine, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Indulgence/Restraint, and Long Term/ Short Term Orientation. (Fons Trompenaar’s succeeding model of national culture has seven related dimensions as well as five orientations for the ways in which people dal with each other.)

• Richard D. Lewis, the founder of the Berlitz language schools in East Asia, Finland and Portugal, whose model focuses, in simple terms, on whether those in given countries or regions pursue individual tasks using linear or sequential logic, focus on relationships and pursue multiple tasks simultaneously, or follow strategies that seek solidarity and harmony.

• Perhaps most ambitiously, the GLOBE project conceived by Wharton professor Robert J. House (and building on Hofstede’s model), offers both an inventory of nine cultural competencies and six specific leadership competencies that vary across 10 societal clusters. These include charismatic vs value-based, team orientation, and participative leadership.

Taken together, these approaches convey the complexity and richness of communication and, especially, leadership in a world still demanding of profound sensitivity in thought and action to social, cultural and national differences – that is, to an early 21st century world that is anything but flat.

Yet another aspect of diversity among creative professionals is not so often addressed: the diversity of roles and professions among those who increasingly are drawn together to collaborate. In the traditional creative industries, for example, everyone does not have the word ‘creative’ in their title. Amir Kassei, the Global Chief Creative Officer of DDB, the advertising agency, uses the helpful label ‘creatively minded’ to include those without other formal validation but still contribution to creative activities. Australian researchers Greg Hearn, Ruth Bridgestock, Ben Goldsmith, and Jess Rodgers go further in their recently published collection, “Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries” (Edward Elgar 2014), which argues for greater attention to the workers contributing creativity or creative services yet employed in sectors outside the creative industries.

In a world where cross-functional and interdisciplinary teams are not only increasingly the norm but looked to as a source, in their very diversity of perspectives and experiences, of original thinking and innovative work, the challenge for leaders is to recognize and yoke together such differences successfully. Just as leaders need to mindful, attentive and sensitive to the different communication and leadership expectations and norms existing across geographic borders, in other words, so they should be attuned to the expectations about working together brought by different kinds of creative professionals and practitioners. Just as Brazilians are sensitive and adapt to different ways of working together with those in Singapore, to take one example, writers need to be sensitive and adapt to the different ways of working productively with programmers.

Effectively combining differing perspectives and expertise has long been at the heart of creative business. The tension – for some, a paradox – between the chaos of creativity and the order of business or management has not only been a challenge to be overcome but a source of the ‘creative friction’ (to use Michael Eisner’s words) needed to generate fresh ideas. A ready historical example, drawn from the ‘creative revolution’ of the 1960s in the advertising industry (as well as others), involved surmounting the ‘great wall’ between creatives and suits without losing the productive opposition it represented.

A similar struggle with the tensions arising from teaming those with different perspectives and expertise has also long existed among creatives themselves. As eager as were the first adopters of Bill Bernbach’s revolutionary coupling of art and copy, finding success in work together wasn’t easy or straightforward. The very first team of art director and copywriter, the legendary Bob Gage and Phyllis Robinson, whom Bernbach actually took with him from Grey Advertising when DDB was founded, were enthusiastic about the new model but often struggled with its implementation. As committed as the two were, their interactions, which were meant to be shaped by constructive conflict, were often bruising. But they ended up producing exceptional and, often, timeless work.

To extend that example to the present, many are calling for an expansion or other re-constitution of the core teams in advertising. For some, it should be ‘art, copy and code.’ For nearly all, though, there is a reckoning that some version of an interdisciplinary, cross-functional or hybrid team adds value through its combination of multiple points of view and experiences. Copywriting, design, digital, and production, even planning and strategy are among the familiar roles typically mixed and combined in hopes of generating the best creative outcomes.

Looking beyond marketing services or brand communications, the value of recognizing different skills and experiences appears in even sharper relief. Contemporary design and architecture firms, for example, regularly integrate a wider range of experts to help shape their work. At IDEO, cultural anthropologists observe human behavior, kinesiologists study bodily movement, mechanical engineers contribute to the exploration of how physical solutions might be crafted. Foster & Partners, one of the world’s most renowned architecture firms, employs an even fuller array of professions, including acoustics specialists, aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, and visual or plastic artists.

Of course, there is a crucial balance to be struck here – and also a risk to be acknowledged and averted. Even as we identify individuals as belonging to certain groups or professional cultures in order to be more sensitive to their needs and wants and well-being, we take the risk of viewing them one-dimensionally, simplistically. The writers do this and the digital guys do that. Even with the best of intentions, we may reinforce or fetishize categories of professional work or culture out of proportion. As with national or regional cultures or sub-cultures, we may stereotype unfairly. Individuals are not simply one thing or, despite a professional skillset or mindset or pedigree, alike in many ways. Put differently, it is not only a matter of recognizing and coordinating different skills or knowledge or perspectives in developing creative solutions to business challenges. Rather, the deeper task and responsibility of leadership is to understand that individuals with different skills or perspectives have often developed through very different experiences. Their conceptions of what teamwork is, how creativity relates to business, what successful outcomes look like, are all also potentially distinctive.

That is what I mean by another kind of cross-cultural leadership. The cultures and sub-cultures – that is, the shared beliefs and values but also common actions – of different kinds of creative workers deserve more attention. The more leaders recognize and remain mindful of those differences, the better they will be able to guide and enable the rich diversity of teams and organizations toward accomplishing shared goals together.

The challenges faced by leaders of creative teams and organizations only continue to increase as markets grow more complex, traditional relationships are transformed, and the skills of workers become more varied. Everyone brings distinct tools, skills and knowledge, often from across disciplines and functions, which need to be integrated in working together on a task or project. But perhaps even more importantly, everyone also brings different expectations, ways of working and solving
problems together. Among the tenets of effective creative leadership today are ongoing selfreflection and self-understanding and the central importance of forging a vision and purpose around which creative teams and businesses can rally and work. Increasingly, as leaders bring together disciplines, functions and technologies to generate better and better creative solutions for clients and customers, those leaders also need to be more attentive and adaptive not merely to the skills brought by diverse team members or colleagues but their different beliefs and ways of working.

Ultimately, this attentiveness and adaptability has the makings of a new alliance or social contract between creative talent with different experiences and expectation. It also presents an immense opportunity for creative leaders willing to understand and engage more fully the many distinct creative cultures represented in their teams and organizations.

Professor David Slocum is the Faculty Director of Executive MBA Program at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership and is on twitter @DavidSlocum.

Languages survive and thrive when their owners consciously update and expand them and pass them on to their children. Take the nations of Europe: many of them are smaller than many ethnic nationalities of the ECOWAS region. And yet they have continually updated and expanded their national languages by capturing in them the entire learned culture of Europe including its mathematics, science, medicine and literature. This is no accident but a result of persistent application of conscious policy over the years.

Similarly, all of the world’s learned culture is available for adoption into any African language and nationality that is up to the task of survival through update and expansion.

How is this to be done? Let’s take it as a series of steps.

STEP 1: Accept the challenge of language conservation and acquisition outlined in Part 1 of this article, namely: train up all children in their mother-tongue; in the language of the locality in which they reside; in one major indigenous language of their nation; and in both English and French. This applies not only to West Africa but to all the presently French-speaking and English-speaking  countries of the entire continent.

STEP 2: Translate all translatables into the chosen language. Be judiciously selective. Translation is as powerful as virtually anything the human mind has conceived. As outreach, it carries on the wind all human thoughts, discoveries and projections and scatters them like seeds to the far corners of the globe. As intake, it brings home to every locality a rich foreign harvest that roots in the soil and enriches the local production as well as the language that conveyed it.

For centuries, the world’s great works of literature have circulated in translation. The literary classics of every culture, insofar as they are known beyond their native borders, are known in translation. Publishers tout the popularity of every book by the number of copies sold and the number of languages into which it has been translated. The foundation texts of the world’s major religions are known mostly in translation. The advances in science and technology, whether epochal or miniscule, are quickly transmitted, translated and domesticated globally.

Those anxious that their language should not die should learn from this ancient practice of translation. They should embark on a comprehensive campaign to preserve, update and expand their language as follows:

Translate into their language the novels, poems, plays, short stories and essays written in other languages by members of their ethnic nationality.

Do the same for works written by fellow-citizens from other ethnic nationalities.

Do the same for their folktales, proverbs, festival songs, songs of praise, songs of abuse, prayers, chants, jokes and other utterances which scholars have collected and written down in English, French or Portuguese.

Continually collect and write down more of these traditional oral literatures in their language.

Tape-record and write down the conversations and speeches of the most eloquent, especially the elder men and women.

Systematically translate works from the global repertory of science, technology, literature and business so they can be read and understood and enjoyed in the chosen  language. In doing so, the team of translators, an enlightened intelligentsia, will adapt and domesticate some foreign words and invent some new words. This, for instance, is how the “romance languages” of Europe tinkered themselves together using the Latin language. Ancient Greek is everywhere in the vocabulary of Europe’s physical, biological and social sciences. And the patch-patch work of gluing together Celt, German, French, Greek and Latin is visible all over the English language.

