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‘Translation is what enables the traffic of ideas between languages,‘ Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes in this week’s edition of Pambazuka News. In the second part of a keynote address given at the 6th Pan African Reading for all Conference, wa Thiong’o shares his own experiences of and views on writing both in English and in his mother tongue Gikuyu, and of translating works from one language into the other. A question frequently asked, after talk about the necessity of using African languages as literacy instruments, is that of the multiplicity of languages. But many languages within nations can be a strength if the relationship between them is not based on the nations of hierarchy, but rather on nations of a network.
In the vision of a network, there is not one centre there are several centres, equidistant with each other but connected in a give-and-take. Every language draws from another. Every language gives to another. All languages end up giving to, and taking from, each other, laying the groundwork for a complex independence and interdependence of cultures within and between cultures. Translation is what enables that traffic of ideas between languages. In his book, Discourse on Colonialism, the Martiniquan poet, Aimé Césaire, once described culture contact and exchange as the oxygen of civilization. Language networking through translation can only help in the generation of that oxygen within and between nations.
I could talk about the role of translation in the history of ideas in philosophy, politics and science. European renaissance is inconceivable without translation. And religion? Can you think of the spread of Christianity without translation? Also the Qu’ran? I have discussed some of this in my book Re-Membering Africa. What I want to do is briefly discuss my own work and my relationship to translation. I started writing seriously in 1960s when I was a student at Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda. I wrote in English. It seemed natural. The writers that I had read and studied had written in English. I had not read or come across any intellectuals who questioned the wisdom and desirability of writing on African writing in European languages.
My first two novels Weep not Child (1964) and The River Between (1965) were in English and it was not until I published my third novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), that I started questioning my linguistic choice seriously. This did not stop me from continuing the habit and I published Petals of Blood, in 1977. As it turned out, that was to be my last novel in English.
I wrote my first novel in Gikuyu, Caitani Mutharabaini, on toilet paper in cell no 6 in Kamiti maximum prison where I had been placed because of my work in theatre in an African language, principally because of my play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will marry when I want).The novel, and the play Ngaahika Ndeenda ,were published in Gikuyu in 1982, two years after I had come from prison. It is then I embarked on the task of translating from Gikuyu into English.
Kenya and Africa have many African languages and I did not want my non-Gikuyu to feel that they had been left out. I did not want their inaccessibility to be used as an argument against writing in African languages. This was my first exercise in translation, auto-translation, in this case. Or was it?
Thinking back about it, I realise that I have always live in translation. First my own when I expressed my sentient interaction with the world around me, hunger, thirst, pain, discomfort, need, in a continuous cry; and happiness, contentment and well being, in laugher; to which people, my mother mostly, responded by meeting desires. This was self-translation of the world within and around me, through the only sounds that I could make. It was my first exercise that, through unconscious, in auto-translation. Later my mother helped me make sense of the same material world – the one I touched, tested, saw or heard and which I had earlier expressed in cry and laugher – by translating it into definite sound which, when I repeated, elicited response. This was another exercise in translation, not my own, but which I later come to know as my mother tongue.
My mother tongue, Gikuyu, communally inherited and continually enriched through time, was a storehouse of knowledge, attitudes, feelings and moods and I drew from this granary of communal memory to understand the world around me. Gikuyu became my primary language. Initially, it was simply my spoken language. When later I went to school and learnt to read and write, a kind of translation of sound images into visuality, it also became my first literary language.
In my third year in school, I started learning Kiswahili and English. To understand the languages, I kept on referencing back to my mother tongue, a process that Marx described as characteristics of all who learn a new language. According to him one has mastered a new language when one no longer feels it necessary to first translate the new into the old to understand it. But while relationship to Kiswahili followed that Marxian observation in peaceful way, I soon came to realise that my relation to English was based on coercive system of rewards and terror. I was rewarded with praise and distinction when I did well in English, spoken and written, but punished and humiliated when I was caught speaking Gikuyu in school compound. In have come to learn that the same was done to Welsh kids who were made to carry a placard, Welsh Not, when they were caught speaking English in the compound.
Soon English took over and became the language to which I referenced back in relation to other languages even my own. [For instance, although the first book that I ever read in my own was the Gikuyu language Bible, a translation, but on learning English, I, along with other English neophytes, would carry an English bible to church. The preacher would still read his chosen passages in Gikuyu but we would follow the same passage through our English language Bible. We would thus learning be hearing Gikuyu sounds, as read by the preacher, through the English literary text we read silently. The irony was of course that the English bible was itself a translation, so it was as if we were negotiating the biblical terrain through complex process of mental translation from one translated text to another. We were looking at the world through a Gikuyu language translation of a biblical text, but through the literary text of an English translation of the same biblical text. It was all a mental exercise.
It is now easy to see that when years later I wrote novels of African life in English, I was simply continuing the practice we had established in church. Writing in English became a literary act in mental translation. The people about whom I wrote in my first four novels had been shaped by their experience of Kenyan history. In real life they spoke Gikuyu or Kiswahili. They voiced their interactions with the natural and social environment in an African language. They talked an African language in their homes, in their fields, in education of their children. They argued and settled disputes in their own language. They imported knowledge and morals in their own language. They sung in their own language. They planned and carried out their ant-colonial resistance in their African languages. And yet when I presented the same characters and actions in the literary text, I made characters emerge as English speakers. By a sleight of literary hand, I had obliterated an African language speech community and created English language speaking African peasantry. I effected this through the act of mental translation of my earlier silent reading in church.
All writing in a language that is not a mother tongue, or the first language of one’s upbringing, is largely a mental exercise in translation. Underlying the exercise persists the question: How much of one’s language does one retaining the mentally translated text? The question – which is really one of the relationships between the source language and the target language – is at the heart of all translation even a mental one.
In my case I had to try making the reader feel that these characters were speaking an African language. One finds the proliferation of African sayings in my English language novels. Sometime songs are given in the original language. At other times, I would mention an African language word and then indicate the meaning in the context. Proverbs are the hardest to render in another language where one is tying to make the reader feel the rhythm of the original. Sometimes, as in Petals of Blood, I left a whole lot of African words without any attempt at their translation either directly or in the context.
Thus when in 1978, at the maximum security prison, I decided to break with English as the language of my fictive imagination and wrote in Gikuyu, I suddenly felt liberated from these exercises in mental translation. Psychologically, I felt I had restored African characters to their own language. They had re-possessed their own voice in the original sounds and structures of their language. In other words, I had stopped bringing death to an African language-speaking peasantry and then having them resurrected as an English language-speaking peasantry.
One of the saddest results in writing in English was that, through mental translation of my creative process, I had lost what would have been the ‘original text’ in Gikuyu. It was lost in the mind. It did not exist. Writing in Gikuyu directly now ensured the existence of original text. Its life was not dependent on translation. That is why I felt that my first novel in Gikuyu, Caintaani Mutharabaini, was an act of self liberation.
I translated the novel into English under the title Devil on the Cross and it was published by Heinemann (Kenya) and Heinemann (London) under the same title in 1982. The translation followed the same track I had followed in my ‘mental translation’ days that had produced Weep Not Child and The River Between. That is, I try to make the reader become aware of the source language through the target language in such a way as to suggest the structure and the rhythm of the original source of language. The only difference was that now there was a real material Gikuyu language text from which to work. In this method as in the first, African characters who are otherwise mature and wise and complex often emerge as simple, though the English words which they voice their thoughts about the inner and external world. This is one of the unintended consequences of trying to make source language be very present in the target language.
My second novel In Gikuyu was Matigari. It came out of Kenya in 1986 and it became famous when the Moi Dictatorship sent police to arrest its eponymous hero, intelligence reports having reached him that Matigari was a real living person going about the country asking question of truth and justice. The novel was translated into English by another hand, Wangui wa Goro and published in London, in its English translation bringing back the old contradiction. Its Gikuyu language original had been banned. But it acquired a second life, Walter Benjamin’s notion of surviving life, through the English translation. Wangui wa Goro avoided the pitfalls of mental translation and that of making the rhythms and syntax of original language overly present in the target language. In this way she manages to capture the complex thought process of Matigari’s question for truth and justice. In other words, readers could concentrate on their identification with the world of the novel without tripped through constant reminder that one is reading a translation.
It took me ten years before I embarked on my major novel in Gikuyu. Mugori wa Kagogo took me many years to write, from about May 1977 to December 2002. The novel, a fantastic epic on a dictatorship, takes place in the fiction Africa territory of Aburiria. Its spatial and temporal landscape is wide. Eastern, Africa and western religious and philosophic systems interact in the text. The action of the novel takes us to India, across Africa, to New York and back to Africa. Many subjects and themes including space exploration are touched upon. But many of these religious, philosophic and technological systems are not part of the Gikuyu language tradition. So in writing the novel, I found myself doing mental translation in verses, where a concept, like space and spaceships, would come to me in English and I had to find a way of rendering them in Gikuyu which often forced me to coin new words in Gikuyu or simply domesticate the English word in Gikuyu.
I did my own translation into English, eventually published in 2006 under the title, Wizard of the Crow. [The process was complex because quit often I found myself having to translate a draft I had thought was complete, only to find, in the process of translation, that there were original was inadequate. The muse would possess me again and I would go to the Gikuyu original, wrote more draft, which I later subjected to yet another translation into English. I would say that in the course of writing and rewriting it, translating and retranslating it, there was continuous dialogue and interaction between Gikuyu and English in away that would have been different had I been translating from a finished and published text the way I had done with Devil on the Cross.
My one determination was that I would not try to make the source language intrude overtly in the target language. I was no longer interested in trying to make the reader feel that he was reading a text that had been written in another language. If one wanted to authenticate the original language of its composition, he or she could go to the Gikuyu language original. My novels in Gikuyu have now been translated into German, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish, thus putting Gikuyu in some sort of dialogue with those languages. My hope is the novel would eventually be translated into other African languages within Kenya and Africa and also into other languages in Asia and Latin America.
Translation is definitely one way of enabling that that complex dialogue among languages. In my book Re-membering Africa, I have talked of translation is truly the language of language, or call it, the common speech of languages. But only if the vision and practices are seen as embodying the idea of translation. It is sermon, a lecture, an order, or a statement. Translation, seen as conversation among languages, can help in undermining the false notions of networking among languages, thus generating the oxygen of a common inheritance that Césaire talked about.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* This speech was made as the keynote address at the 6th Pan African Reading for all Conference, hosted by the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on 11 August 2009.
* Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and director of the International Centre for Writing and Translation, at the University of California Irvine.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online atPambazuka News.
Now that school has been in session for more than a week, you’ve probably started to notice some new faces. One of those belongs to Icelandic translator, poet and assistant professor of English and creative writing Lytton Smith.
Smith isn’t a stranger to Western New York. He lived between Rochester and New York City four years ago when his wife had a fellowship at the University of Rochester for a year. Smith has done work for the university himself; translating works of Icelandic fiction like Bragi Ólafsson’s The Ambassador. Smith said that the “independent stuff going on with music, radio and breweries” has him excited to be back.
He grew up in a small town in England. While, his parents got him into verse speaking competitions at a young age and exposed him to a range of poetry, Smith didn’t identify as a writer until he was in high school.
Writing became a larger part of his identity while he attended University College in London, England. There were no workshops, so he set up a literary magazine called 50 Meters Fully Clothed with some of his friends. Another major shift in Smith’s writing destiny occurred when he decided that the time he was taking to memorize lines for theater would be better spent on writing.
Smith has published two books of poetry and is working on a third. One of his books, All Purpose Magical Tent was published in 2008.
“It’s about being unsettled, not having a place in either in language or in the world,” Smith said. “It’s fascinated with circuses and exclusions, but in a fairly whimsical way.” Displaying a trait that isn’t uncommon in poets, Smith admits that while he’s written a book influenced by the circus, he’s only been to three in his life.
Smith’s second book, While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It, published in 2013, switches topics and themes drastically as it tries to explore the relationship between poetry, politics and ethics.
Now, Smith is astonished that he thought of applying for MFA’s in fiction.
“I’ve always been interested in form, like the line, and discovering a range of forms, getting beyond just the sonnet,” he said.
Translation and poetry are complimentary activities to Smith. He describes the translation process as a “wonderfully creative jigsaw.”
“You try to work out what all the pieces are and how they fit together, but then you get to rearrange it so it’s an even better image than you started with, in a sense,” he said.