Translating all known knowledge into a language is the perfect guarantee for the conservation and survival of any language.

STEP 3: As much as possible, produce new literature, television programs and movies in the indigenous language; then, to reach a larger public, translate them into the major indigenous languages of the country and the continent, plus English and French.

In this regard, the great Kenyan writer and philosopher Ngugi wa Thiong’o has set the pace: some three decades ago he decided thenceforth to write all his works first in Gikuyu, then translate them into English. That way he helps keep Gikuyu alive while at the same time reaching a global reading public.

Nigeria’s Yoruba Nollywood movie industry has followed a similar policy: produce in Yoruba and add subtitles (written translations) in English. Trouble is that subtitles are not always legible against the variegated visual background, their letters are too tiny, and they change too fast for moderate-to-slow readers, who constitute the majority. This is a world-wide failing of subtitles. Yoruba Nollywood should have better success with “dubbing”—audio translation, voices speaking the dialogue in whatever the chosen language.

In contrast, Nigeria’s Igbo Nollywood movie industry has become “all-English.” But again, this failing can and should be remedied with audio-dubbing, making each and every movie accessible to any language on earth that desires it.

As we have seen, then, the bulk of the world’s literature, science and thought has circulated for centuries in translation, and continues to do so. With the powerful cultural engine of translation providing both input and output, aided by computer technology that makes so many impossible things possible, there really is no excuse for cultural isolation or relegation of any ethnic nationality or language.

Onwuchekwa Jemie

Earlier this year, the first mind-to-mind communication took place. Hooked up to brain wave headsets, a researcher in India projected a thought to a colleague in France, and they understood each other. Telepathy went from the pages of science fiction to reality.

Using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that pick up and monitor brain activity, brain wave technology has been advancing quickly in the last few years. A number of companies already sell basic brain wave reading devices, such as the Muse headband. Some companies offer headsets that allow you to play a video game on your iPhone using only thoughts. NeuroSky's MindWave can attach to Google Glass and allow you to take a picture and post it to Facebook and Twitter just by thinking about it. Even the army has (not very well) flown a helicopter using only thoughts and a brain wave headset.

Despite the immense interest in brain wave technology, little attention has been paid to what translation apps--such as Google Translator--will mean to an upcoming generation that will likely embrace brain wave tech. Youth will surely ask: What is the point of learning a second language if everyone will be communicating with brain wave headsets that can perform perfect real-time language translations?

The question is valid, even if it's sure to upset millions of second language teachers and dozens of language learning companies, like publicly traded Rosetta Stone. Like it or not, sophisticated brain wave headsets will soon become as cheap as cell phones. A growing number of technologists think the future of communication lies in these headsets, and not handheld devices or smart phones.

However, the question of whether it will be useful to learn a new language in the future is about far more than just human communication and what technological form that takes. Different languages introduce us to other cultures, other peoples, and other countries. This creates personal growth, offering invaluable examination on our own culture and how we perceive the world. The process broadens who we are.

Being proficient in other languages also offers certain nuances that knowing only one language cannot. French offers far more romantic and poetic gist than English ever can. But Arabic is steeped in more historical imagery and connotation than French. And nothing compares to Hungarian's ability to effectively curse in ways that all other languages fall far short of.

Perhaps most importantly, learning a second language offers the physical brain a chance to grow in new and meaningful ways. The study of a new language, for example, is often suggested to early on-set Alzheimer's patients to help stimulate the brain's proper functioning.

Ultimately, the most quintessential question rests on whether there are more important things to be doing in today's busy world than learning a new language. With radical transhumanist tech changing our most basic functions like communicating, is society better off pushing its youth to learn how to write code, or to speed read, or to play the violin? In hindsight, I would've rather spent my time becoming a proficient martial artist than the six years I studied Spanish in school.

Whatever your opinion, the future of learning languages and how we communicate is in flux. Speaking at the 2014 World Future Society conference in Florida, Singularity University Professor Jose Cordeiro said, "Spoken language could start disappearing in 20 years. We'll all talk with each other using thoughts scanned and projected from our headsets and maybe even chip implants. This will radically increase the speed and bandwidth of human communications."

Twenty years isn't that far off. I'm not ready yet to drop my 4-year-old daughter's Chinese lessons, but I am keeping my eye on whether technology is going to change some of our basic communication assumptions, like the value of learning a second language.

Languages survive and thrive when their owners consciously update and expand them and pass them on to their children. Take the nations of Europe: many of them are smaller than many ethnic nationalities of the ECOWAS region. And yet they have continually updated and expanded their national languages by capturing in them the entire learned culture of Europe including its mathematics, science, medicine and literature. This is no accident but a result of persistent application of conscious policy over the years.

Similarly, all of the world’s learned culture is available for adoption into any African language and nationality that is up to the task of survival through update and expansion.

How is this to be done? Let’s take it as a series of steps.

STEP 1: Accept the challenge of language conservation and acquisition outlined in Part 1 of this article, namely: train up all children in their mother-tongue; in the language of the locality in which they reside; in one major indigenous language of their nation; and in both English and French. This applies not only to West Africa but to all the presently French-speaking and English-speaking  countries of the entire continent.

STEP 2: Translate all translatables into the chosen language. Be judiciously selective. Translation is as powerful as virtually anything the human mind has conceived. As outreach, it carries on the wind all human thoughts, discoveries and projections and scatters them like seeds to the far corners of the globe. As intake, it brings home to every locality a rich foreign harvest that roots in the soil and enriches the local production as well as the language that conveyed it.

For centuries, the world’s great works of literature have circulated in translation. The literary classics of every culture, insofar as they are known beyond their native borders, are known in translation. Publishers tout the popularity of every book by the number of copies sold and the number of languages into which it has been translated. The foundation texts of the world’s major religions are known mostly in translation. The advances in science and technology, whether epochal or miniscule, are quickly transmitted, translated and domesticated globally.

Those anxious that their language should not die should learn from this ancient practice of translation. They should embark on a comprehensive campaign to preserve, update and expand their language as follows:

Translate into their language the novels, poems, plays, short stories and essays written in other languages by members of their ethnic nationality.

Do the same for works written by fellow-citizens from other ethnic nationalities.

Do the same for their folktales, proverbs, festival songs, songs of praise, songs of abuse, prayers, chants, jokes and other utterances which scholars have collected and written down in English, French or Portuguese.

Continually collect and write down more of these traditional oral literatures in their language.

Tape-record and write down the conversations and speeches of the most eloquent, especially the elder men and women.

Systematically translate works from the global repertory of science, technology, literature and business so they can be read and understood and enjoyed in the chosen  language. In doing so, the team of translators, an enlightened intelligentsia, will adapt and domesticate some foreign words and invent some new words. This, for instance, is how the “romance languages” of Europe tinkered themselves together using the Latin language. Ancient Greek is everywhere in the vocabulary of Europe’s physical, biological and social sciences. And the patch-patch work of gluing together Celt, German, French, Greek and Latin is visible all over the English language.

Translating all known knowledge into a language is the perfect guarantee for the conservation and survival of any language.

STEP 3: As much as possible, produce new literature, television programs and movies in the indigenous language; then, to reach a larger public, translate them into the major indigenous languages of the country and the continent, plus English and French.

In this regard, the great Kenyan writer and philosopher Ngugi wa Thiong’o has set the pace: some three decades ago he decided thenceforth to write all his works first in Gikuyu, then translate them into English. That way he helps keep Gikuyu alive while at the same time reaching a global reading public.

Nigeria’s Yoruba Nollywood movie industry has followed a similar policy: produce in Yoruba and add subtitles (written translations) in English. Trouble is that subtitles are not always legible against the variegated visual background, their letters are too tiny, and they change too fast for moderate-to-slow readers, who constitute the majority. This is a world-wide failing of subtitles. Yoruba Nollywood should have better success with “dubbing”—audio translation, voices speaking the dialogue in whatever the chosen language.

In contrast, Nigeria’s Igbo Nollywood movie industry has become “all-English.” But again, this failing can and should be remedied with audio-dubbing, making each and every movie accessible to any language on earth that desires it.

As we have seen, then, the bulk of the world’s literature, science and thought has circulated for centuries in translation, and continues to do so. With the powerful cultural engine of translation providing both input and output, aided by computer technology that makes so many impossible things possible, there really is no excuse for cultural isolation or relegation of any ethnic nationality or language.

Onwuchekwa Jemie

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- With a shared vision for defining today's collective visual language, LINE Euro-Americas Corporation (subsidiary of LINE Corporation, owner and operator of the free call and messaging app LINE) and the world's largest .GIF search engine, GIPHY, have partnered to announce the inaugural sticker design competition, The Sticker Shop Contest.

Stickers are digital communication, evolved. They are communication tools in this mobile-first world and are the next evolution towards a true global language. A sticker, simply put, is worth a thousand words.

In the spirit of self-expression, LINE & GIPHY invite artists across disciplines to craft fun and new stickers that will help define today's digital language.

WHAT:    The Sticker Shop Contest

WHO:      LINE & GIPHY & the best digital artists

WHEN:    Submissions start 9/25-11/3. Winners are announced 12/23.