There are two extreme approaches in the way one can translate a literary piece from one language to another. The first is seeking a literal translation, sometimes known as formal equivalence, in which an attempt is made to translate using the words that correspond as exactly as possible in the two languages, allowing, of course, for the grammatical differences but without paying a great deal of attention to context. A second extreme is paraphrasing, sometimes called making a free or loose translation. One problem with the first approach is that literal translations can be awkward. An obvious problem with paraphrasing is that the translator may not accurately convey the intent of the speaker, especially where precision of language is required. So many of the best translations take a middle ground, sometimes known as dynamic equivalence — trying to convey the thoughts and intent of the original, veering from the literal where needed. Here are some basic tips to keep in mind when translating: Read avidly in both languages:
Reading the genres you wish to translate will help you become better acquainted with the writer and the nuances of language, culture, thought, and message. This will help you understand what the writer is trying to relay figuratively. Reading will also help you develop your language skills and keep up with any changes in dialects or semantics. Take a course:
Taking a course in comparative literature, linguistics, languages, or translation will give you the technical skills and a confidence boost. Such academic training will also give you access to literary lectures, mentorships with professors who translate and libraries with extensive collections. If academia doesn't fit into your schedule, you can teach yourself through books or translation blogs and websites. Research the writer and work you are translating.
Translating means not just looking at the words but also trying to understand the writer's work and what message he/she is trying to convey. In order to do so, find out when and where the work was written; the writer's history; the historical context of the piece; literary references (if any); etc. Practice, practice, practice:
You can only get better by working hard and regularly, if possible – daily doing an exercise on translation. It gets easier and faster with practice and after a while, you will be amazed at how much work you have accumulated.
Most importantly, keep in mind that translation is an art not a science. So use your judgment and creative skills as well as your vocabulary to get the “right” words.
In the engulfing mediocrity that defines our intellectual discourse today, one voice that remained consistently refined and nuanced is no longer with us. In the passing away of U.R. Ananthamurthy on August 22, our country has lost a powerful writer, thinker, philosopher and public activist. He was a man who consistently believed that a writer is not a neutral entity who expresses his views but is not required to fight for what he believes is right. For him a writer was a spirited part of society and politics, and needed to use his pen to engage with the vital issues of the day. In the deadening expediency of “public” debate now, he was the quintessentially cerebral non-conformist, who opposed when he thought he should and not merely to be noticed.
I first got to know Ananthamurthy well when he accepted my invitation to participate in the Afro-Asian Literary Festival. The festival was organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in 2006 when I was its director-general. The venue was the historic Neemrana Fort near Delhi, so beautifully restored by Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg. At that time Ananthamurthy’s health was already fragile but he was still fairly mobile.
The fort required a visitor to climb some considerable steps, and although I was afraid of his ability to do so, Ananthamurthy readily accepted the challenge.
That conference was memorable also for the presence of another great writer, Gulzar. In the case of Gulzar, our meeting at that memorable locale was, at least for me, path-breaking. It led to a friendship which is one of my most treasured possessions, and to several books, which include several volumes of my translation of his poems, and his wonderfully evocative translation of my poem, Yudhister and Draupadi.
But to return to Ananthamurthy. He emerged at that conference as one of the most powerful voices on the importance of writing in our own mother tongue, and the respect that must be given to our own languages. It was not a new argument, but in the context of this specific conference, where so many well-known writers from Asia and Africa were present, apart from literary figures from India, it made a great impact.
Through his simple yet emphatic logic the point came through that one of the greatest losses of colonised societies is the loss of their own languages.
He reiterated this in a public lecture in Delhi a little later: “We are going to lose our memory. We need English, but not of the ‘call centre’ sort. It is not a gateway of knowledge. We need to create in our own language. The English elite in India are not as cultured as the masses. English must be taught but children in schools need to create in their own languages, because we don’t think in English. It is a received language.”
This thought, so simply yet eloquently elucidated by Anantha-murthy, was shared by several of his noted contemporaries, both in India and abroad. Professor Namwar Singh has made the crucial point that no language can be substituted by another. Like mother’s milk, our mother tongue is something we acquire in childhood; a foreign language can be an additional acquisition but never an alternative to it.
The brilliant Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, began his book, Decolonising the Mind, with the statement that this will be his last book in English, and henceforth he will write only in Giyuku and Kiswahili, because a foreign language can only be a language of communication, not a carrier of culture and history. Sheldon Pollock, the great US Sanskrit scholar has made the point that until 1947, and for centuries before that, India had scholars in philology who compared with the best of the world.
These scholars produced pioneering works in all our languages, including in Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit and Urdu, which were invaluable reference works and constituted a window to the roots of our culture.
Unfortunately, the last few decades have seen almost no work on this literary treasure, so much so that foreign universities — and he cites the case of an important one in the United States which failed to get a trained professor in Telugu who had a command over the entire classical Telugu tradition — are being forced to close down their specialities in our languages.
Ananthamurthy wrote almost entirely in Kannada, and still had a huge following. He was fortunate that some of his noted works were widely translated into other languages, including English.
His classic novel Samskara, written in 1965, was made into a much-awarded film, and became a sensation for its fierce condemnation of the sterile and inequitable norms prevailing in a Brahmin village. It is significant that Ananthamurthy spoke of the humiliation and degradation of the caste system when he himself was a Brahmin. He was a beneficiary of institutionalised social inequity by birth, but rebelled against it because he had the ability to think for himself and read widely and eclectically, including the works of Ram Manohar Lohia.
In recent times, even though unwell and on dialysis, Ananthamurthy spoke fearlessly about the dangers of communalism, the threat to India’s pluralistic ethos, and the use of ethnicity and religion in the rise of fascism. He was ruthlessly criticised for his views by the fanatical wings of the Sangh Parivar.
There were even reports that on hearing of his death, some members of these organisations ignited crackers to celebrate. Had they even read his books? Were they even aware of the magnitude and depth of his huge intellectual corpus?
The bigoted zeal of the illiterate fanatic has become one of the greatest threats to our society. The memory of the gentle but unbending legacy of Anantha-murthy will always be an inspiration for those who have a different vision of India.
Author-diplomat Pavan K. Varma has been recently elected to the Rajya Sabha
What happens when Shakespeare’s work is translated into foreign languages? Is it still Shakespeare? Or does something fundamental to the original evaporate in the process? “Bless Thee! Thou Art Translated,” a podcast in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Unlimited series, raises these thought-provoking questions. A translator can retain the story, characters, and ideas of a play, but the intricate wordplay proves much more difficult. For one thing, it’s impossible to translate Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter into a language like Korean, in which poetry is based on syllable counts, not stresses. And what is to be done with those well-crafted puns? However, translation also opens up possibilities for new depths of meaning, as the familiar recedes and a different perspective takes over. Sound interesting? Go ahead – take a short break from back-to-school prep and listen to this delightful podcast. Do you have any of your own stories to share about encountering Shakespeare in a different language or culture? Tell us in the comments.
The Arabic language A better understandingArabic is spoken in 22 countries, but people from different countries don't necessarily understand each other. The language is split up into numerous dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. The Arab spring went a long way towards unifying the way Arabic is used in everyday life. Translators are working on an online dictionary to help standardise the language for business purposes. By Charlotte Schmitz and Guido Zebisch A taxi driver in Cairo once spoke only Modern Standard Arabic with his passengers for an entire day. He claimed to be celebrating "Modern Standard Arabic Day". His passengers thought it was hilarious, which was the intended effect. They believed they were participants in a hidden-camera TV show. The setting was guaranteed to produce laughter because formal Arabic is almost never used in everyday life. Instead, people speak a multitude of regional dialects. Arabic is spoken from Mauritania in the west to Oman in the east. "In Morocco, people can understand and even speak Modern Standard Arabic, but it can still be very difficult to talk to someone from Dubai," says Tarik Bary, the director of the Egyptian-German Cultural Centre in Cairo. Because Arabic is associated with the "holy language" of the Koran, some consider it blasphemous to allow colloquial features to creep in or even to change the standard at will. In everyday spoken language, multiple varieties of Arabic exist side-by-side. The different dialects were shaped by the languages of the former colonial powers or by contact with Berber languages. French had an impact on the Arabic dialects of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, for example, whereas other countries experienced an anglophone influence. According to Charlotte Schmitz and Guido Zebisch, satellite broadcasters that transmit to the entire Arabic-speaking region, in particular Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, are advancing the unification of the language Media is changing Arabic Widespread Internet use has helped unify Arabic dialects and contributed to a greater mutual understanding among Arabic speakers. Bloggers who became particularly active during and after the Arab spring are playing a helpful role as well. Tarik Bary gives an example: "Young people in Tunisia were very supportive of young people in Egypt during the uprising of 25 January 2011. The Tunisians were in a position to tell the Egyptians how to respond to violent attacks from the police on the basis of their own experience." Arab bloggers like to write in Modern Standard Arabic because the print media do so too. All Arabic readers understand the written standard. According to Bary, blogging has changed writing culture: "Nowadays many more young people write literary texts than was the case 20 or 30 years ago. Most of this writing takes place on blogs. It has even resulted in books, and although literary critics debate their merit, they have become bestsellers." Satellite broadcasters that transmit to the entire Arabic-speaking region and beyond, particularly Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, are also contributing to the unification of the language. TV hosts make an effort to speak in a way that everyone will understand rather than slip into their respective dialects. Closing the gaps in business, scientific and technical terminology: the online dictionary known as "Arabterm" is a compilation of technical terms in Arabic, English, French and German. According to Charlotte Schmitz and Guido Zebisch, this is not just an academic exercise, "linguistic unification creates enormous potential for growth in the professional sector of Arabic-speaking countries" Young people mix languages When posting on Facebook or chatting online with friends, young Arabic speakers prefer to combine regional dialects, English and Modern Standard Arabic, often writing with the Latin alphabet. Because not all Arabic letters have a Latin equivalent, numbers are commonly used instead. In English, for instance, "4u" can be read as "for you". In Arabic, numbers that look like Arabic letters are used to shorten words when communicating online. Tarik Bary laments the fact that scholars have made little progress towards unifying the Arabic language so far. As is the case in Europe, English has become the lingua franca of scholarship in the Arab world. But not all students speak English well enough to read publications in their field. Although university students typically have good English skills, they still may not understand all the terms used in academic or scientific texts. Online dictionary for technical terminology This reliance on a foreign language causes problems for businesses as well. Issues arise, for instance, when operating manuals for complex machines are only available in English. Translating these texts into regional varieties of Arabic often proves difficult because there are no generally-accepted and widely-understood terms for certain specialised concepts. What is "floating scum drain" in Arabic? And "hydro-power plant"? Is there an Arabic equivalent for "hydrocyclone"? Tarik Bary, who is also a professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo, has been working for years with a team of translators to deal with such problems. They are contributing to an online dictionary called "Arabterm", compiling technical terms in Arabic, English, French and German. Of the six volumes planned, four have already been published and are available for free online: "Automotive engineering", "Water technologies", "Renewable energies" and "Electrical engineering". Two more volumes, "Textile industries" and "Transport and infrastructure", are coming soon. Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) is supporting the project financially. The project is being carried out by the GIZ in cooperation with the Arabisation Coordination Bureau (BCA), a subsidiary of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (ALECSO), which is based in Rabat, Morocco. Germany is supporting Arabterm because communication in technical fields is becoming increasingly important for business relations between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Seamless communication in a fast evolving, technology-driven private sector is especially necessary in fields like water management or environmental engineering. Linguistic unification creates enormous potential for growth in the professional sector of Arabic-speaking countries. Until recently, the BCA only published specialised dictionaries for Arabic in printed form. However, it takes up to six years to compile a single volume, so these books were often outdated by the time they appeared. "Before Arabterm, the terminology in Arabic dictionaries for important fields like automotive engineering was stuck in the 1960s. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done in other technical fields as well," says Abdelfattah Lahjomri, the director of the BCA. According to him, the BCA is striving to achieve consensus among the national education authorities of the 22 member countries of the Arab League, and that might lead to Arabterm being adopted as a standard reference publication. Inventing new words
Tarik Bary (pictured above) laments the fact that scholars have made little progress towards unifying the Arabic language. Even though English is now the lingua franca of scholarship in the Arab world, not all scholars can speak and understand it well enough to use it in their work Seven thousand terms were defined and placed online in the "Water Technologies" volume alone. Photographs and illustrations make the terms easier to understand. The Egyptian team of translators faced enormous challenges. For every word that was to be included in the dictionary, they first researched whether an Arabic equivalent already existed. If not, they created a new word based on the grammatical rules of the Arabic language. The neologism had to convey the intended meaning as clearly as possible. The German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA) contributed to the project too. It offered 55,000 key terms from its own specialised dictionary in German, English and French. Sometimes, up to seven specialists from the DWA were fine-tuning translations. "Since the Arab world is located on the EU's doorstep, we made sure that the Arabic terms were aligned with the designations and definitions used by the European Committee for Standardisation," says Roland Knitschky, an adviser from the DWA's Department of Education and International Cooperation. "That will make it easier to translate European standards and technical specifications." The 2010/11 Arab Human Development Report pointed out that knowledge transfer is impossible if students and trainees cannot express themselves using precise and accurate terminology in their own language. "Linguistic precision is vitally important when engaging in international trade, manufacturing high-tech components, building bridges, discussing technical matters with colleagues or applying for patents," says Thomas Fitschen, the German ambassador to the UN in Geneva. Last year, Arabterm was Germany's contribution to the annual substantive session of the UN Economic and Social Council. Linked to the website, smartphone apps will also help establish the dictionary as a reliable resource for people working in technical fields. Project partners like the Goethe-Institut, the German Jordanian University and especially Arab institutions like the Office of Vocational Training and Employment Promotion (OFPPT) in Morocco are helping to spread the word. Influential partners in the Arab world and donor agencies are similarly important nodes of the network. Charlotte Schmitz & Guido Zebisch © Development and Cooperation 2014 Editor: Aingeal Flanagan/Qantara.de Charlotte Schmitz is a freelance journalist who covers development policy and economics.
Guido Zebisch is the GIZ project director for Arabterm and an adviser to the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (ALECSO). More on this topic
The federal constitution assures all Malaysians of their right to study their mother tongue language, and all races are encouraged to help promote national unity through mutual respect and understanding of our diversity. As such, any claims of Chinese vernacular schools (SJKC) being the main cause of racial division in our nation, such as the accusation made by Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Razali Ibrahim, are utter nonsense.
By promoting the various languages and cultures of the many different races in Malaysia, we are helping to cultivate multi-lingual talents, and even foreigners have expressed their envy for our ability to converse in many languages. Thus, our diversity should be cherished, instead of being abolished.
MCA has always defended the development of Chinese education and culture, and we have never sought to provoke the sensitivities of different races. In fact, MCA has been actively promoting a deeper understanding amongst the different races to instill tolerance and respect, and this has thus allowed all Malaysians to live together in harmony for the past 50 years; a rare feat which is not easily achieved anywhere in the world.
Therefore, I urge Razali to stop trying to disrupt our hard-earned racial harmony. I also urge him to remember that the two most rapidly developing economies in the world belong to China and India; both of which are also the most populous nations. Thus, if Malaysians are allowed to study and master both these languages, as well as English and Bahasa Malaysia, it will make Malaysia more competitive.
As such, SJKCs do not hinder national unity, but instead help promote it. MCA and Chinese education are also synonymous with each other, and MCA will continue to defend our rights to learn Chinese, as well as the rights of other races to pursue their education of mother-tongue language.
JASON TEOH SEW HOCK is MCA Public Services and Complaints Bureau chairperson, MCA Central Committee member and Gelang Patah MCA Division chairperson.
Two new tools allow users to witness the evolution of popular language – Yelp Trends and The New York Times' Chronicle. Yelp's tool draws from the startup's 57 million local reviews of restaurants, bars, grocery stores, spas and more, allowing users to search a decade of language used by city. The New York Times created the Chronicle two years ago as an internal research tool that allowed reporters and editors to search which words were used most frequently in the Times' vast archive of news articles. Now, the NYT Research and Development Lab has released the tool on its website, so everyone can view words used over the last 162 years. We talked with two specialists in language changes who helped us pick out the most interesting charts and refreshed our knowledge of college linguistics – because 8 a.m. was too early for that class anyway. Here's what we learned: Grammar Is Constantly Changing Grammarians are always fretting about something, but the words your English teacher chastised you for using might be commonplace in 50 years. "What’s interesting about a tool like this is you get to see all sorts of things about how a language changes," says John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University. "It sheds light on what proper language is and what improper language is." In the 19th century, The New York Times used the words "he don't" without losing any credibility. "It was perfectly respectable to say that and still be taken seriously," McWhorter says. And he don't lie. The trend shows in the graph, with a huge decrease in use of that word combination. Changes in grammar also go the other way. Combinations that were faux pas in the 1800s are used without fear now. The difference between "first two" and "two first" was hammered into the hearts and brains of school-aged children with passion in the 1880s. The correct way to refer to the first pair in a sequence is to use "two first," as in, "The two first students in the line are the leaders." [READ: OkCupid's Data Blog is Both NSFW and Completely Entertaining] In this judgy grammar manual from 1879, it instructs that "some people say 'the first two,' contending that there can be but one first, though they themselves constantly use such expressions as, 'the firsthours of the day,' 'his first efforts,' 'the first years of his life.'" #Burn. “You used to get your knuckles slapped in class for that," McWhorter said. "You can see how something you can see in grammar manuals from the gilded age changed how The New York Times used language.” The graph shows the "correct" way has now fallen out of favor. Words can also disappear because of social trends. "Oriental" was once the common way to refer to persons of Asian decent. In the 1980s, there was a push against that word, along with another popular word referring to Asian descent – "Asiatic" – and it became offensive. The New York Times switched to using "Asian." You can see a major split in the lines beginning in the mid-1980s. The continued use of "Oriental" refers to objects, such as rugs, and not to people. "Asiatic" is still allowed in Associated Press Style (the style guide used in journalism), but discouraged because of its offensive connotations. A Change in Words Often Shows a Change in Culture As different foods, workouts and activities become trendy, those words become fashionable as well, and vice versa. Words die when trends die. "The increase in frequency of a word that is already part of the language is a reflection of the change in society at large,” says Brian Joseph, professor of historical linguistics at Ohio State University. A little-known fact that is "just something I know," according to McWhorter: Broccoli didn't become popular in the U.S. until the 1930s. “You’d sort of imagine Abraham Lincoln eating a big plate of broccoli, but he didn’t," McWhorter says. "It would have been very foreign to him.” Originally brought to the U.S. by Italian immigrants, the food didn't become popular in America until the Great Depression, and the word wasn't used in The New York Times until around then, either. Because we live in the District of Columbia, where everyone loves a good food trend, we thought the same trend would be seen for kale. Not so. "Kale" was actually a slang term for money before everyone started asking for the best place to eat a kale Caesar salad. Both tools are great for showing cultural trends. From this graph, it looks like doughnuts are now the pastry a la mode. “I’m 62 and I’ve been talking about cupcakes since I was 5 years old. It’s not anything new," Joseph says.
Although Rare, It's Possible to Invent Completely New Words “It’s sometimes just hard to tell where these words come from," Joseph says. "Sometimes, they are existing words put together in a new way. Sometimes, they are metaphorical uses. Sometimes, they are borrowings from foreign languages or blendings of existing sounds.” "Kodak" wasn't used until the company began and invented the word. Now, while on vacation, you can save all of your "Kodak moments." "It was completely out of thin air," Joseph says. "It was visually striking because of the 'k' at the beginning and the 'k' at the end." The tools also show new slang. "Hangry" – meaning angry and hungry or anger brought on by extreme hunger – recently came into mainstream use. U.S. News & World Report even wrote an article about it. Using "turnt" for "drunk" also skyrocketed recently. Although Joseph says he isn't familiar with "turnt," he says there have been hundreds of slang words for drunk over the century. View them by year here. Bonus
The NYT tool also provides some interesting insights into the paper's reporting, such as which words it uses for controversial subjects, which political parties it writes about and when and whom it chooses to write about and to interview (breaking news: men). Since the Yelp tool includes different cities for each term, comparing trends in different locations is easy. For example, which city hates gluten the most: Vancouver, Salt Lake City or Dallas? If you find anything good, tweet or email me and you could be included in this post.
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The present-day Brazil is made up of people including the descendants of the African slaves brought into the country in the mid-sixteenth century. Some of these are the Bakongo, the Mbundo and the Ovimbundu peoples from Angola and the Congo; the Fon people (or Jeje) from Benin; the Yoruba people (or Nago) from Nigeria and Benin. And it is needless to say that the culture and tradition of these people, though with various changes are with them in their adopted country. Jemila told Sunday Tribune that their mother is from the Urhobo extraction in Delta State, Nigeria. Then, were they in Salvador to trace their maternal roots, sort of? “No,” the elder of the sisters said. Flanked by George, their tour guide and other relatives, Jemila said: “Mummy is Urhobo and she teaches us the language back home in London.” Then I decided to take her up on this claim: Digwe, I told her and she replied Migwo, though in a flawed intonation. At any rate, I returned her greeting: Vredo. Encounter with Canadian born in Lagos Jemila and Zeyana were not the only people who have one link or the other with Nigeria or Africa who made most of the opportunity the quadrennial FIFA tournament offered to check out on the norms in Brazil, vis à vis a background about which they were already well informed. What of Sonam Mehta? Sonam, a Canadian, was born in Apapa, Lagos, where she spent the first seven years of her life before leaving for Toronto, Ontario, where she resides today. Even in her home country, Sonam still ‘feels’ Nigerian with Daud, Nkiru and Ogo helping her out in her pharmacy profession. These ones could not have been able to guide this writer on his mission to the city reputed for its collection of monuments that earned it the title of World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985. Help, I thought, could only come from Brazilians on how to go about my mission, but even that prospect was not being threatened, thanks to language barrier. However, out of the blue emerged Francois Duc, who found me out in my confused state. I was in company of two Peruvian ladies who themselves were seeking direction from an equally uninformed me, who was only better off by the abridged map of Salvador I had picked up at the Rodoviario (bus station) on arriving in the Bahia State capital a few days earlier. As I tried to share the little information I had with the ladies, approached Duc, who looked to be in his late 60s. “Hello, you are from which country? I can see you are not a Brazilian. If you dress like a Brazilian or even walk like one when you are not, I will know,” he said. A Swiss tells of Nigerian Civil War After telling him I was from Nigeria, Duc opened up: “I know Lagos. I saw Sapele being destroyed during the Biafran war. That was in 1969, I was a sailor then. I am from Switzerland, my wife is Hindu from Brazil and I have been living in this country for 23 years,” he retorted. And the name of his ship? “MES Malaya,” Duc replied. To say I was excited would be an understatement as I had hoped to rely on him for much information on my mission to the city. But as I tried to engage him further, he dropped the bombshell: “Sorry, I am a very busy man,” and then disappeared into his gems shop. However, before he left me to my fate, Duc, who refused his photograph to be taken, handed me a lifeline: “There are no African influences here, but a reconstituted Africa.” Centro Historico A simple explanation of Duc’s suggests that the presence of African peculiarities in Bahia (and by extension, the whole of Brazil) goes beyond mere traits (carried from that continent by those who were taken as slaves hundreds of years back into Brazil). The African essence, rather, has found home in another environment which now defines its world view. My encounters with these people took place at different locations at the Centro Historico (Historic Centre), said to play a major role during the Portuguese colonial period. Being the first slave market on the South American continent, Salvador was the destination of most African slaves who were brought to work on sugar plantations. The city was also the first capital of Brazil (1549-1763). At the Centro Historico is a place called Pelourinho Arena (the word ‘pelourinho’ means pillory), where slaves were always disciplined back in the day. However, that same spot is known as Independence Arena and it is the choice venue for a lot of activities today. The whole area of the Centro Historico, which covers an expanse of land on which are still standing historical structures like churches, cafes, restaurants and shops, is referred to sometimes as the Pelourinho – beyond the point the slaves were subjected to in those days. The slaves practically left their mark in the sands of time and this bears witness to the rigorous tasks they were made to carry out. The land surface of the Centro Historico is paved with rocks – the handiwork of the slaves. The fact that rocks are still so deep in the earth shows the high quality of the work done by hundreds of slaves on it. The labour of these slaves could, however, have been consigned to history. Sunday Tribune was told the story of how an attempt on this was halted. Alhaji Misbahudeen Oyewale Akanni is the liaison officer in Bahia State attached to the Nigerian Embassy and he has been living in Brazil for over 20 years. According to him, at a time the rocks were going to be removed on the order of a director in charge of the department of culture. Why? Alhaji Akanni added that the girlfriend of the director had come visiting him from Sao Paulo and the lady, who wore a pair of tiny high heel shoes to the Centro Historico, fell because of the uneven surface of the paved ground. For this reason the director felt that all the rocks should be removed. Then stepped in Antonio Carlos Peixoto de Magalhaes, the Bahia State governor, who not only stopped what he was said to have seen as an attempt to destroy a heritage, he also sent the director packing. Magalhaes died in July 2007. Back to Duc’s wholesale statement, how true is it? Social linguistics teaches that language yields to the environment and reacts to same in everyday use. This is apart from the dynamic aspect of language which overhauls it overtime. It is no surprise then that the African languages as ‘exported’ to Brazil by the slaves during the colonial era have undergone some changes distinct from the way they are deployed back “home”. Yoruba language in Brazil However, to Adeyinka Adewole, Executive Director, Instituto Cultural e Linguistica Africana, Salvador, a Nigerian who relocated to Brazil in 2008, some Brazilian speakers of Yoruba plainly manifest errors. He gives his instance. “When they want to greet in Yoruba language here, they say ‘e ka ka karo’, instead of ‘e kaaro’. But Denilson Oluwafemi (born Denilson José Santana), a Bahiana (Brazilian from Bahia who believes he has his origin in Africa), disagrees, saying the fact that there are differences in the way a particular language is used in a particular community as opposed to the way the same language functions in another does not mean that they are errors. According to Santana Denilson Oluwafemi who teaches Yoruba to beginners, “We just have variations, different ways, different meanings but the same language. Nigeria is different and Bahia is different, we have a kind of linguistic variation.” Denilson may have never been to Nigeria, but his knowledge of the Yoruba language will certainly dwarf that of many present-day Yoruba person who looks down on his/her mother tongue. Denilson’s love of the Yoruba language is profound and unquestionable. According to the man christened ‘Oluwafemi’ by Ayo Olayanju Ayanwale, former liaison officer of the Nigeria Cultural House in Salvador, he only studied architecture “just to show my family that I was doing something.” He talked about the influence of the Arab on the Yoruba language; how they contributed the diacritic mark to it, adding that “Yoruba was just oral before the Arab began to write it.” Neither was he oblivious of the transformation of Yoruba language in 1852 by Ajayi Crowther. “Before Crowther, Yoruba language was written by the Arabic people,” he said. Some noticeable differences between the Yoruba language and the way it is spoken in Brazil today include the orthographic representation of ‘s’ as ‘x’ in the Brazil variation. So ‘Sango’ is written as ‘Xango’; ‘n’ being represented as ‘m’, as in ‘Osun’ written as ‘Oxum’. Despite these orthographic differences, they phonetically align with the way they are pronounced in Yoruba land. The voiceless velar sound /k/ in the standard Yoruba language as spoken in Nigeria today is orthographically represented as ‘c’ in the Brazilian version of the Yoruba language. As an instance, the /k/ sound in a word like àkàrà (bean cake) as written by the Yoruba in Nigeria is represented as ‘c’ in the Brazilian Yoruba orthography. The difference does not end there; the word àkàrà is acaraje in the Brazilian version of the language. Brazil’s acaraje and àbàrá “Proof of the pudding is in the eating,” goes an English saying. The evidence of the acaraje, for me, too, must be in its consumption. The purchase of a piece of acaraje from Sheila at the Centro Historico left me in no doubt that it is same kind of akara fried with palm oil in Nigeria. In fact the taste took me down memory lane to the Foko area of Ibadan, where as a young boy, on his way back from his father’s electrical parts shop at Agbeni almost every evening, I must savour akara kengbe fried in palm oil. You can just imagine the taste and texture of the Brazilian acaraje in that light. But why acaraje, Alhaji Akanni gave an explanation: “According to a research we carried out, they wanted to say it is akara egbe, but because they had difficulty in pronouncing ‘gbe’, they substituted it with ‘je’. Like the Europeans came to Nigeria and they could not pronounce ‘Igbo’ and they said ‘Ibo’. The difference between akara and acaraje is that while the former is not sold with any accompaniment, in Brazil acaraje is something of a burger – sliced and stuffed with shrimps, okro, half-ground fried pepper and what they call vatapa. The buyer has the discretion to turn down the addition of any of these.