HOW:      Go to giphy.com/stickershop

PRIZES:  $10,000 cash to the Grand Prize Winner, 20 Cintiq 24HD Touch Displays, The opportunity to have your art reach over 490 million people                      

"Digital communication has moved far beyond texting—now our global users rely on stickers to communicate emotions to friends and family. Through the contest, we're prompting new-age self expression by giving participants a platform and the artist in all of us to create personal, expressive stickers," said Jeanie Han, LINE USA CEO.

LINE and GIPHY have enlisted an all-star team of digital partners, such as Tumblr, Fox ADHD, Frederator, Cut & Paste, New Museum, Eyebeam, Museum of Moving Image, Rhizome, The Webby Awards, Pratt, NYU ITP, The Huffington Post, Thought Catalogue and Dribbble to support The Sticker Shop Contest and recognize the sticker artists creating breakthroughs in today's visual language.

"GIPHY has always worked hard to support the world's best GIF artists," said Alex Chung, Giphy, Inc. CEO. "We're excited to partner with LINE to be able do the same for the world's best sticker artists."

To learn more and participate in the contest, visit http://www.giphy.com/stickershop

To download LINE for great sticker contents and more: http://line.me/D

About LINE Corporation
LINE Corporation is based in Japan and develops and operates the LINE app for smartphones. Since launching in June 2011, the LINE app has grown into a global service used in 230 countries, ranking first in the free app category in 60 countries. LINE offers free one-to-one and group messaging, as well as free domestic and international voice and video calls. LINE also includes a wide array of social elements such as fun and expressive stickers, a personal Home, a Timeline, and numerous LINE family apps, including LINE games and LINE camera. For more information about LINE, please visit http://linecorp.com/en/

About GIPHY
Giphy is how you search, share and discover GIFS. GIPHY is the world's largest GIF search engine and a pioneer responsible for the technology that gets GIFs into our favorite apps and social networks through the world's only GIF API. About 20 million visitors rely on giphy.com each month for an endless, curated array of the best memes, tropes & touchstones of pop culture created by some of the most talented artists on the web.

Giphy, Inc. 
29 Little West 12th Street 
New York, NY 10014 
http://www.giphy.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140925/148322

SOURCE LINE Corporation

Each language department approaches the competency requirement differently, however. Where some departments emphasize immediately teaching in the target language — conducting the entire course in the language within the first semester — many others focus on developing grammar before speaking.

Meeting the requirement

Students have to complete through — or earn exemption through testing from — the 2020 level in a target language.

“Each level requires another level of proficiency,” French Department Chair Prof. Ari Blatt said. “There’s no exit exam, but they need to get a passing grade in 2020.”

Blatt noted some universities require students to successfully pass a “proficiency interview” in order to fulfill the language requirement. Blatt previously administered proficiency interviews at another university.

“There’s been some talk of that,” Blatt said. “I thought it was fun to administer. I think the students felt a sense of accomplishment afterward.”

There are currently no plans to initiate a language proficiency interview in the University’s French Department.

“Nobody’s expecting that by the time a student finished 2020 or even a French major that they’re going to be speaking or writing like someone with native French,” Blatt said. “But the idea is to get them as close to that as we can.”

Language in the classroom

Each foreign language department upholds four pillars of language: writing, reading, oral comprehension and speaking. No department explicitly prioritizes one skill above the others, but instructors emphasize the importance of exposing students to relevant language as early and as often as possible.

Modern Hebrew Program Coordinator Zvi Gilboa said students must practice speaking skills right away in order to attain fluency.

“Learning a foreign language is a very long process,” Gilboa said. “I put an emphasis on students being able to be fully functional, regardless of the shortcomings of their skills or vocabulary at any point.”

This technique of immersion is a fairly new approach to language acquisition.

“It used to be that you could learn, learn, learn and then you have learned everything you need to know,” Gilboa said. “The approach that I take is that you actually have to jump into the water from the very first moment and realize that the gap between you and where you want to be is gradually going to become smaller.”

Gilboa encourages his students to practice their speaking skills at all levels, even if they feel discomfort or uncertainty with learning a language.

“As a speaker of a foreign language, a lot of your ability and competence depends on your ability to hide your inabilities,” Gilboa said. “You have to participate even when you don’t exactly understand everything that’s being said to you. That is the true art of learning a foreign language, of operating in a foreign language, and also teaching in a foreign language. It’s faking it all the time until you no longer need to fake it.”

Second-year College student Zak Krooks is a student in Gilboa’s Intermediate Modern Hebrew course. Krooks noted a concerted effort to develop all aspects of his language skills.

“I think that Zvi attempts to really give a complete teaching,” Krooks said. “We do try to do as much writing as speaking. In class it’s more speaking, but at home it’s more writing, so it really rounds itself out.”

Though Krooks said he has noticed an improvement in his Hebrew skills, he would not feel comfortable conversing with a native Hebrew speaker at this juncture.

“I definitely can say that [the Hebrew department is] doing a great job,” Krooks said. “I didn’t know any Hebrew beforehand, and now I am much more confident in my abilities. Every day I see an improvement.”

Each language poses its own unique challenges. For example, faculty members of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures said it is often difficult for students to speak Slavic languages until later on in their course of study because even simple sentences require multiple cases and it takes several semesters to completely introduce each grammatical case.

Maria Ivanova, a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Language and Literature, teaches first-year Polish as well as second- and fourth-year Russian.

Ivanova noted that particularly in Slavic languages, it is very difficult for students to learn basic concepts without using a fair amount of English.

“Even in the beginning levels I try to use as much of the language as possible,” Ivanova said. “I will use the words that they might not necessarily understand but can figure out with context. I try to expose them to the language as much as I can without scaring them.”

Ivanova said students often experience a boost in confidence once they master basic grammatical concepts.

Lilia Travisano, associate professor of Russian and coordinator of the Russian Language Program, agreed.

“I tell students that Russian is an exceptional language, because almost every single grammar rule has tons of exceptions,” Travisano said. “It’s the kind of language that we don’t expect conversation right away. … It’s slower than other languages.”

Third-year College student Ben Gorman is a student in Travisano’s first-year Russian course. He has only been studying Russian for about three weeks.

“You really just have to practice every night and keep up with it,” Gorman said.

Beyond the requirement

The language departments at the University offer various programs to enrich the study of language, which many students choose to take advantage of.

For example, the German department has recently introduced a content-focused seminar on modern German history as an alternative to the traditional Intermediate German course.

Manuela Achilles, associate director for the University Center for German Studies, teaches the course.

“We’re doing everything that a textbook would do, but we are looking at historical topics and drawing on authentic materials,” Achilles said. “It’s a class that tries to add an experiential level to learning.”

Achilles said she believes the inclusion of a theme adds an element of interest to the course.

“It helps that you have a more concrete experience so that you can build vocabulary around the theme,” Achilles said.

Third-year College student Ravynn Stringfield dedicates herself to applying her foreign language skills outside of the classroom while living in the Maison Française, the University-owned French House.

Stringfield said in Maison Française, faculty advisors allow her to practice her language skills on a regular basis.

“It’s definitely intimidating, but I feel comfortable holding my own with a native speaker,” Stringfield said. “They usually understand that no matter how long you’ve been taking it, it’s not your first language.”

The University also offers a wide variety of study abroad programs which can help students develop their language skills. Students can choose to study abroad during the school year, during January Term, or during the summer in locations such as Delhi, Dublin, Lyon, Rabat, Valencia and many more.

Ivanova noted the benefits of studying abroad in developing language skills.

“Lots of students gain confidence when they study abroad, and after they return they really see how their grammar can work,” Ivanova said. “Everyone starts speaking significantly more confidently if they go abroad and they are immersed in the language.”

Creating a global community

Blatt said studying other languages and cultures is especially important in today’s increasingly globalized world.

“Learning a second language is useful for your brain,” Blatt said. “It exercises your brain that learning something else is not going to do. Knowing something about another culture and knowing their values and history.”

Blatt and the French Department are attempting to provide students with a curriculum which acknowledges and embraces globalization.

“We changed our name recently; we’re no longer the Department of French Language and Literature, we’re the Department of French,” Blatt said. “We do language to be sure, but we also do literature, we teach about North Africa, we teach about the Caribbean, we teach about other Francophone countries. There’s a lot more that goes into it, and I think the language is really important, but getting to know the world — getting out of the “America-Box” that a lot of students get into in college — is really useful.”

Fourth-year College student Dylan Herrmann chose to continue his study of French past the language requirement by becoming a French major.

“It’s less about the requirements of the language in terms of the brick and mortar of it,” Herrmann said. “What it should be about is the growing importance of a [second] language worldwide.”

A 2002 study found that college graduates who spoke a second language had on average salaries 2 percent greater than monolingual graduates.

Everette Fortner, executive director for professional development and adjunct faculty member at the Darden School, confirmed the growing importance of familiarizing oneself other cultures.

“More and more job opportunities have an international component, whether you are traveling internationally, or just dealing with suppliers, customers, or other divisions of your company,” Fortner said. “I think what’s more important is that students can demonstrate that they can deal with a diverse set of people from different cultures, rather than being able to speak a different language.”