For many of us, the thought of ever forgetting how to speak our native language would seem preposterous. But for some readers, it became a reality. During a five-year captivity in Afghanistan, US soldier Bowe Bergdahl apparently lost some of his language capabilities. This prompted the Magazine to ask under what circumstances a person could lose their native or first language. In response, readers wrote in to tell their own stories of language loss or confusion. Here's a selection. Kristina Schmale O'Hagan, Ireland Kristina Schmale O'Hagan in Ireland Having had to switch from German to English, I now realise how inextricably linked language and culture are. Being from a more reserved nation saying "Ich liebe Dich" does not come as easily as saying "I love you". I can also swear in English... yet do not know any German expletives! I do feel a kind of loss over a language I once was fluent in, but luckily I have reached a level of fluency in English that allows me to be fully myself. M Rodgers, Midlothian I moved to the UK when I was 23 and have been here for over 10 years. People always look at me sceptically when I say I have "lost" my Dutch language. When my mother calls I need to put her on hold while I go and get the thesaurus. My colleagues send me documents to be translated into my native language, and I end up taking them home to take my time. Even when I come across other Dutch people in the UK, I ask if they don't mind speaking English because my English is better than my Dutch. I don't mind though, English is such a beautiful language, I have loved it since I was little and it's no wonder I ended up in an English-speaking country. Alicja Gruszka, Italy I was born in Krakow, Poland. I graduated in medicine and left for London where I did my PhD and stayed for two more years, then moved to Milan, Italy. Thus, I had lived for a total of eight years in London and have now lived for 10 years in Milan. Alicja Gruszka in the UK During my time in England, English became an integral part of me, up to the point that I would dream in English and respond in English first thing in the morning whilst on holiday in Poland. I then decided to move to Italy. I learned the language in no time at all. It seemed as if I had already known it and it just needed to be given an opportunity to be used. However, there is a clear division as to what I like to use "my" three languages for - I write my memos on all work and life-related issues in English as well as do most of my pleasure reading in this language. I write things to do with my other great passion - music - in Italian and Polish has become a spoken tongue that I use with my family and friends. Obviously, I can still write in Polish, but I am told that my grammar or more precisely, the syntax, is very odd. I do form neologisms that consist of an English or Italian root and a Polish ending. Some are very funny and many make no sense what-so-ever to a Polish speaker. Overall, many times do I realise that I cannot remember how to say a certain thing in my native language, which I find both frustrating and sad. Sue Jensen, Denmark Sue Jensen in her cheese shop, "Øens Oste" I was born and grew up in Lancashire, UK, and at the age of 25 moved to Denmark. Twenty-five years later my English language is sometimes a disaster - can't find the words, grammar is back to front (like Danish) and my numbers are shot at. I run my own cheese shop where I'm in contact with the Danish public all day, every day. Giving correct change is important, so we count it out. However Danes say their number backwards (ie nine and fifty, rather than fifty-nine), it really mixes me up sometimes. Particularly as my tables are strongest in English... sometimes I do count it out to them in English, especially on very busy days. My Danish friends and customers are also very patient, especially when I mix the two languages, which does happen when I have been speaking only English for two to three days or more. Lorraine Jordan, Italy Lorraine Jordan on her wedding day in Italy It was so interesting reading this article, as I well know that feeling of struggling to recall a specific word in English. I've lived in Italy for eight and a half years, and I work alongside fellow ex-pats at a large language school. Amazingly it is not uncommon for one of us to begin describing a word we have been trying to think of for several hours in the hope that someone else will remember it. The worst feeling of all is when you know the word perfectly well in your second language and seem totally incapable of remembering it your own language. Susan, United Kingdom I moved to the UK from Finland in 1998, when I was 17. Though I have no difficulty holding a casual conversation in Finnish (which I do regularly with my family), I have certainly forgotten words and find myself using grammar constructs that exist in English, but not in Finnish, such as starting sentences with "there are". On many occasions, I have also caused a great deal of hilarity trying to use a word in Finnish which is in fact not a word at all, but rather an attempt to recall a word and instead making up an imaginary one that sounds a bit like it, but doesn't really exist. All of this, ultimately, is not really an issue as 99% of the time I use Finnish in casual conversations with family members. But I have entirely lost the ability to tell the difference between the casual and formal language in Finnish and writing even very simple e-mails in the 'formal' tense is difficult. I have to ask someone to read them to make sure I'm not accidentally sending something in an overly casual tone! Milind Sojwal, United States I came to America from my native India 20 years ago. I could speak Marathi, my mother tongue, fluently and Hindi, the lingua franca of northern India, fairly comfortably. In these past 20 years, I have gone to India several times and have preached in my old church in Marathi (I am an Anglican priest) several times. But I am astonished how awful my Marathi is. I speak it haltingly. While searching for the right word I often stumble into my German (which I studied for two years in college), into my Spanish (which I have been studying for the last four years), as I am not able to hear Marathi spoken. My wife and I only have English in common, since neither of us speaks each other's languages, even though we are both Indian. Paulo Pinto, Southampton, UK I was born and raised in Portugal and moved to Britain in 2010. I'm now 30 and fully immersed in British culture - I don't socialise with any other Portuguese people, only watch British TV, and my partner is British. I've noticed more and more that I find it hard to express myself in my native Portuguese. This is more evident when I talk to my Portuguese friends about my job, as my main job references, jargon and expressions are all English. I've also noticed I've started dreaming in English and forget the odd word. Portuguese will always be my first language by nature, but the longer I'm away the less cultural references I have. Matous Ptacek, United Kingdom Matous Ptacek on a geological field trip to Skye I was born in the Czech Republic and spent the first 11 years there, not speaking a word of English. However, once our family moved to Luxembourg and I begun to attend the European School, and then eventually started university in the UK, I've been finding my actual thought processes - not just my speech - curiously segregated. Buying milk, cycling, looking at bugs in the park - I have to consciously try for English concepts and sentence structure to emerge. But once I start thinking about philosophical issues, or solving a scientific task - even in my head - it all happens in fluent English. And I don't think it's just a matter of vocabulary, either - the ideas pop into my head with Czech or English structures and associations already in place, articles missing/present in the sentences depending on the subject. Perhaps mere confirmation bias, but I've had to expend conscious effort not to sound Russian at the till, while discussing geology is utterly fine! Ingrid van de Kamp, Dubai, United Arab Emirates I moved to the Middle East when I was 24 and have been speaking English for 26 years now. I have definitely lost the fluency in my native language. My Dutch family and friends think it quite hilarious how I butcher my mother tongue. I make so many grammatical errors, am so often lost for words and totally mess up expressions. It usually gets a bit better after a day or so, and I certainly try, but is very difficult to keep up when I am tired or have had a glass of wine. I clearly think, talk to myself and dream in English. Alan Fear, Brazil Alan Fear in Brazil I've been in Brazil now for 22 years. I'm not losing my English but sometimes I unconsciously come out with some weird hybrid sentences. For example "change" in Portuguese is "trocar" and "clothes" is "roupas" - a while back I arrived home and this sentence leapt out of me: "I'm just going to troc my roups and I'll be right there!" Reka Polonyi, France I grew up with Hungarian parents in the US and in France. My sisters and I never lived in Hungary, but we'd occasionally visit family and friends during the summer. My parents taught us the language - as well as to read and write in it... we adamantly kept Hungarian the predominant language at home. Meeting other ex-pat Hungarians in my childhood, I was always surprised at the strong accents and language difficulties the children had, even though many had lived in Hungary before. I finally understood, after many years of meeting and speaking to "expat kids", that the key to retaining fluency in one's mother tongue (or at least the parents' predominant language) is to speak it with the siblings. This plays a crucial role in retaining its "freshness", its "youth", rendering it a tool in which to communicate spontaneous thoughts, insults, jokes, feelings of anger, excitement, surprise, etc. Melker Hansson, Spain Melker Hansson in Spain I experienced loss of fluency in Swedish after having married a Spanish woman and moving to Spain 25 years ago. In those days, the internet didn't exist of course and I only used my native language in a monthly phone call. Strangely, my Swedish "came back" after becoming fluent in Spanish in about four years. My impression is that if the brain is busy learning a new language and you only communicate in this language, the other languages you know are temporarily suppressed. William Buchanan, United States As an American soldier in Germany in the 1980s, I had frequent and prolonged interaction with native Germans, but my interaction with Americans was infrequent and brief. I lived with a German girlfriend off base as well. After completing my three-year tour of duty, I returned to the United States. Many friends who'd known me since childhood remarked on my "German accent". I was unable to hear it when I spoke, but was quite surprised when I heard audio recordings of myself since it was subtle but unmistakably there. Within a period of three months or so after my return to the US, my "German accent" disappeared. Pascal Jacquemain, Yorkshire Pascal Jacquemain at the Forbidden Corner in Yorkshire I am French. I was born in Paris 45 years ago. I have lived in England for the past 19 years. After a few months living in Britain, I went to a hotel/restaurant in the Pyrenees that I had used before moving to Britain. The hotel staff recognised me but hearing me speak English and an already slightly English-accented French, they were not so sure. This was 18 years ago. Now, I struggle with my French. Understanding the language, no problem. There are situations that challenge me though. I find it extremely difficult to discuss IT in French although I started my career in France. When I have to "think on my feet" and say something quickly, a mixture of French and English may result.
When University of Kentucky student Erica Mattingly enrolled in one of Andrew M. Byrd’s linguistics courses, she had no idea she would be rewriting history — or at least re-speaking it.
Byrd, assistant professor of linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and his students have drawn national attention for their groundbreaking work to reconstruct and understand prehistoric languages.