Nepal is a small country located between China and India. And while it is about the size of Arkansas, Nepal is rich in history and culture, and is home to a variety of languages.  

Despite its remoteness, Nepal’s richness of languages provided the perfect research environment for a trio of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville faculty. Kristine Hildebrandt, associate professor in the department of English language and literature, Shunfu Hu, professor in the department of geography and Jessica Krim, assistant professor in the department of curriculum and instruction, traveled to Nepal to study its indigenous languages. 

For Hildebrandt, her initial interest in language came out of the program she was studying in for her Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara, which had a strong emphasis in cross-cultural fieldwork. 

“There are over 100 languages spoken in Nepal,” she said. “These are distinct languages, plus countless dialects and varieties of those languages. It is a great place to do fieldwork because people are wonderful to work with. They are very accommodating. And I was lucky enough in my graduate program to become involved in a research project that was just beginning there at the time that would bring us to Nepal for that kind of work.” 

Although a geographer, Hu, who is of Chinese origin, thought he could also make important contributions to this research on linguistics.

“When Dr. Hildebrandt talked to me about studying the languages, especially endangered languages in Nepal, I was interested in linking the speaking of the languages to the geographic context,” he said. “My interest is to see how those languages are geographically distributed and also use my research expertise in online mapping to demonstrate these languages to the public.” 

Hu found that there were many similarities in terms of language and culture between Nepal and China. “The way that people interact with each other, the food they eat, some of the cultures, religions they practice, are all very similar to Southwestern China,” he said.

Krim found a strong application between this project and what she does as an educational researcher. “In Nepal, schools are basically community centers,” she explained. “They are the roots of where the language centers are. There is just a large group of people in those areas. So I looked at it from my point of view in order to study the educational system.” 

In many ways Nepal, despite its size, is a linguistic puzzle. Although Nepali is the official language, almost half of the country does not speak it.

“It is true Nepali is the official language, and it is the language of banking and official business, and to the extent that you see active schooling going on it is the language of education. However, English is starting to have more a presence in schools as well. Despite that, when you leave the urban centers of Nepal you lose Nepali as a commonly spoken language,” explained Hildebrandt

This diversity of language is in big contrast with countries like the United States, where despite its size, most people speak the same language, and where original languages like those spoken by Native Americans or other colonial languages, including Spanish, are not as dominant. 

“That is not the case in most other parts of the world,” added Hildebrandt. “In fact, many people in different parts of the world are not just bilingual, but trilingual or they are polyglots. And it’s not that big of a deal. It is true even for people who have had no formal education in their lives.” 

 It does help that the languages spoken in Nepal are closely related to each other. So while they are different, the differences are not that dramatic. We find a similar situation in China. Although Mandarin is the most widely spoken Chinese language, it is not the only one by any means. You have Cantonese, but you also have many regional languages. So how does commerce and everyday life get done in such places? 

“There are 52 minorities in China itself,” said Hu. “The main language everyone uses is Mandarin, but in practice everyone uses their own languages at home. Parents will speak their own languages with their kids. But when the kids go to school they speak Mandarin.” 

One of the languages of Nepal is Manange, currently spoken by no more than a couple hundred people. How do such languages survive?

“For students to actually learn it they need to be taught in their home language, but in order to survive in the world outside of their home language they need to know Nepali and even English,” said Krim. “As an educator I think it is important to learn all of them so that you can function in different societies.”

Hildebrandt said that countries like Nepal, with their many languages, pose many interesting questions. Should Nepali replace other languages, or should there be an additive approach, in which Nepali is added to the repertoire of local languages? To what extent can these languages be taught in school if they don’t have writing systems? It depends, according to Hildebrandt, on how well prepared schools are.

“How well are the local schools equipped in terms of where the teachers get their training, and how they interact in a local school system to handle a task of bringing in local languages? Is the local school system a functioning system to begin with? We found some issues and gaps in how the school systems function on a day to day level,” she said. “And that’s even before you try to introduce a new level of pedagogy and curriculum in language teaching.” 

 

Aldemaro Romero Jr. is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His show, “Segue,” can be heard every Sunday morning at 9 a.m. on WSIE, 88.7 FM. He can be reached atCollege_Arts_Sciences@siue.edu.

Today poetry provides more questions than answers, but maybe it continues to exist, and has simply changed address

If poetry ever provided answers, these aren’t those times. That’s what I thought returning last week from the Hindi Academy’s annual function, Bharatiya Kavita Bimb, that celebrates Indian poetry. Thirty-seven poets who write in 20 languages gathered in four sessions for an audience of about 500. For most of us, poetry evokes nostalgia for those student days when it burnt in our hearts and lit up our lives. But I came away with prickly questions and tedious arguments.

The sight of poets writing in Tamil, Oriya, Hindi, Rajasthani, Bangla, Urdu, Kashmiri and English together on one stage, reciting Hindi translations after the original, could fill anyone with nationalist pride. It was a sarkari ritual that reminded me of my favourite sarkari poem, ‘Ek Chidiya’, which was the background score for a Doordarshan animation film on our unity in diversity. But nationalism aside, can we really speak of an Indian poetry? Don’t we have many ‘poetries’ instead? What is common among these poetries? And can our link language, English, also be our language of choice for translation? Or is Hindi a better literary arbiter since most of our poetries are parallel traditions, not different, the way that Spanish poetry is different from Scandinavian poetry? Such unpoetic thoughts, you would say, when all I wanted was some unalloyed nostalgia.

I remember I enjoyed reading regional literatures more in Hindi or Punjabi than English. I even read Altaf Hussain Hali’s key text on Urdu poetry, Muqaddama-e-Shero-Shayari, and another classic, Muhammad Husain Azaad’s Aab-e-Hayat, in Punjabi translation. I also read Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag Ka Darya in Punjabi. When I read the Urdu original, it did not add much to my experience. And later, when an English translation came out, I found it lame. Despite the best efforts of translators, the English text cannot fully reproduce the Indian flavour the way another Indian language translation can. Is it our civilisational ethos? I can’t quite close my fists around this.

I found AK Ramanujan’s otherwise brilliant translation of Nammalvar, Hymns for the Drowning, so clinically bare and stripped of Indian sensibility that the hymns could as well have been written by William Carlos William. Like Bhakti poetry, which freely mixes the carnal and the spiritual, most Indian poetry can be daunting as it poses the challenge of translating a whole culture and not just a language. I have found that poetry today has more questions than answers.

From its lyrical state it has lurched wildly towards a paraphrased reality. And to think that once even mathematics was written in verse: Aryabhatta gave the value of pi in a sprightly Sanskrit meter. What we find frozen in textbooks and poetic symposiums today was once poetry in motion. There were poets more popular than filmstars. Girls wrote letters in blood to Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi, who outshone Rajesh Khanna in those parts. Poetry gatherings could become sites of mass hysteria with rockstar poets such as Gopal Das Neeraj, Majaz Lakhnawi and Harivansh Rai Bachchan. At the recent Hindi Academy function, I remembered Neeraj’s poem ‘Kaarvan guzar gaya’, where a line reads Karvan guzar gaya, gubar dekhte rahe (the caravan passed and I kept staring at the clouds of dust). Such functions are the clouds of dust that the bygone caravan of poetry has left behind.

So what killed poetry as we knew it? Many blame the modern trend of obscure poetry that fails to connect with the lay reader. When American poet Wallace Stevens wrote ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, it became famous not as a poem but a puzzle. The secretary of the Amalgamated Ice Cream Association, afraid that it showed his product in bad light, shot off a letter to the poet demanding to know what the poem meant.

I look on with amusement at numerous thin editions of Faber & Faber and Carcanet lying on my shelves. Despite their dense and heavy writing, they look lithe and nifty, as if made to dodge all future onslaughts on poetry. But it’s hard to believe that once I actually ‘enjoyed’ reading these. I notice another thin Penguin book by Sujata Bhatt, My Mother’s Way of Wearing a Sari, probably one of the last poetry books to be published by a mainstream Indian English publisher. Sometimes I do dip into one of my many Rajkamal paperbacks of Hindi and Urdu poetry, but I can’t bring myself to read them the way I did earlier. I guess it’s the same with most people who used to once read poetry by the racks.

I believe poetry is not dead yet; it has just changed address. The democratisation of taste, wider availability of diverse aesthetic experiences and fragmentation of leisure time have created new homes for poetry. Purists look disdainfully at advertisements and cinema but that’s where poetry is today, take it or leave it. It also thrives in email forwards and Power Point presentations. It’s certainly not with Paul Muldoon or those who write in The Paris Review. We forget that what is high literature today —Hamlet, Great Expectations or Huckleberry Finn — was once pure groundling entertainment. Every age has its own poetry. To Shakespeare, most of TS Eliot or Wallace Stevens would have seemed all sound and fury signifying nothing. For long, Urdu purists begrudged Sahir Ludhianvi the full status of ashayar. He was considered just a lyricist. Though we took inordinately long, we have finally accepted Gulzar as a poet. I am sure the day will come soon when, along with cinema, advertisements too will be taught in universities — as a literary genre and not as some condescending semiotic analysis. After a few hundred years, Burma-Shave’s roadside doggerel (for example — His cheek/Was rough/His chick vamoosed/And now she won’t/Come home to roost) from mid-20th century America might find place alongside Shakespeare’s sonnets. It may be a dreaded prospect today but Prasoon Joshi might come to be known as a Renaissance man of letters who could sell anything from washing powder to revolution. Hindi poetry collections might begin with Maithili Sharan Gupt and end with the Nirma jingle. Who says poetry is dying?

(The author is a Delhi-based journalist)

(This article was published on September 19, 2014)

Wisdom Publications is proud to announce that for the second consecutive year its authors have been awarded the Khyentse Foundation Prize for Outstanding Translation. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura were awarded the 2014 prize for "Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā," the second volume in Wisdom’s acclaimed Classic of Indian Buddhism series.

This prize honors excellence in translations that make the Buddhist heritage universally accessible. The award was presented to the translators on August 20, 2014, at the Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS), held at the University of Vienna.

“Wisdom is thrilled to have its authors honored two years in a row by the Khyentse Foundation,” says Wisdom’s publisher, Tim McNeill. “This prestigious award affirms Wisdom’s abiding commitment to producing the highest quality presentations of critical Buddhist texts.” Last year’s award was for Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation from the Pali of "The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Aṅguttara Nikāya."

Nāgārjuna’s renowned twenty-seven-chapter Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) is the foundational text of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. It is widely considered the definitive, touchstone presentation of the core doctrine of emptiness. Siderits and Katsura prepared this translation from the Sanskrit using the four surviving Indian commentaries in an attempt to reconstruct an interpretation of its enigmatic verses that adheres as closely as possible to that of its earliest proponents.

Mark Siderits has taught both Asian and Western philosophy at Illinois State University and Seoul National University, from which he retired in 2012. He is the author or editor of five books and has published numerous articles on a wide variety of subjects in Indian Buddhist philosophy and comparative philosophy.

Professor Shōryū Katsura has taught philosophy at Hiroshima University and Ryukoku University, Kyoto, until his retirement in 2012. He remains active at Ryukoku University, where he is the director of their Research Center for Buddhist Cultures in Asia. He is the author or editor of seven books and has published over sixty articles on various facets of classical Indian Buddhist thought.

Khyentse Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the support and enhancement of 
Buddhist study, practice, and scholarship throughout the world. Founded by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche in 2001, its primary aim is to extend the Buddha’s wisdom and compassion as widely as possible, in order to benefit all beings.

Wisdom Publications is the leading publisher of contemporary and classic Buddhist books and practical works on mindfulness. Publishing books from all major Buddhist traditions, Wisdom is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to cultivating Buddhist voices the world over, advancing critical scholarship, and preserving and sharing Buddhist literary culture.

"Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way" is the second entry in the Classics of Indian Buddhism series. It is published by Wisdom Publications and distributed by Simon and Schuster. Cost is $28.95 and the ISBN is 9781614290506. 368 pages, paperback, 6x9”.

Praise for "Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way" 
“Katsura and Siderits’s translation and commentary renders the work accessible in an outstanding fashion. The scholarship is of the very highest quality. Vivid and illuminating.”—Graham Priest, author of "Logic: A Very Short Introduction"

“This new translation by Katsura and Siderits is accurate, faithful to the Indian interpreters, and clear.”—Tom Tillemans, Professor Emeritus, University of Lausanne

“It should certainly become the first translation of choice for all English-language work on the Madhyamakakārikās.”—Paul Williams, Emeritus Professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy, University of Bristol, author of "Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition"

“Siderits and Katsura have produced a masterful translation that is both philologically precise and philosophically sophisticated and sets extremely high standards for further work on the Madhyamakakārikā. Every student of Buddhist philosophy will want to own a copy of this book.”—Jan Westerhoff, Oxford University, author of "Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction"

“Will justly be received as the go-to translation of one of the most important works of the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition.”—Dan Arnold, University of Chicago Divinity School, author of "Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief: Epistemology in South Asian Philosophy of Religion"

The 2014-2015 Copeland Colloquium begins at 7 p.m. this Wednesday evening with a screening of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film “Lost in Translation.”

Hosted by Amherst Cinema, the film will be introduced by Mount Holyoke Professor Christopher Benfrey and will be followed by a 20-minute discussion. For each month of the academic year, a different film will receive a similar analytical treatment as part of a translation film series, just one of the many events scheduled for this year’s Copeland Colloquium, “Words in Transit: The Cultures of Translation.”

Since its creation in 1971, the Copeland Colloquium has sought to bring together scholars, lecturers, artists and others from all disciplines and corners of the globe to provide varying perspectives on a specific theme.

“Our intention has been to make Amherst College less aloof, more connected by reaching out to local and national institutions to create a series of events that involve students, faculty, staff, administrators and the general public in the Pioneer Valley,” said steering committee member and Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans.

This year’s theme, “Words in Transit,” explores both the perils and possibilities that come with communicating across language barriers via translation. In an email sent to the Amherst community earlier this month, Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein said that the colloquium will also focus on related themes of immigration, journalism, hybrid cultures, international diplomacy and the role of the humanities in a multicultural society.

“There are around 6,500 languages in the world today,” Stavans said. “Speaking one, maybe two of these languages makes us members of the community. That community, to survive needs to be in constant dialogue with others.”
Another central focus of this year’s theme will be the challenges and opportunities that technology poses for effective translation.

“Do Facebook, Twitter and Instagram bring us closer together? Or do they push us further apart making people lonelier, less in touch with society? And how do different linguistic communities interact on social media?” Stavans asked.

The task of exploring these questions will be taken on in a series of “Translator Talks.” Among those scheduled to present their ideas are international investigative reporter and New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson, novelist Jeff Parker and German literature translator Susan Bernofsky.

Other collaborators from less linguistic backgrounds have been invited as well.

“We thought it would be most interesting to invite people involved in other areas like music and engage them in a conversation about translation,” said steering committee member and Professor of Russian Catherine Ciepiela, “They may not have been asked to talk about translation before. But that’s another way which we thought, ‘oh that’ll really open the conversation up’— if the people you’re inviting don’t have a professional line on translation. We’re interested in seeing how translation issues affect many areas of cultural life.”

One of these unusual voices weighing in on the question of translation will be world-renowned Panamanian jazz pianist and composer Danilo Pérez.

“It’s an interesting place to talk about the link between history and culture and language and music,” Ciepiela said. “Jazz is an international idiom that still draws on local traditions, not just musical, but even linguistic traditions. Indigenous languages and Spanish are part of the texture of his music.”

The experimental theater group, Double Edge will also join the conversation, performing on Sept. 28 their adaptations of “Don Quixote,” “The Arabian Nights,” and “The Odyssey” with the first-year quad as their stage.

The discussion will not just be limited to those visiting campus, however. Amherst students are already beginning work on a series of related projects that will engage both the campus community and the Pioneer Valley community.

“Amherst College students will be involved with NPR in producing an Oral History of immigrants to the region who tell stories about learning English, and [others] will also collaborate with the Amherst Regional High School in producing short plays about young people coming to the United States,” Stavans said.

One student, Melih Levi ’15, is currently developing a blog that he says will function as a sort of “hub for student reflections.” Levi hopes to recruit submissions, including translations done by students, writings on translation and visual arts.

“I really think that translation is crucial for what we do in the humanities,” Ciepiela said. “And Amherst, I’m proud to say, is really having to get out in front culturally as an advocate of the liberal arts and the humanities. The practice of translation goes to the heart of what we do, I think.”

The complete schedule of events for the Copeland Colloquium can be found here.

The Education and Culture Ministry has been criticized for a number of language problems in its promotion of Indonesia’s higher education institutions through its scholarship program, the Developing Countries Partnership (DCP), which is run by the ministry’s Directorate-General of Higher Education (Dikti).

The scholarship website, knb.dikti.go.id, is a case in point. The first sentence that greets visitors to the website reads: “Developing Countries Partnership program on Scholarship or better known as Beasiswa Kemitraan Negara Berkembang (KNB) designed to facilitate every passion of Developing Countries citizens to pursuing their dream through higher education.” 

Nafisah Ratanti Wulandari, who obtained a scholarship from Europe’s Erasmus Mundus for a Master’s degree, said on Tuesday that her view of the Education Ministry’s scholarship website was, “Although the English is understandable, the style is unattractive and informal. There are too many informal idioms […] it uses almost colloquial language.”

Marta Tintya Karunianingtyas, a Master’s graduate who was given a Rector’s Fellowship by the International Islamic University of Malaysia, concurred that the English used on the website was inelegant. “The language issues should be fixed. [If I were the applicant] I would think twice. I would be afraid of miscommunication problems,” she added.

A number of grammatical errors also appear in the letters sent to the awardees of the DCP scholarship, which has been given to individuals from developing countries since 2002.

The letters, which can be downloaded from knb.dikti.go.id/index.php, contain more than 18 grammatical mistakes. Typographical errors, such as lack of spaces, also distract the reader.