Byrd has devoted much of his research time translating the language known as Proto-Indo-European.
The language is thought to have been first used over 7,000 years ago, with some suspecting it was spoken even earlier. Byrd’s work focuses on the sounds and structure of the PIE language, aiming to understand what it sounded like when spoken a millennia ago.
“To figure out what PIE sounded like, we must compare it to the most ancient Indo-European languages, like Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit,” Byrd said.
While the nuts and bolts behind reconstructing stories in PIE is quite complicated, Byrd describes the translation process as fairly straightforward.
The difficulty, he says, comes from knowing which words the PIE speakers used, which requires study and knowledge of the culture.
“For each sentence you want to write, you must consider the words the PIE speakers used to convey concepts as well as the word order. Once you have those, you’ve got yourself a reconstructed sentence,” said Byrd.
Mattingly, a linguistics and Spanish senior, took Byrd’s Indo-European course last year. She says her experience in the class played no small part in her decision to pursue a career in linguistics.
After a study of the culture of the PIE speakers and the makeup of their language, Byrd issued a unique challenge to his class: Translate the third-ever fable into PIE.
When Byrd told his class that they would be reconstructing a fable into the PIE language, no one knew what an undertaking it would become. Mattingly recounts the pressure to reconstruct the language accurately.
“It was so, so difficult at first, because we wanted so badly to do it correctly,” she said. “These are words our linguistic ancestors spoke. So to bridge that gap in class was very meaningful to me.”
Byrd keeps his dynamic classroom environment full of challenge and opportunity, offering up research studies to his students interested in translating other works written in PIE and other ancient languages. These independent studies are flexible, chosen based on consideration of student interest and Byrd’s work.
“The work that comes out of these studies is stellar,” Byrd said.
Last year, Mattingly had the opportunity to complete an independent study with Byrd. Knowing her strengths after having her in class, Byrd pushed Mattingly to take a leap and work on something new.
She chose to look at the adaptation of the Spanish language between the years 711 and 1400 and how it shifted as a result of an influence from Arabic.
“Dr. Byrd inspired me to work on something that incorporated both languages that I speak,” she said. “Before working alongside him, I hadn’t thought about Islamic conquest in terms of how it affected the evolution of the Spanish language.”
Byrd says he likes to make his classes stand out from other linguistics courses so that his students learn the material they need while having fun.
“While students are asked to undertake lots of linguistic analysis, I always like to bring a little bit of fun and silliness into it, whether it’s translating a fable into PIE or analyzing the made-up language of Ramma Lamma Ding Dongian,” he said.
It’s that environment that encouraged Mattingly to further pursue her linguistics passion. She emphasizes the value of having Byrd as a mentor who can check in on her and she can approach with questions or concerns, as she recalls not always having the answers as a first-year student.
“Dr. Byrd knows his craft really well,” she said. “If I have a question, he will either have a hard answer or he’ll know exactly where to send me. He’s a great asset as a resource.”
For incoming linguistics students, Byrd recommends a strong desire to learn other languages and a willingness to look at things from other perspectives, which, he says, go hand in hand.
“My advice is to take courses in both ancient and modern languages from the wonderful faculty in the MCLLC department and Hispanic Studies Department here at UK,” he said.
After she graduates, Mattingly plans to pursue a master’s degree in linguistics and later start a career in translation and linguistics for the federal government.
For generations school children in French class have said “Yes, Miss” or perhaps “Oui, Mam’selle” but in one class in a Cheltenham school they’re as likely to say “Ja, Fraulein” or “Igen, Tanarno” or something similar in a host of different languages. In one Balcarras School Year Seven class, 7F2, 11 children speak 12 different languages, as well as English, and in the last French lesson of the year, teacher Sarah Kelly got the children to teach each other something from their own tongues. She said: “In the first lesson I asked the children which languages they spoke, and in this class it turned out there were 12 other languages. “I’ve been teaching them all year and I thought for one lesson they could teach me something, and each other.” Mrs Kelly added that knowing more than one language helps her pupils learning French or any other language. She said: “One of the students Celeste Godden is bilingual in French so she often acts as my teaching assistant. But even for the other who speak another language – they know the benefits of having another language and they know that there’s more to just speaking English and staying in Britain. “They can also teach each other a bit of cultural understanding as well – and a lot of learning a language is not just verbs and vocabulary it’s learning about the culture of a different country as well.” And some of the children agree that it’s good to have two languages and be learning a third. Tamara Beeson, who speaks Indonesian and English said: “It’s easier learning another language because you’re used to learning different words and you have a way of remembering vocabulary in two languages so a third’s not so difficult. And Hashem Mostafa, who speaks Arabic at home said: “I like to be able to speak and write in both. It means I can write to my relatives in Egypt. It’s not confusing even though they’re written very differently. Two girls Elicia Lyford and Bee Cooke are learning Chinese in a club after school. Elicia said: “I like Chinese because it’s something really different to learn. And Bee said: “You can show off a bit, saying, I know the word for that in Chinese. But because it’s tonal you have to be careful. You might try and say ‘hello I like your shoes’ and if you get it wrong it could be something like ‘you’re a horrible person’ or something even worse.” The full list of languages spoken by pupils in the class is: Pashto, Indonesian, Cantonese,Mandarin, Slovak, Italian, Hungarian, French, German, Urdu Arabic and Swiss Romansh.
Read more: http://www.gloucestershireecho.co.uk/languages-spoken-class-Balcarras-School/story-21455282-detail/story.html#ixzz37H88q3xb
Translation and the Many Languages of Resistance Call for Papers Cairo, 6-8 March 2015 Deadline: 15 September 2014 Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK Organized by Mona Baker, Yasmin El Rifae, and Mada Masr
Call for Contributions
Activists from various regions and countries connect with and influence one another through practices involving various types of translation, including video subtitling, written translation, and oral interpretation. The Egyptian Revolution and the activists and collectives who have worked to move it forward have been highly visible to other protest movements in large part through such practices. This conference aims to explore themes related to translation and its role in creating a global image for protest movements, and in connecting different movements to one another.
Held in Cairo, the conference will engage extensively with the Egyptian Revolution and the values and practices that Egyptian activist groups have shared with other groups around the world. It will also accommodate contributions relating to other protest movements insofar as they shed light on some of the ways in which global networks of solidarity are enabled and mediated by different types of translational practice. The event is ultimately intended to highlight the political import of translation and to provide a space for local, regional and international activists to reflect on the processes of mediation that allow them to connect with other movements and publics.
Translation is understood here in both its narrow and broad senses. In its narrow sense, translation involves rendering fully articulated stretches of textual material from one national language into another, and encompasses various modalities such as written translation, subtitling and oral interpreting. This type of translation is part of the fabric of practically all oppositional groups in Egypt – from the written translation of statements and campaigns by groups such as No to Military Trials to the subtitling of videos by collectives such as Mosireen and Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution. As Rizk (2013)* explains, it is translation that allows activists involved in a group such as Mosireen to connect with protest movements elsewhere and to see themselves “within a broader struggle and not an atomized battle against local dictatorship”. In its broad sense, translation involves the mediation of diffuse symbols, narratives and linguistic signs of varying lengths across modalities (e.g. words into image), levels of language (e.g. fusha and ‘amiyya) and cultural spaces, the latter without necessarily crossing a language boundary. As such it also encompasses the use of languages other than Arabic in writings and discussions about the Egyptian Revolution, the use of (forms of) Arabic in addressing regional audiences, as well as the journey of visual and musical artefacts across social and national boundaries. Themes to be addressed include but are not limited to the following: - Forms of mutual solidarity that are enabled and enhanced by various acts of translation;
- Video activism and the role of subtitling in negotiating the shift from representation to narration;
- Critical appraisals of the internet savvy middle class in Egypt as translators and interpreters of the Revolution;
- The role of translation in situating the Egyptian Revolution within broader struggles, especially in the global south (Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, etc.);
- Case studies of the contribution of translation to specific activist projects connected with the Egyptian Revolution or with similar movements elsewhere (Turkey, Greece, Argentina, etc.);
- The political import of creative strategies of translation, in its narrow and broad senses, in the context of protest movements;
- The extent to which new technologies and software support or restrict the subversive potential of translation;
- The interaction between textual and visual media, and between different languages, in sites of protest such as graffiti and street performance.
The languages of the conference are English and Arabic (with volunteer interpreting provided where feasible). Registration for this event is free. Submission of Abstracts for Presentations
Abstracts of 300 words should be sent by 15 September 2014 to: Professor Mona Baker (mona.baker@manchester.ac.uk) and Yasmin El-Rifae (yasmin.elrifae@gmail.com). Notification of acceptance will be given by 30 November 2014. Keynote Speakers & Abstracts: (see website for further details) Changing Frames and Fault-lines Khalid Abdallah, actor, producer, filmmaker, activist; founding member of Mosireen and Cimatheque; played leading roles in United 93, The Kite Runner and Green Zone
The story of the Egyptian revolution carries a heavy burden. Its many tales travel across contexts and experience, within Egypt and beyond it, influencing movements and revolutions while building dreams and threatening them. Solidarity fundamentally entails sharing an interpretation of a story. How that story is told and re-told has political and historical implications that are as much about the current moment as they are about the future. Political events are hard to follow at the best of times and solidarity is broken when the thread of a story is lost or events within it become subject to confusingly competing narratives. Meanwhile, a revolution is in itself a radical break with old political frameworks and the interpretations of possibility and the present they represent. And like any story, the longer it gets the more complicated it becomes. At stake is not only solidarity within the Egyptian revolution itself, but also a story of change and how it happens, or might.
Over the past four years I have worked with a range of forms and collaborators to engage in telling many of the stories of the Egyptian revolution, translating experiences and perspectives between a diverse range of contexts and audiences. With each form and each language, each event and each audience, comes a framework within which those stories can be told and shared – some infrastructural, some political, some legal, some linguistic. In this presentation I will reflect on what I see as the fault lines in translating events between contexts and the interpretative lapses that threaten meaningful solidarity. I will also reflect on strategies that have been used to attempt to bridge some of these gaps, giving my reading of certain successes and failures, while asking how to adapt and re-strategise amidst a period of extraordinary struggle and change.
Text and Context: Translating in a State of Emergency
Samah Selim, Rutgers University, USA
This presentation will explore the problems associated with activist translating in revolutionary historical moments like the one that began in Egypt in 2011. Using my experience working as a subtitler with the radical video collective Mosireen in 2012/13, I want to reflect on how the process and experience of translating in a state of emergency – when the state mobilizes its arsenal of violence on the streets – profoundly shapes how we think about terms like profession and objectivity, and about the roles of both translator and audience in building effective cross-border virtual solidarity networks in real time. I also want to broadly distinguish between what I see as the two closely related and equally urgent modes of political translating work described above; crisis and building. While the former is defined by transposable and widely-circulating spectacles of violence and resistance, the latter seeks to mobilize the broadest possible array of socially embedded source texts (tracts, statements, press conferences, testimonies, manifestos, analysis) in order to fully territorialize the spectacle and give it political meaning. I will argue that building effective and sustainable international solidarity networks absolutely depends on this kind of multi-directional territorializing translation work, particularly at this time when militant popular movements are exploding across the globe.
Translation and Solidarity in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution Leil Zahra-Mortada, transfeminist queer anarchist; founder of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution; member/contributor to Operation Against Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH), No to Military Trials for Civilians, and Mosireen.
Translation has been an integral part of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution from its very first stages. Subtitling the speech of the women interviewed into a variety of languages is not just an issue of disseminating information and making their unique experiences accessible to as many people as possible, but is part of a broad expression of political commitment that assumes different forms. First and foremost, it is part of a wider post-colonial and feminist commitment to allowing the subjects themselves to shape their own voices and representations. Speaking in Arabic, the women translate their first hand experiences into a discourse that counters the widespread appropriation of the voices of both women and people of colour. These voices have traditionally been constrained and distorted by patriarchal, xenophobic and racist interpretations and streamlined into simplistic generalizations that oscillated between imposition and exoticism. Making subtitles into a wide range of languages an integral part of the project is a further step towards empowering Egyptian women by connecting them to networks of rebellion across borders. Subtitles constitute a tool that extends the messages of empowerment to other locales, makes local political struggles visible to other protest movements, and further fosters international networking and solidarity. This contribution will offer a critical account of both levels of translation as they evolved in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution.