For example, on the list of the Master’s scholarship awardees in one of the letters, the scholar Galia Petkova is recorded as coming from “Bulgary” instead of Bulgaria, while Ahmad SA Hamayel is said to come from “Palestina” instead of Palestine. Sierra Leone is spelled “Sierra Leonne”, while Slovakia is “Slovak”.

The ministry’s letters also indicate that Ahmad took a Master’s in Islamic “Tought” instead of thought, while Duarte da Costa Barreto from Timor Leste is recorded as taking a Master’s course in “phylosophy” instead of philosophy.

In addition, all references to “language” in the list are spelled as “languange”, while the word “environmental” is rendered “enviromental”.

When asked how such errors could occur, a Dikti deputy, R. Purwanto Subroto, said “We will look into it.”

“We usually use a mechanism to monitor such errors,” he said, adding that the directorate-general did not have standard English names for program studies yet.

Purwanto further said that Dikti intended to discuss the matter in an upcoming coordination meeting.

Meanwhile, the ministry’s inspector general, Haryono Umar, expressed astonishment at the errors. He said that the ministry had standard operational procedures in place for writing formal statements, supposedly ruling out the possibility of mistakes.

“The letters posted should have passed through a check and re-check procedure first,” Haryono said. “There should be officials who sign and review them before they’re sent.”

Laila Sifa, the scholarship program’s coordinator at the directorate-general, said that the errors might be down to a lack of English expertise on the part of the directorate-general’s staff.

“We also do not have special proofreading staff for such purposes,” Laila added.

Haryono said that to prevent such mistakes from reoccurring, the ministry would instruct every one of its officials to implement the standard operational procedures.

“The ministry’s inspectorate-general will also evaluate the procedures to address the current situation,” Haryono added.

This year, the ministry has awarded DCP Master’s degree scholarships to 117 awardees from 44 different countries. It has also awarded Bachelor’s scholarships to four awardees from three different countries. 

Last week, Dikti made headlines after delaying the payment of scholarship funds to Indonesian students studying at overseas universities.

A number of the students are facing economic hardship and are at risk of being dismissed from their universities for failing to pay their tuition.

Some of the scholarship grantees said that the late disbursements had been a recurring problem in recent years, but the current delay was the longest yet. (ask)

The theme of this year’s congress was “Translation as a Form of Cultural Diplomacy.” This topic reflects both the current turbulent geopolitical environment and the principles that inspired the foundation of the Institute of Translation itself. Bridging the gap “We wanted to create a forum where translators from all over the world could exchange bits of wisdom and professional experience on their art form,” said Vladimir Grigoriev, the Deputy Head of the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications and one of the Institute’s key founders. The Congress of Translators was founded by the Institute of Translation in 2010, and the first event attracted over 150 participants from 20 different countries. The second congress, which took place in 2012, boasted translators from 30 different countries. “But we also had in mind the higher, more philosophical purpose of translation, which is a means of uniting people from different countries. Although it is highly technical in nature, translation is after all not a science but an art, and there’s a certain degree of cultural alchemy that takes place when you translate, because you’re not just replacing one word with another, you’re creating a palpable bridge between the cultural mentalities of two countries.” The congress played host to an incredibly diverse range of lectures over its two days, and there were almost 300 given in total. Each morning and afternoon session consisted of nine separate “sections,” with each section focusing on its own theme that was explored by five or six translators and a moderator.  Topics included practical issues such as “How do you avoid unintentional plagiarism in classic works that have been translated numerous times?” and “How does one translate cultural context?” Many lectures were devoted to language-specific dilemmas like “The difficulties of translating Nabokov and Chekhov into Japanese,” or “The problems posed by trying to translate the musicality of Russian poetry into American idiomatic speech.” These lectures were a chance for genuine, passionate cultural exchange, as they concerned questions that literary translators frequently encounter. Cross-cultural topics such as “What contemporary Russian literature is popular in China and why?” and “The history of translating Russian literature in Iran” drew particular attention – especially for countries that are culturally distant from Russia. There were also political discussions on hot topics like “Translating Russian literature into Ukrainian in the wake of the current crisis” or “The situation with translating Russian authors into Estonian.” These were important as art and literature can pave the way for peaceful resolutions in politics, and translation has a key role to play in facilitating this. The congress also touched on pedagogical subjects such as “What is the role of the university in molding young translators?” and “How to teach students to preserve the ‘soul’ of a text,” as well as more ontological questions such as “Does the translator need to know everything?” or “Is translation more of a science or a labor of love?” Facing the tough questions Fyodor Lukyanov: Russia's relations with the West are ruined for long time As the congress took place with the crisis in Ukraine still ongoing, this subject was always lurking in the background. The Institute of Translation chose to confront the matter head on by including a discussion on the topic from international expert and editor-in-chief of Russian Global Affairs, Fedor Lukyanov. Many translators present at the congress thought that this was unnecessary, suggesting that culture should not be affected by politics. The concept of the translator as cultural ambassador and peace envoy was further emphasized in the introduction printed on the first page of the congress’s itinerary: “The world is living in difficult times right now, when professional diplomacy is not always capable of quelling hostile conflicts, when mutual misunderstanding and mistrust break apart peace-loving people. In these situations, one must not undervalue the role of the literary translator, who fulfills the high humanitarian mission of bringing together the people and culture of different countries.” However, without any initiative from the organizers, the participants of the congress had issued an anti-war petition of their own. The translators expressed their “terror and pain at the sight of the events in Ukraine” and conveyed their collective protest against “the propaganda of hate, which distorts reality and calls people to violence.” According to the petition, “The duty of a translator as a cultural mediator is to promote and assist peace and freedom of speech, to openly stand out against violence and lies. Translation is possible only as free transfer of languages, ideas, cultures and worldviews.” This was made public on September 4, the congress’s first day, and was signed by more than 300 Russian and foreign translators, writers, scholars and others. Impressions of an intellectual feast The highlight of the congress’s first day was a lively evening discussion between Russian writers who took to the stage in pairs, with each pair representing opposing points of view on different subjects related to life and art. The Read Russia Prize is awarded in Moscow The congress also saw the awarding of the Read Russia Prize – the only prize for translation of Russian literature – in four categories. The prize for translation of classic 19th century Russian literature went to Alejandro Ariel Gonzales for his Spanish translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Double.” In the 20th Century Russian Literature category, the award went to Alexander Nitzberg for his German translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.” Marian Schwartz won the prize in the Contemporary Russian Literature category for her English translation of Leonid Yuzefovich’s “Harlequin’s Costume.” Finally, the winner in the Poetry category was Liu Wenfei, who translated selected poems by Alexander Pushkin into Chinese. Alexander Livergant, chief editor for the Russian magazine Foreign Literature and moderator of one of the congress’ sections, shared his impressions of the event: “Naturally, we didn’t expect so many participants to come to Moscow this year – there has been very significant growth in comparison with the previous congress. For example, there were many more visitors from the former USSR republics this time around. Special project: RBTH Literature The congress was also notable for the great amount of publishing projects that were presented and the fact that the geography of translations from Russian has grown – France, Germany, and Scandinavia are all widely translating Russian literature, although this is significantly less true in the UK and US. I should also note that interest is not just limited to the classics – our contemporary writers are very popular and well-known globally.” Many translators at the congress agreed with the view that translation can facilitate peace through mutual understanding, and some even took the idea a step further, arguing that translation has a certain degree of political purity because it is so emotional in nature. “Translators are more than cultural diplomats, because diplomats are diplomatic. Translators must be critical of their material, must walk across all the thorns in the field of their work, and you can only do that if you really love what you do,” said Ljubinka Milincic, a Read Russia prize nominee for her Russian-Serbian translation of Georgy Vladimov’s “The General and His Army.”  According to many participants, the obvious passion and intellectual commitment to the craft is also what distinguished this particular congress from the many other similar educational events that take place globally every year. Translation challenges the brightest minds “I like this congress because you can tell that the people who organize it actually really care about translation,” said Oliver Ready, an Oxford academic who recently produced a new translation of the Russian classic “Crime and Punishment.” “I’ve been to many other congresses where it’s clearly just an excuse for the grandchildren of important people to have careers.” While the undeniable breadth and depth of the subject matter was greatly appreciated, it was also a double-edged sword, as many translators felt they had too much choice. They described fretting over which section to attend, often running through the labyrinth of buildings in anxious pursuit of the next groundbreaking lecture. In response, Vladimir Grigoriev cited better organization as one of his key goals when discussing the Institute of Translation’s future plans. He also spoke of the importance of continued expansion, particularly to include countries whose literature – or very existence – is not very well-known. International translators can be sure that they will have even more to look forward to at the next congress.
Source: Russia Beyond the Headlines -http://rbth.com/literature/2014/09/12/a_labor_of_love_or_a_science_experts_gather_in_moscow_to_discuss_t_39753.html)

When I first ran across Asifa Majid’s  article with Ewelina Wnuk in Cognition, about how speakers of Maniq, a language indigenous to southern Thailand, have a vocabulary for talking about smell, I was taken aback. In anthropology, especially since the work of people like David Howes, Constance Classen, and Andrew Synott, we know very well that different cultures privilege olfaction and other senses more than Westerners do. The anthropology of the sense has made it clear that the ideological privileging of vision in the West, and relative underdevelopment of sense of smell or proprioception, is not matched elsewhere.