The Translation of Protests and Movements across Time, Space and Culture Cristina Flesher Fominaya, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Protests and movements in one place can inspire and influence people far beyond the point of origin, with unexpected and impossible to predict consequences. In this talk I will draw on examples from the recent wave of anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements to describe some of these processes across not only space but also time, to show how transmitters and adopters must work hard to effect a process of movement translation across contexts, how these processes are not always successful and why, and how ideas, practices and repertoires can take on a life of their own. Translating Rebellion: From Local Protests to Global Uprisings Brandon Jourdan, Global Uprisings
Since 2011, streets and squares across the world have become the site of massive demonstrations, strikes, occupations, riots, rebellions, and revolutions. From the Arab uprisings to the movement of the squares in Southern Europe, and from there to the global Occupy movement and the recent uprisings in Turkey and Brazil, people everywhere have been rising up against the power of governments, corporations and repressive regimes, representing a global legitimation crisis that has affected authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike. While mainstream media, filmmakers, sociologists, and writers have often worked to explain the local contexts for the rebellions, many have not adequately attempted to try to connect them in their global economic and political context. Many instead have chosen to view the Arab uprisings as simply people fighting for Western-style democracy or the European movements as purely anti-austerity protests or the protests in Brazil and Turkey as fights against urbanization projects. However, the neo-liberal policies that became globalized over the last four decades led to the transformation of the world political economy and connected populations in a manner often unreported and the timing of the wave of rebellion over the last few years coincided with a breakdown of both neoliberal capitalism and representative democracy. In many cases, protesters related to other movements much more than to the ruling figures within their own countries. The symbols, tactics, and motivations for going to the streets translated easily across geographic and political boundaries.
This audio/visual presentation will focus on showing how the recent uprisings and protests are connected through the global political economy and how movements have bridged the divide of national boundaries using shared symbols, slogans, memes, tactics, and ideals.
Is There a Right to Translation? Vicente L. Rafael, University of Washington, USA In October, 2010, the European Union Parliament issued a Directive “On the Right to Interpretation and Translation in Criminal Proceedings”. It stipulated that member nations must provide a competent interpreter when needed in prosecuting a crime, and that all legal proceedings and documents pertaining to the case of the accused must be available in the language understood by the defendant. This right to translation is part of a much larger right to defense designed to protect the defendant against legal proceedings in languages foreign to him or her. The model for this right to translation, as with the right of defense, is economic. Just as the European Union seeks to ensure that a commodity sold in one market can cross over and be sold in another, so legal decisions in one country, regardless of the nationality of the accused, will follow the same procedures and, thanks to translation, will be equally valid in another. In such cases, the need for extradition vanishes, as the fairness of a trial in one EU country is deemed to be valid in another.
Another way to put this: thanks to the right to translation, the law itself will be fully transparent and unerringly translatable from one country to another. Barriers to justice, like barriers to trade, will simply melt away. Translation will help to ensure justice is done. The body of the accused can be held accountable to a law that now speaks in the same, fully substitutable language. The right to translation thus is also the right of the law to operate across borders — linguistic, political and economic. Translation amplifies the law’s trans-national reach. At the same time, it transforms the individual who is accused. Seeking to protect his or her rights, translation turns the accused individual, regardless of his or her linguistic particularity, into a subject recognizable to the law.
The right to translation as a right of the State to preside over the body of the accused, to find the accused either guilty or innocent according to the law, would seem to suggest that translation is merely a handmaiden to governance. It can at best claim to be a subsidiary to a larger set of civil rights, such as the right to a fair trial, the right to health care, or the right to an education, social security, and so on. In this way, the right to translation puts it in its traditional place: as the subordinate, dutiful, often invisible supplement of power.
But is there another way in which we can think of the right to translation that isn’t simply subsumed by the law? Is translation, as a practical matter, also above or beyond the law? And exceeding the law, can it also upend it? How does the right to translation, for example, relate to the right to the humanities, or to literature? And more to the point of this conference, how does this right, if there is such a thing, relate to social movements, often organized against the State? Like literature, do social movements have a right not to be translated, to remain opaque and unreadable to the eyes of the law and the interpretive commands of the marketplace? These are the questions I propose to explore in my talk.
Translating the Arab World: From Orientalism to Eurocentrism, and the Limitations of Modern Thought Magid Shihade, Institute for International Studies, Birzeit University, Palestine
As soon as the events that started in January 2011 began to unfold in the Arab world, journalists, academics and commentators in different parts of what is often referred to as the ‘West’ jumped immediately to analyze, explain, name and translate what is taking place in the region. Overwhelmingly, these translations treated the developments in the region as events that ended and can thus be named, judged and completely understood. A similar pattern could be observed within the region itself, with local journalists, academics and experts almost mirroring the interpretations and translations provided by western commentators. The main questions were, and remain to this day, as follows: whether to name these developments as revolutions, coups, revolts, uprisings, etc.; whether these developments were the making of local energies or outside forces; and whether they follow archetypal patterns attested in western history. The analyses and translations of these developments have been and remain constrained by old forces that we might be tempted to think are long gone, especially after decades of critiquing the certainty with which social human behavior was analyzed and translated in the past. Orientalism, as theorized by Edward Said decades ago, seems to continue to impact the way people see the region and the way people in the region see themselves. As does Eurocentrism, which means that events in the world and human social behavior continue to be evaluated through the lens of western history, experience and tools of analyses. This presentation will discuss the various frameworks that have led to ‘mistranslations’ of world history and recent events, often with huge impact and consequences for the people who live around the world and are the object of analyses that often have little to do with local history.
Byrd, assistant professor of linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and his students have drawn national attention for their groundbreaking work to reconstruct and understand prehistoric languages. Byrd has devoted much of his research time translating the language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The language is thought to have been first used over 7,000 years ago, with some suspecting it was spoken even earlier. Byrd's work focuses on the sounds and structure of the PIE language, aiming to understand what it sounded like when spoken a millennia ago. "To figure out what PIE sounded like, we must compare it to the most ancient Indo-European languages, like Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit," Byrd said. While the nuts and bolts behind reconstructing stories in PIE is quite complicated, Byrd describes the translation process as fairly straightforward. The difficulty, he says, comes from knowing which words the PIE speakers used, which requires study and knowledge of the culture. "For each sentence you want to write, you must consider the words the PIE speakers used to convey concepts as well as the word order. Once you have those, you've got yourself a reconstructed sentence," said Byrd. Mattingly, a linguistics and Spanish senior, took Byrd's Indo-European course last year. She says her experience in the class played no small part in her decision to pursue a career in linguistics. After a study of the culture of the PIE speakers and the makeup of their language, Byrd issued a unique challenge to his class: To translate the third-ever fable into PIE. When Byrd told his class that they would be reconstructing a fable into the PIE language, no one knew what an undertaking it would become. Mattingly recounts the pressure to reconstruct the language accurately. "It was so, so difficult at first, because we wanted so badly to do it correctly," she said. "These are words our linguistic ancestors spoke. So to bridge that gap in class was very meaningful to me." Byrd keeps his dynamic classroom environment full of challenge and opportunity, offering up research studies to his students interested in translating other works written in PIE and other ancient languages. These independent studies are flexible, chosen based on consideration of student interest and Byrd's work. "The work that comes out of these studies is stellar," Byrd said. Last year, Mattingly had the opportunity to complete an independent study with Byrd. Knowing her strengths after having her in class, Byrd pushed Mattingly to take a leap and work on something new. She chose to look at the adaptation of the Spanish language between the years 711 and 1400 and how it shifted as a result of an influence from Arabic. "Dr. Byrd inspired me to work on something that incorporated both languages that I speak," she said. "Before working alongside him, I hadn't thought about Islamic conquest in terms of how it affected the evolution of the Spanish language." Byrd says he likes to make his classes stand out from other linguistics courses so that his students learn the material they need while having fun. "While students are asked to undertake lots of linguistic analysis, I always like to bring a little bit of fun and silliness into it, whether it's translating a fable into PIE or analyzing the made-up language of Ramma Lamma Ding Dongian," he said. It's that environment that encouraged Mattingly to further pursue her linguistics passion. She emphasizes the value of having Byrd as a mentor who can check in on her and she can approach with questions or concerns, as she recalls not always having the answers as a first-year student. "Dr. Byrd knows his craft really well," she said. "If I have a question, he will either have a hard answer or he'll know exactly where to send me. He's a great asset as a resource." For incoming linguistics students, Byrd recommends a strong desire to learn other languages and a willingness to look at things from other perspectives, which, he says, go hand in hand. "My advice is to take courses in both ancient and modern languages from the wonderful faculty in the MCLLC department and Hispanic Studies Department here at UK," he said. After she graduates, Mattingly plans to pursue a master's degree in linguistics and later start a career in translation and linguistics for the federal government. Byrd's teaching style, in which he compares translation to solving a riddle, allowed her to see how much she enjoyed the process. "It really opened me up to realizing how much I love linguistics," she said. "I love finding the answer and doing research that has never been done before, whether it's PIE, Bengali or Swahili. It gives us insights not only into those cultures but our own as well."
Byrd, assistant professor of linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and his students have drawn national attention for their groundbreaking work to reconstruct and understand prehistoric languages. Byrd has devoted much of his research time translating the language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The language is thought to have been first used over 7,000 years ago, with some suspecting it was spoken even earlier. Byrd's work focuses on the sounds and structure of the PIE language, aiming to understand what it sounded like when spoken a millennia ago. "To figure out what PIE sounded like, we must compare it to the most ancient Indo-European languages, like Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit," Byrd said. While the nuts and bolts behind reconstructing stories in PIE is quite complicated, Byrd describes the translation process as fairly straightforward. The difficulty, he says, comes from knowing which words the PIE speakers used, which requires study and knowledge of the culture. "For each sentence you want to write, you must consider the words the PIE speakers used to convey concepts as well as the word order. Once you have those, you've got yourself a reconstructed sentence," said Byrd. Mattingly, a linguistics and Spanish senior, took Byrd's Indo-European course last year. She says her experience in the class played no small part in her decision to pursue a career in linguistics. After a study of the culture of the PIE speakers and the makeup of their language, Byrd issued a unique challenge to his class: To translate the third-ever fable into PIE. When Byrd told his class that they would be reconstructing a fable into the PIE language, no one knew what an undertaking it would become. Mattingly recounts the pressure to reconstruct the language accurately. "It was so, so difficult at first, because we wanted so badly to do it correctly," she said. "These are words our linguistic ancestors spoke. So to bridge that gap in class was very meaningful to me." Byrd keeps his dynamic classroom environment full of challenge and opportunity, offering up research studies to his students interested in translating other works written in PIE and other ancient languages. These independent studies a
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-reconstructing-prehistoric-languages.html#jCp
Translation and the Many Languages of Resistance Call for Papers Cairo, 6-8 March 2015 Deadline: 15 September 2014 Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK Organized by Mona Baker, Yasmin El Rifae, and Mada Masr
Call for Contributions
Activists from various regions and countries connect with and influence one another through practices involving various types of translation, including video subtitling, written translation, and oral interpretation. The Egyptian Revolution and the activists and collectives who have worked to move it forward have been highly visible to other protest movements in large part through such practices. This conference aims to explore themes related to translation and its role in creating a global image for protest movements, and in connecting different movements to one another.
Held in Cairo, the conference will engage extensively with the Egyptian Revolution and the values and practices that Egyptian activist groups have shared with other groups around the world. It will also accommodate contributions relating to other protest movements insofar as they shed light on some of the ways in which global networks of solidarity are enabled and mediated by different types of translational practice. The event is ultimately intended to highlight the political import of translation and to provide a space for local, regional and international activists to reflect on the processes of mediation that allow them to connect with other movements and publics.
Translation is understood here in both its narrow and broad senses. In its narrow sense, translation involves rendering fully articulated stretches of textual material from one national language into another, and encompasses various modalities such as written translation, subtitling and oral interpreting. This type of translation is part of the fabric of practically all oppositional groups in Egypt – from the written translation of statements and campaigns by groups such as No to Military Trials to the subtitling of videos by collectives such as Mosireen and Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution. As Rizk (2013)* explains, it is translation that allows activists involved in a group such as Mosireen to connect with protest movements elsewhere and to see themselves “within a broader struggle and not an atomized battle against local dictatorship”. In its broad sense, translation involves the mediation of diffuse symbols, narratives and linguistic signs of varying lengths across modalities (e.g. words into image), levels of language (e.g. fusha and ‘amiyya) and cultural spaces, the latter without necessarily crossing a language boundary. As such it also encompasses the use of languages other than Arabic in writings and discussions about the Egyptian Revolution, the use of (forms of) Arabic in addressing regional audiences, as well as the journey of visual and musical artefacts across social and national boundaries. Themes to be addressed include but are not limited to the following: - Forms of mutual solidarity that are enabled and enhanced by various acts of translation;
- Video activism and the role of subtitling in negotiating the shift from representation to narration;
- Critical appraisals of the internet savvy middle class in Egypt as translators and interpreters of the Revolution;
- The role of translation in situating the Egyptian Revolution within broader struggles, especially in the global south (Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, etc.);
- Case studies of the contribution of translation to specific activist projects connected with the Egyptian Revolution or with similar movements elsewhere (Turkey, Greece, Argentina, etc.);
- The political import of creative strategies of translation, in its narrow and broad senses, in the context of protest movements;
- The extent to which new technologies and software support or restrict the subversive potential of translation;
- The interaction between textual and visual media, and between different languages, in sites of protest such as graffiti and street performance.
The languages of the conference are English and Arabic (with volunteer interpreting provided where feasible). Registration for this event is free. Submission of Abstracts for Presentations
Abstracts of 300 words should be sent by 15 September 2014 to: Professor Mona Baker (mona.baker@manchester.ac.uk) and Yasmin El-Rifae (yasmin.elrifae@gmail.com). Notification of acceptance will be given by 30 November 2014. Keynote Speakers & Abstracts: (see website for further details) Changing Frames and Fault-lines Khalid Abdallah, actor, producer, filmmaker, activist; founding member of Mosireen and Cimatheque; played leading roles in United 93, The Kite Runner and Green Zone
The story of the Egyptian revolution carries a heavy burden. Its many tales travel across contexts and experience, within Egypt and beyond it, influencing movements and revolutions while building dreams and threatening them. Solidarity fundamentally entails sharing an interpretation of a story. How that story is told and re-told has political and historical implications that are as much about the current moment as they are about the future. Political events are hard to follow at the best of times and solidarity is broken when the thread of a story is lost or events within it become subject to confusingly competing narratives. Meanwhile, a revolution is in itself a radical break with old political frameworks and the interpretations of possibility and the present they represent. And like any story, the longer it gets the more complicated it becomes. At stake is not only solidarity within the Egyptian revolution itself, but also a story of change and how it happens, or might.
Over the past four years I have worked with a range of forms and collaborators to engage in telling many of the stories of the Egyptian revolution, translating experiences and perspectives between a diverse range of contexts and audiences. With each form and each language, each event and each audience, comes a framework within which those stories can be told and shared – some infrastructural, some political, some legal, some linguistic. In this presentation I will reflect on what I see as the fault lines in translating events between contexts and the interpretative lapses that threaten meaningful solidarity. I will also reflect on strategies that have been used to attempt to bridge some of these gaps, giving my reading of certain successes and failures, while asking how to adapt and re-strategise amidst a period of extraordinary struggle and change.
Text and Context: Translating in a State of Emergency
Samah Selim, Rutgers University, USA
This presentation will explore the problems associated with activist translating in revolutionary historical moments like the one that began in Egypt in 2011. Using my experience working as a subtitler with the radical video collective Mosireen in 2012/13, I want to reflect on how the process and experience of translating in a state of emergency – when the state mobilizes its arsenal of violence on the streets – profoundly shapes how we think about terms like profession and objectivity, and about the roles of both translator and audience in building effective cross-border virtual solidarity networks in real time. I also want to broadly distinguish between what I see as the two closely related and equally urgent modes of political translating work described above; crisis and building. While the former is defined by transposable and widely-circulating spectacles of violence and resistance, the latter seeks to mobilize the broadest possible array of socially embedded source texts (tracts, statements, press conferences, testimonies, manifestos, analysis) in order to fully territorialize the spectacle and give it political meaning. I will argue that building effective and sustainable international solidarity networks absolutely depends on this kind of multi-directional territorializing translation work, particularly at this time when militant popular movements are exploding across the globe.
Translation and Solidarity in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution Leil Zahra-Mortada, transfeminist queer anarchist; founder of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution; member/contributor to Operation Against Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH), No to Military Trials for Civilians, and Mosireen.
Translation has been an integral part of Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution from its very first stages. Subtitling the speech of the women interviewed into a variety of languages is not just an issue of disseminating information and making their unique experiences accessible to as many people as possible, but is part of a broad expression of political commitment that assumes different forms. First and foremost, it is part of a wider post-colonial and feminist commitment to allowing the subjects themselves to shape their own voices and representations. Speaking in Arabic, the women translate their first hand experiences into a discourse that counters the widespread appropriation of the voices of both women and people of colour. These voices have traditionally been constrained and distorted by patriarchal, xenophobic and racist interpretations and streamlined into simplistic generalizations that oscillated between imposition and exoticism. Making subtitles into a wide range of languages an integral part of the project is a further step towards empowering Egyptian women by connecting them to networks of rebellion across borders. Subtitles constitute a tool that extends the messages of empowerment to other locales, makes local political struggles visible to other protest movements, and further fosters international networking and solidarity. This contribution will offer a critical account of both levels of translation as they evolved in Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution.
The Translation of Protests and Movements across Time, Space and Culture Cristina Flesher Fominaya, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Protests and movements in one place can inspire and influence people far beyond the point of origin, with unexpected and impossible to predict consequences. In this talk I will draw on examples from the recent wave of anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements to describe some of these processes across not only space but also time, to show how transmitters and adopters must work hard to effect a process of movement translation across contexts, how these processes are not always successful and why, and how ideas, practices and repertoires can take on a life of their own. Translating Rebellion: From Local Protests to Global Uprisings Brandon Jourdan, Global Uprisings
Since 2011, streets and squares across the world have become the site of massive demonstrations, strikes, occupations, riots, rebellions, and revolutions. From the Arab uprisings to the movement of the squares in Southern Europe, and from there to the global Occupy movement and the recent uprisings in Turkey and Brazil, people everywhere have been rising up against the power of governments, corporations and repressive regimes, representing a global legitimation crisis that has affected authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike. While mainstream media, filmmakers, sociologists, and writers have often worked to explain the local contexts for the rebellions, many have not adequately attempted to try to connect them in their global economic and political context. Many instead have chosen to view the Arab uprisings as simply people fighting for Western-style democracy or the European movements as purely anti-austerity protests or the protests in Brazil and Turkey as fights against urbanization projects. However, the neo-liberal policies that became globalized over the last four decades led to the transformation of the world political economy and connected populations in a manner often unreported and the timing of the wave of rebellion over the last few years coincided with a breakdown of both neoliberal capitalism and representative democracy. In many cases, protesters related to other movements much more than to the ruling figures within their own countries. The symbols, tactics, and motivations for going to the streets translated easily across geographic and political boundaries.
This audio/visual presentation will focus on showing how the recent uprisings and protests are connected through the global political economy and how movements have bridged the divide of national boundaries using shared symbols, slogans, memes, tactics, and ideals.
Is There a Right to Translation? Vicente L. Rafael, University of Washington, USA In October, 2010, the European Union Parliament issued a Directive “On the Right to Interpretation and Translation in Criminal Proceedings”. It stipulated that member nations must provide a competent interpreter when needed in prosecuting a crime, and that all legal proceedings and documents pertaining to the case of the accused must be available in the language understood by the defendant. This right to translation is part of a much larger right to defense designed to protect the defendant against legal proceedings in languages foreign to him or her. The model for this right to translation, as with the right of defense, is economic. Just as the European Union seeks to ensure that a commodity sold in one market can cross over and be sold in another, so legal decisions in one country, regardless of the nationality of the accused, will follow the same procedures and, thanks to translation, will be equally valid in another. In such cases, the need for extradition vanishes, as the fairness of a trial in one EU country is deemed to be valid in another.
Another way to put this: thanks to the right to translation, the law itself will be fully transparent and unerringly translatable from one country to another. Barriers to justice, like barriers to trade, will simply melt away. Translation will help to ensure justice is done. The body of the accused can be held accountable to a law that now speaks in the same, fully substitutable language. The right to translation thus is also the right of the law to operate across borders — linguistic, political and economic. Translation amplifies the law’s trans-national reach. At the same time, it transforms the individual who is accused. Seeking to protect his or her rights, translation turns the accused individual, regardless of his or her linguistic particularity, into a subject recognizable to the law.
The right to translation as a right of the State to preside over the body of the accused, to find the accused either guilty or innocent according to the law, would seem to suggest that translation is merely a handmaiden to governance. It can at best claim to be a subsidiary to a larger set of civil rights, such as the right to a fair trial, the right to health care, or the right to an education, social security, and so on. In this way, the right to translation puts it in its traditional place: as the subordinate, dutiful, often invisible supplement of power.
But is there another way in which we can think of the right to translation that isn’t simply subsumed by the law? Is translation, as a practical matter, also above or beyond the law? And exceeding the law, can it also upend it? How does the right to translation, for example, relate to the right to the humanities, or to literature? And more to the point of this conference, how does this right, if there is such a thing, relate to social movements, often organized against the State? Like literature, do social movements have a right not to be translated, to remain opaque and unreadable to the eyes of the law and the interpretive commands of the marketplace? These are the questions I propose to explore in my talk.
Translating the Arab World: From Orientalism to Eurocentrism, and the Limitations of Modern Thought Magid Shihade, Institute for International Studies, Birzeit University, Palestine
As soon as the events that started in January 2011 began to unfold in the Arab world, journalists, academics and commentators in different parts of what is often referred to as the ‘West’ jumped immediately to analyze, explain, name and translate what is taking place in the region. Overwhelmingly, these translations treated the developments in the region as events that ended and can thus be named, judged and completely understood. A similar pattern could be observed within the region itself, with local journalists, academics and experts almost mirroring the interpretations and translations provided by western commentators. The main questions were, and remain to this day, as follows: whether to name these developments as revolutions, coups, revolts, uprisings, etc.; whether these developments were the making of local energies or outside forces; and whether they follow archetypal patterns attested in western history. The analyses and translations of these developments have been and remain constrained by old forces that we might be tempted to think are long gone, especially after decades of critiquing the certainty with which social human behavior was analyzed and translated in the past. Orientalism, as theorized by Edward Said decades ago, seems to continue to impact the way people see the region and the way people in the region see themselves. As does Eurocentrism, which means that events in the world and human social behavior continue to be evaluated through the lens of western history, experience and tools of analyses. This presentation will discuss the various frameworks that have led to ‘mistranslations’ of world history and recent events, often with huge impact and consequences for the people who live around the world and are the object of analyses that often have little to do with local history.