Prof. Asifa Majid

However, Wnuk and Majid were attacking, with empirical observations and psychometric testing, one of the pillars of Western philosophical accounts of how human senses evolved: the idea that human evolution had tipped the balance decisively away from olfaction.The alleged weakness and imprecision of olfaction was taken for granted in perceptual psychology.

Some of these theories of sensory evolution hold that our ancestors had, in a way, paid for our distinctive cognitive and perceptual development by sacrificing olfactory acuity. Vision increased precision at the expense of olfaction.

In fact, some theorists of brain evolution go so far as to suggest that there was a kind of neurological trade-off: language use could only grow as our ancestors lost a capacity for smelling. The restraint and remove from the immediate sense-world necessary for logic and abstract thought was opposed to the kind of complete immersion and sensory triggering of behaviour that other animals had because of the way aromas dominated their perception. Were the senses in a zero-sum exchange where visual acuity and a distinctly human way of life made acute olfaction impossible?

Research conducted by Asifa Majid, together with her collaborators, suggests that language and olfaction are not at odds; the right language can actuallyenhance the perception of aroma, as language has also enhanced, inflected and refined our other senses. Rather than a fact of human being, the neglect of olfaction in the West is a result of our own cultural presuppositions and sensory biases: smell suffers from neglect, not an inescapable evolutionary trade-off. (Majid’s research got a mention recently from Tanya Luhrmann in an op-ed in the New York Times: Can’t Place That Smell? You Must Be American: How Culture Shapes Our Senses.)

I ended up writing at length about their research in an earlier post, Giving names to aromas in Aslian languages, and Prof. Majid and I subsequently exchanged emails. She agreed to answer some questions about her research, which I’m really happy to present today as an interview (below the fold).

Asifa Masjid is Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition at the Center for Language Studies, Radboud University in Nijmegen, but she’s also a Research Fellow, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, 

and affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. You can follow her on Twitter at @asifa_majid. 

Interview: 

Greg Downey: First off, I really want to thank you for agreeing to being interviewed, and for sharing your research with us. Although neither Daniel nor I are linguists, we’ve found repeatedly that research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has a lot to offer in thinking about brain-culture relations.

To start us off, I wanted to ask you: How did you get interested in the language of smell and what alerted you to the fact that the Aslian languages have this remarkable vocabulary about aroma?

Asifa Majid: The interest in smell started from a cross-cultural survey on the language of perception. Across many different disciplines there is a long-standing idea that some sensory modalities are more important than others. It is said that humans are visual creatures first, followed by hearing, and then the other senses. I was interested to know whether this “hierarchy of dominance” was reflected in language(s). This led Stephen Levinson and I to ask whether some sensory modalities were more “ineffable” than others, i.e., difficult or impossible to put into language. (We lay out the theoretical framework in a paper soon to be published in Mind & Language.) 

In order to test the hypothesis that some sensory modalities were easier to put into language than others, we created a standardised stimulus set of colours, sounds, tastes, smells, etc. Our colleagues used these stimuli to collect data from many different languages. Some preliminary results were published in the journal The Senses & Society, including Niclas Burenhult’s and my first paper on Jahai smell. The data Niclas first collected suggested something very different from the other languages in the cross-cultural sample. This immediately grabbed my attention, and led to the subsequent work.

GD: To get some kind of background, I wanted to ask you about the broader area of studying indigenous languages.  People who study indigenous languages often point out how quickly we are losing them. Some estimate that potentially thousands of languages could be lost in the twenty-first century.

What is the current state of the Aslian languages you studied? Are there a lot of speakers? Are children learning the languages?

AM: The Aslian languages, like most languages of the world, are spoken by small communities. Speaker numbers are in the 100s for most Aslian languages; there are around 300 speakers of Maniq, and around 2,000 for Jahai. The good news is that they are still being learned by children and have wide applicability, that is, they are not restricted in their use to specific register or genre.

 

Fieldwork: Methods for investigating sensory experience

GD: How hard is it to get to these groups of people and to get them to tell you about their perceptions of aromas?

AM: Fieldwork is hard going but intensely rewarding. It is mentally demanding. There is a lot of information to assimilate at once: the individual personalities of the people, the different ways of sitting (yes, sitting) and behaving, the complexities of the language, etc. We work with speakers in their native language. This means that a good understanding of the linguistic structures is a prerequisite to any systematic data collection using experimental tasks. I rely heavily on my linguist colleagues for their expert knowledge here. Niclas 

Burenhult has been working with the Jahai for over a decade and has written the only existing grammar of the language. Ewelina Wnuk has been working on Maniq for 5 years, and has spent cumulatively over 8 months with the Maniq. Long-term fieldwork is crucial to the kind of work we do.

Aside from the intellectual demands, fieldwork can be physically grueling. Both Jahai and Maniq speakers live in tropical rainforest. This means we have to travel through jungle, wait out thunderstorms, try to avoid dysentery, malaria, dengue fever…, and be prepared for mosquitos and leeches. I think both Niclas and Ewelina are far braver than me when it comes to these challenges!

GD: Although you touch on the research method in a couple of your articles, I wanted to ask you more about your actual methods, the procedures you use for testing people on the sense of smell. How did you get the systematic data to talk about perception of smell?

A starting point was asking people to describe perceptual stimuli, such as Munsell colour chips and, for smell, the Brief Smell Identification Kit (the B-SIT), a sort of “scrach-and-sniff” way of presenting the same odors to different people. I was astounded when I first realised that Jahai speakers were making systematic distinctions between smell qualities using a smell set of verbs. This led us to probe these distinctions in additional ways.

We supplemented our knowledge of the smell terms in Jahai and Maniq by using “free-listing”: we simply asked people to list all the smell words they knew. In addition, we tried to find out more about their application by asking people to provide exemplars (What smells like X?) for each of the smell words. With the Maniq, we also conducted a “similarity judgment task”. We wanted to understand better the how the smell words were related to one another. So, we provided Maniq speakers with triads of smell words, and asked them to tell us which word was the most different to the others. It would be like asking English speakers to say which is the most different out of the following three: GREEN, BLUE, ORANGE. These judgments can be converted into similarity matrices, and then analysed using multivariate statistics to reveal the underlying structure of the smell lexicon.

These empirical methods are one prong of our smell studies. We also rely on linguistic elicitation to figure out more about the linguistic properties of the words: what word class are they, do they have special grammatical properties, etc. And, we rely on ethnographic observation to understand better what significance smell has in everyday life for the Jahai and Maniq. It is by pulling together the three stands: experimental study, linguistic documentation, and ethnographic observation that we are able to better understand smell in the Aslian langages and cultures.

GD: Sorry, but I want to go back to this method question, partially because I’m personally interested in using systematic data gathering techniques in field settings where cross-cultural issues are a big deal. How do you use the Brief Smell Identification Kit (the B-SIT)? Do you think that this way of testing your subjects’ sense of smell affects the data that you get? 

AM: We use the B-SIT in an unusual way. The B-SIT is a standardised test. The way it is normally administered, is as a forced-choice test. People smell one of the scratch-and-sniff chips, and then say what smell it is from a choice of four pre-determined categories; for example, is this smell cinnamon, banana, petrol or strawberry. The four choices are given in English, so we can’t run it with the Jahai using this method.

We want to get equivalent data for the English and Jahai speakers, so instead of using a forced-choice task we use a free-naming task. Speakers simply have to say what smell is this. They can use whatever kind of description they like. We can then quantify the types of descriptors given by the two groups of speakers.

The advantage of using something like the B-SIT is that we can administer the same odorants to everyone. The odorants are standardised. However, this can also be a disadvantage. The smells are standardised for an American audience. So we cannot be sure that they are representative of the Jahai odour environment. In fact, we believe we have underestimated the Jahai abilities in our paper. We think we would learn far more if we were to adequately sample the Jahai odour space. But still, it is testimony to the potential of Jahai terminology that Jahai speakers still out-perform the English, even though the smells are biased to English smellscapes.

 

The philosophical implications of olfactory research

GD: You write in your article with Niclas Burenhult about Jahai language speakers that Western philosophers have long argued that ‘olfactory abstraction’ is impossible. That is, general traits or qualities of smells cannot be derived from the variety of smells we perceive, unlike abstract qualities such as color in sight or pitch in sound. Does your research with the Jahai and Maniq overturn this idea that abstraction is impossible with aromas?

AM: The Jahai and Maniq data is certainly incompatible with the view the olfactory abstraction is impossible. Have we overturned the idea? Only time can tell.

GD: Fair enough. I suppose that is the only way to really know! I hope time does tell…

When you analyze the clustering of smells and get your subjects to compare them, do they form any organized system? Do they have something that is equivalent to ‘primary colors’ or is the ‘smell space’ organized in some sort of systematic way?

AM: Yes, smell terms have a beautifully organised structure, akin to what we find for colour terms in other languages. You can find out about this internal structure by asking speakers to make judgments about the similarities between words using a similarity judgment task, as I explained before.

We gave Maniq speakers smell words, and asked them to say which were the most different. Based on these judgments, we were able to run statistical analyses that showed the Maniq smell lexicon is organised along two dimensions. The first is pleasantness: some smell terms refer to pleasant smells, others to more unpleasant smells. The second parameter seems to tap into dangerousness. For example, the terms miʔ huhuɸ, hamis and kameh sit on one 

end of this dimension. They refer to the smells of snakes, sun, millipedes and poison, smells that are believed by the Maniq to cause illness and pain. On the other side of the dimension are the terms miʔ bayɔɸ, lspəs and haʔıt which are not considered dangerous.

GD: Where do you think that the organization of the system of smells comes from? Is it influenced by the sense organs themselves? By the language? By the practicalities of day-to-day life, like what is good-to-eat and what is dangerous? Or is organized or structured by some other factors?

AM: Great question. In the paper we postulated that this might tell us something about the sense organs themselves, but the sense organs themselves are shaped by the practicalities of everyday life, and so forth. We’re currently expanding our research to look at other communities and environments in the hopes of teasing apart these factors.

 

Smell in psychological perspective

GD: You reference one of my favorite recent articles, the review by Joseph Henrich, Stephen Heine and Ara Norenzayan that explores how psychology is biased by an over-reliance on WEIRD research subjects, that is, subjects who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Henrich and colleagues detail a whole range of areas of cognition and psychology that are affected by this bias. Your research seems to reinforce this point so strongly for the sense of smell.

Where do you think that this bias comes from? Why do Westerners, not just the general public but also scientists who should know better, assume that our human sense of smell is so weak?

AM: Within psychology there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the sense of smell is weak. It is a fact that English speakers struggle to name odours. There also isn’t a lexical field for smell as there is for the other sensory modalities. There have, in fact, been cross-cultural studies that confirm that this poor naming and lack of olfactory vocabulary generalises to other populations. Given that evidence it is not unreasonable to conclude that this is a pan-human trait.  But, as we said in our papers, there is other evidence from within anthropology that casts doubt on the generalisation. I hope our studies will be able to make a bridge between the two fields, so we can revisit of some of these issues with a more diverse sample of people in mind.

GD: On a more personal note, do you think your research is affecting the way that you perceive aroma? Do you notice your own sense of smell changing, or do any of the people on the project report that talking about aroma is affecting the way that they perceive?

AM: I’m reflecting on smell every day in a way I wasn’t before I started this line of work, so – yes – my research is definitely affecting the way I perceive scents. It has certainly brought me a richer appreciation of everyday smells and flavours!

GD: Do you think that someone could be trained, outside of these groups, to perceive smells as accurately as they do, maybe by using their system of aroma terms as a form of training? One reason I ask is that some of the research on wine-

tasters and perfume testers, people who do develop quite sophisticated olfactory senses, is inconclusive. Some research finds that these people don’t develop the kind of shared, mutually-intelligible systems for describing what they perceive that you describe in Aslian language. They develop their own idiosyncratic systems, but you don’t get classifications that generalize as well.

Do you think that this is trainable if one has the right training system, or is the context for Aslian language learners so complex that it’s hard to imagine taking the skill out of that context? 

AM: I believe these categories can be learned. Your question points to the critical issue, however: what sort of learning experiences do we need exactly to learn smell categories? I think language plays a critical role. But this is something that needs to be fleshed out further with experimental studies.

As an aside, let me say that we are currently re-examining the issue of expert vocabulary for smells too. My PhD Ilja Croijmans has just finished a study investigating wine- and coffee-experts in order to establish whether they show more consensus in describing smells and flavours than novices. We are particularly interested in whether their knowledge is domain-general or domain-specific. We’ll keep you posted about our results!

 

GD: Thanks so much for doing this, Asifa. It’s not easy to do an interview-by-correspondence, but the research was so fascinating that I wanted to talk to you more. If readers want to learn more, check out the earlier post here, which also has links to the articles we’ve discussed. 

Credits:

Portrait of Asifa Majid from her Twitter account.

Photo of Majid administering the aroma identification test from the story: MPI “Language of perception” project featured on Dutch television documentary, at the website of the Max Planck Institute.

If you understand Dutch, there’s a video on YouTube of a panel interview with Prof. Asifa Masjid, as well as Profs. Mark Dingemanse and Carel ten Cate. Majid answers her questions in English, so I was able to follow her parts of it!

Final photo is public domain, generously shared by ‘Unsplash’ at Pixabay.

Translators of Russian literature were honored at an award ceremony at Moscow's Pashkov House, where participants warned that international tensions over Ukraine were having an effect on the quiet work of translators too.

The Read Russia award ceremony on Saturday was hosted by former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi and took place at the end of an international translator congress, which saw dozens of participants sign a letter voicing their opposition to Russia's actions in Ukraine.

Pashkov House has a proud literary heritage, with a starring role in Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" so it was fitting that one of the winners was Alexander Nitzberg for translating that very book into German. He won in the category of "20th-century Russian literature [works written before 1990]."

Read Russia prizes are awarded to a translator or group of translators for outstanding translations of prose and poetry works from Russian into a foreign language, published by a foreign publisher, during the previous two years.

In the contemporary Russian literature nomination [works written after 1990] the prize went to Marian Schwartz for her translation of Leonid Yuzefovich's novel "Harlequin's Costume." Schwartz is a prominent translator of Russian books in the U.S. with more than 60 volumes of Russian classic and contemporary fiction, history, biography and criticism.

The detective novel set in St. Petersburg in the second half of the 19th century is the first in a trilogy based on a real-life figure, Chief Inspector Ivan Putilin.

"I thought it was so good and unlike most Russian books people had in America," said Shwartz, who translated the book on her own and then found a publisher, "I don't really have time for that but I liked it so much. [Yuzefovich] has got some wonderful books and is one of the most overlooked authors in English translation."

Russian contemporary literature is printed in small print runs in the U.S., Schwartz said and virtually unknown.

"I would say in America, every year, only about 10 translated Russian books are published," Schwartz said. "Many of those are small books, maybe poetry, available in small numbers."

"We have lost the tradition of even paying lip service to high culture, to literature, when they at least say, "literature is important" — not that they read it," said Schwartz, "In America, it is a big country but a small audience."

Classic Russian works are better served in the English language than contemporary pieces. Two new "Anna Karenina" translations will be published this year. One translated by Rosamund Bartlett was published by Oxford University Press in August and another one, translated by Schwartz will appear from Yale University Press.

The situation with translations is better in Argentina, said Alejandro Ariel Gonzales, who won a prize for his translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella "The Double."

"Argentina is a country of immigrants, which has always been closely tied to Europe," he said, "We can feel the Russian literary influence in our native literature. The first published novel by [famous Argentinian novelist] Julio Cortazar, The Winners (Los Premios), opens with an epigraph from Dostoevsky — a quote from 'The Idiot.' Another Argentinian author, Roberto Arlt, who is not well-known abroad, was even called 'Dostoevsky.' Works by playwright Leonid Andreyev were also very popular in Argentina in the 1970s."

Natalya Solzhenitsyn, a member of the Read Russia's board of trustees, believes that current trends are natural. If we talk about the classic works, they are "time-tested," and contemporary pieces are valuable and important as "a mirror we can look in, they register the current moment."

"But great literature is never born in turbulent times, but rather in more stagnant periods, when there is time to look around, think it over and comprehend," Solzhenitsyn said.

She emphasized that Read Russia's long list included 10 works by contemporary writers out of 32 titles competing for the prize, a third of the total.

Nevertheless it was contemporary ­issues, which were more on the minds of those at the ceremony.

The current political situation is awful and unprecedented, said Marina Boroditskaya, Russian translator and poet. More than 100 congress participants and their colleagues in the industry signed a petition of protest against Russian involvement in Ukraine — both military involvement and propaganda.

"Some of our foreign colleagues have already complained that publishers are reluctant to talk about new translations from Russian: "please do not bring Russian for now," Boroditskaya said.

Schwartz observed that in the Soviet times, much was translated from Russian in the U.S. "Many of the translated contemporary books then had some political element to them, which I did not appreciate at the time. And now I am also asking myself the question, "With these rising tensions, is this going to change the kind of literature that is published in America?"

Boroditskaya also felt uncertainty whether another congress will happen in the future, "given we are driven into a 'rogue state' situation."

Director of the Russian State Library of Foreign Literature Yekaterina Genieva read the final communique of the congress, which stressed the urgent need to promote humanitarian ties and support translation as a means of mutual understanding and communication.

"Today, with the rising international tensions and stronger threats to peace and human dignity provoked by the battle of geopolitical interests, it is crucial to prevent an unwinding of humanitarian ties, knowledge and idea exchange, which facilitate deeper mutual understanding between countries and cultures. Writers' word brought across languages with translators' help often proves more powerful than diplomatic documents and gun fires."