Professor Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic & Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a high-profile translator of Arabic fiction into English. Sarah Irving interviewed her about her thirty-year career in translation in a piece that originally ran in May of 2013: Marilyn Booth with Palestinian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah. Sarah Irving: How did you become a translator in the first place? How did you actually start out? Was it an aspiration or something that happened accidentally? Marilyn Booth: Somewhere between the two, I think. I would have to say that I started because I had to do quite a lot of translation for my PhD dissertation, translating poetry, and I really loved it. Actually I had done a lot of translation of 1920s ‘romantic’ prose for my BA thesis on Mayy Ziyada. Both were difficult and fun in completely different ways. Recherche and down to earth! Bayram al-Tunisi was ‘ammiyya poetry so it was quite challenging and then I won an award for it which was nice—it was already rewarding in itself but it was really helpful to feel some encouragement from others, as a student. I think we need to develop more venues for that. Translation is such an ever-impossible and also lonely enterprise, new and good translators should be encouraged — they are now, more than in the past, at least with regards to Arabic literature. I was trying to think about this — when did I start? What is a start?! And I can’t actually remember, but I must have started my first independent translation really soon after I finished my PhD. The timing is all a bit hazy now, because I was trying out various possibilities for my near-future as most of us do. I was coming up with a project but around the same time I was asked to translate Nawal al-Saadawi’s prison memoirs, which actually is a book of hers that I do think is worthwhile (by this I mean that while I have regard for her early nonfiction, as well as these prison memoirs, and also have regard for the fact that people do react in interesting ways to her fiction, I find her nonfiction, or some of it, more satisfying intellectually and narratively). Meanwhile the editor of Quartet Books, whom I got to know, was interested in supporting Arabic translation. We started brainstorming around putting together a volume of writings by Egyptian women. Eventually we settled on short stories, and I have always loved short stories, so I thought, Oh yes, what a good idea! So I started reading short stories, originally with the intention that I would put together a fairly traditional kind of collection – thinking about who were the important writers, since the 1920s, one story per author and only a few per generation, and so on. But as I read on and on, I read a lot of things that didn’t excite me much and, I thought, would not excite readers in English much. It is good to give readers a historical sense of a tradition — I’ve tried to do that in other ways, both through translation and through academic writing — but you also have to think, of course, about what will excite an audience NOW? Eventually, I decided to focus on eight writers who, then, were not really well known, though I’m delighted that they have become better known since — Salwa Bakr, for instance. She was certainly drawing attention in Egypt: her first short story collection was quite new and different. So I did that collection, and I really enjoyed it. But it is probably one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, fabulous and difficult. In a project like this you’re working between radically diverse voices, you’re working with eight different authorial voices and styles. I did not want to homogenize those voices and I’m afraid that is something that happens sometimes. It was extremely challenging — in some ways more so than doing a novel or a collection of works by one author, because then you’re inside that author’s voice, but I was very pleased with the result and I’m very proud of that book and I’m sorry it’s out of print. It’s kind of “of it’s moment,” because at the time very little had been published in translation by Egyptian female authors. One of my reasons for wanting to do it was that it seemed that the only Egyptian female author that people outside of the Arab world knew was Nawal al-Saadawi, and whatever one thinks of her work I didn’t think she should be the only voice out there. pull1 This coincided with a period of time when I didn’t have (or want!) an academic job, so it also fulfilled an artistic and intellectual need for me to do that kind of work. I was committed to research but literary translation has always been for me an artistic outlet, an avocation, a professional commitment and (I think) a duty, so I just continued from there, alongside research. I had quite a long time as an independent scholar – or unemployed, depending on how you want to define it! I did have some grants and was doing some research but I was also translating. I also found that translating is something that you can combine with having babies, because — except for the very final stages when you really need to live inside the work — it is something that you can pick up and put down. I did think quite seriously about going into translation full-time, but at that time, I would have had to go into commercial translation and I didn’t want to do that. I knew I wanted to translate literature but I didn’t want to turn it into a business. That’s never been the way that I’ve seen it — which is fortunate because you can’t really regard literary translation as a business because you make no money at it. At the same time, I am seriously mentoring emerging translators, those of us who have done a lot of translation have a responsibility to do that, especially since it is an ever-more competitive atmosphere now — ironically! Arabic lit is more on the map, but it is harder than ever to have a say in what that means and how to define it. SI: You work both as an academic and as a translator. Much of your academic work focuses on female writers and activists, but you’ve translated both male and female writers and those have had protagonists of both genders, so you’ve worked with a lot of different styles and themes. How do you find the novels you translate? Do they come to you or do you discover them and find a publisher? pull2 MB: It’s been different with each one. Some novels I’ve been asked to translate and have decided to do so, and others I’ve been asked to do and have turned down. But in general and certainly for the past period of time, it’s been either that I have found the novel or the short story collection, or a publisher has suggested it. I should say — for the benefit of any readers who are thinking of just doing a translation and then trying to ‘sell’ it — that is unfortunately becoming harder. I’m delighted that Arabic literature is more on the international map now, but distressed that what can get published in translation is in some ways more constrained. Publishers want BLING! What many of us want to translate are the intense and beautifully written and consummately constructed but not always easy novels of many writers throughout the Arab world. It is a bit frustrating that certain rather narrow conceptions of ‘market’ — and holdovers of Orientalist concepts of what writers from Arabic-speaking societies should be saying — govern what gets taken. I don’t want to overdo this: There are a lot of fantastic authors being translated. And I absolutely support the notion that bestseller novels in the Middle East should be translated — don’t readers of European languages want to know what readers of Arabic spend their evenings in bed reading? The problem is that — as with other literatures in translation — there is a narrow if swift-flowing channel of works that actually get into English. I will also say (if any new translators are listening!) that I have learned the hard way that one should translate things that really speak to you. That should be obvious, but sometimes it isn’t, and one can also think that a novel speaks to one and then find out half way through that it no long does, which is one of the perils of this artistic and political commitment (which I believe, for me, it is, equally in both measure). But in general I’ve translated works that I really either felt passionate about or felt were important to have translated, or hopefully both – it’s best when it’s both, obviously. SI: What kind of relationship do you tend to have with the authors of works you translate? MB: It’s been really different with each one. Actually, as a result of a couple of experiences of this I started doing some research which I’ve never published but which I hope to get back to soon. I think it’s a really important issue, the translator-author relationship as part of the production of the text-in-translation. There are also the vagaries of the translator-author-publisher relationship(s), and that complicates things even further. I respect the fact that publishers have to sell what they take on, and that’s good of course for the book, for both authors (‘original’ and ‘translator’). It isn’t always comfortable; if they take you on, publishers are great and you work together. I do give emerging translators whom I mentor a lot of advice on dealing with publishers: you need to ask them as much as they ask you. It’s a relationship. They understand that, they appreciate it. In general, for me, one of the wonderful and very rewarding parts of translation has been getting to know authors, especially when it is first through their texts, and then forming personal relationships. No surprise that when I really like a work, I’m going to really enjoy the author! (This might not always be true but for me it has been consistently good). I have some very close friends where the friendship happened through translation and that’s been absolutely wonderful, and it has been consistent. Translating someone is an intimate act, and when that results in friendship it is beautiful. In other cases it’s been a case of generally going to the author quite late on in the writing of the translation for help with certain things. Translators and authors both have different ways of working on that. Some authors don’t want to be involved at all, and I respect that. Some authors want to be a little bit too involved, and don’t understand what translation means. I’ve certainly had that experience and it has been disappointing and I think has meant a less successful outcome. Obviously the best situation is one of mutual respect, when authors respect what translators do and realise that it is a special kind of work and is something that in a sense requires a different set of talents. Most of the authors I have worked with (though there are some unfortunate and fairly high profile exceptions!) have recognized that — after all, a good writer would recognize it. They know that fine translation requires writerly talent. You can’t be a good literary translator without being a good writer, but at the same time there are lots of other aspects and so I think a lot of it depends on what the writer’s expectations are and how much they know about the art of translation. That’s been true for me in my relationships with authors and it’s definitely true in other situations. I remember one colleague once saying to me that he particularly loved working with Jabra Ibrahim Jabra because Jabra himself was a well-known and superb translator and understood what translation was about. Two of the authors I’ve worked with are also translators and that’s been wonderful and in a sense they’ve been less interested in interfering because they know, and they’ve trusted me to work as a translator. Of course I’ve gone to them with questions, but in general they’ve stayed away from the process. One configuration has been especially lovely! I’ve translated literary works by someone who has translated my academic books. We are mutually vulnerable and this is the place where translation becomes affect and love as well as work and respect. I’d like to think more about translation as a relationship of affect. pull3 There have been other authors who have been very interventionist, and those have been the worst experiences, and they’ve resulted in the worst translations. The very worst situation is when you have a writer who is certain that he or she knows English very well but in fact does not know it to the extent that they can actually be part of the translational process. Luckily that doesn’t happen very often and I do want to say that, in my experience, the huge majority of authors I’ve translated have been respectful. But I have to say I am much more wary now of going to the author and I’m much less likely to allow an author to read the whole translation unless I feel that that is important, or unless I really know that author in a way that I know I can trust them with the text. Because once I’m translating it it’s no longer their text, it’s my text, and they don’t have a right to interfere. I am also no longer willing to allow publishers to do this to me, to impose a ‘star’ author — that is just not in anyone’s interests — particularly not the reader’s. So I do worry a bit about what is happening now. Can we feel secure that the present and very welcome hyped-up interest in Arabic literary works will really result in an appropriate continuing range (historically as well as in other ways) of works published, and in a fierce insistence on top-quality translation? SI: What does your translation process look like? MB: The first step, of course, is reading and re-reading and re-re-reading, and just thinking and dwelling inside the text. When you have a new text and you’re excited about it and you want to start translating it, you want to start immediately, but I try generally (not always successfully!) to resist that impulse, to spend a bit of time letting it just seep into me before I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. I think that’s a really important thing to do and sometimes I’m more successful at that than at others. Of course sometimes there’s more pressure to get something done quickly, although that’s something I really resist and I do NOT – I never have and I never will – agree to do a translation where the timeline is shorter that I feel comfortable with. That does a complete disservice to the book, and to me as a writer. Just as it takes a writer an indefinite amount of time to write a book, that has to be regarded as a feature of really writerly translation. So I would never try to rush. But once I have started actually translating, generally I like to go through the whole thing and do a rough translation, because that brings up a lot of things and raises a lot of issues. And it also means that I’m grappling in a different way with some of the things I was pondering before I started translating. So I do that, working of course very closely with the Arabic. And then do a second draft where I’m still going back and forth but I’m looking more globally in a sense. It’s not necessarily start to finish, because sometimes there is a piece in the middle that holds a key to the whole thing that I need to work with first. So I do that second draft and if time permits I try to put it away for a little while. And when I go back to it for the 3rd draft I really try to get away from the original text and try to work with the English for a while, although I still obviously go back to the Arabic quite a bit. At the end of the third draft I have what is not yet really polished in the way it has to be, but it’s a fairly good text and hopefully I’ve ironed out most of the problems. With the fourth draft I actually go back to the Arabic and work very, very closely with it, having been away from it for a bit. And then the fifth draft – it’s usually about five drafts – is really the point where for me it almost becomes like a Sufi space in that I have to be inside it, I have to let the rest of the world recede, although one doesn’t always have the circumstances to do that. This is where, ideally, you can go to a translator’s retreat, but it’s an ideal one can’t normally have. But in the 5th draft I’m inside it, I’m trying to hear the voice, I’m again moving back and forth inside the text but trying to let that writing process happen with respect to the author’s voice on the one hand and the resonance of the Arabic but on the other hand with respect to my voice in the English and the translation, so I’m kind of doing this double thing. pull4 That’s also when, in my experience, you start having dreams about the text – hopefully not nightmares! – and sometimes that produces surprising results. And that’s the stage I really love, but sometimes I also really hate it because you’re, like, ‘this is it’. But that, for me, is really the stage where I’m the writer, and the voice of the original work and my voice on the page are hopefully coming together, mingling, and often shouting at each other, but in general coming together. And that is also the only point where I can really appreciate what some writers mean when they say that at a certain point it just writes itself. Which of course doesn’t mean there’s no labour involved, or that there’s no tension or no frustration. But there’s a point of no return, and hopefully at the end of that point you resurface and you have this beautiful text! SI: Translation is, for you, a creative process – one with technical aspects of grammar and vocabulary, but very much a process of creation. How do you weigh up the different aspects of you and the Arabic and the author? MB: That’s a huge question. I’m actually as a translator quite conservative in the sense that I do generally stay quite close to the text. Obviously that varies, but in the end I find that actually that’s what works best. Listening closely to the author’s rhythm and words and voice, the way any of it gallops, is where I want to be, and really, staying close to the text is in the end what works, if it is a text you respect. The rhythm and voice are there. Yes, languages are different, and I do subscribe to the view that suggests you try to make readers of the translation hear the rhythm of the original. I believe in bringing a lot of the original language into the translation, and that works as long as you are respecting both the original rhythms and the possibility of translated readers catching it (they generally do! One of my problems with publishers is that they are scared readers won’t get it — I think they are generally wrong). It is in the fine grain of the original text that you find the voice of the translation. So I am extremely attentive to the in-between of the language of the original, and the novels that I’ve liked best to translate I think demand that. To me, the really superb novel could not be written any differently than it is written and the translator must attend to that and respect that and work within that language. I find actually that sometimes a near-literal rendering is the most expressive and the best way to go. Obviously when I say literal I don’t mean literal but it is a question of where the language of the original leads you to, and in a sense that’s so much a part of the author’s voice and style that it has to be attended to — and you can ask the reader to attend to it, and though publishers get nervous, I think readers are there! Two of my very favourite authors, Hoda Barakat or Hassan Daoud, both have an extremely precise and rich language, and one has to play extremely close attention to that precision and get that into the work, so I think it’s a matter of making sure that that’s always the language that you’re inside of and never getting too far away from it. (But will a publisher agree?!) Of course on another level there are also lots of decisions you have to make: How much Arabic do you retain in the text? That really varies. Some novels are really enriched by it, some aren’t, and also of course there are issues around use of the vernacular. To what extent is it important to retain that vernacular voice and intimacy? Usually I think it is quite important, although it’s very hard to do, and of course we can’t have the same effect in English that switching between levels of language has in Arabic, because that movement in Arabic between ‘ammiyyas and fushas is one that immediately conveys a range of messages – whether it’s political or local intimacy or a place or moment – it’s never going to come across in the same way but one can approximate it. I remember when I was translating The Loved Ones by Alia Mamdouh, her use of Iraqi colloquial was enormously important, as a counter both to what was going on in Iraq from outside and in terms of a masculinised war culture which this novel challenged. I worked very hard with that to try and make sure that the colloquial-ness of that came through – partly by using Arabic words and partly by coming up with an English that would convey it. Those issues all come up, and are both a lot of fun to work with and also difficult and frustrating at times. But to the extent that I’ve examined other translations by other people, naturally there’s a range of practices and it’s impossible to say what’s right and wrong. It has struck me, though, over and over, how compared to many translators (and contra a lot of what is said in Translation Studies) I do seem to be closer to the texture of the original. I’m not trying to make a claim of value, it’s just the way that I work and the way my voice intersects with the original. And I think actually it is the best way to introduce newness into the language of translation — in my case, to enrich English. SI: Where do you stand on cases where there is, for instance, a very culturally specific metaphor or anecdote? Do you think that that is something that the Western reader should find out about or do you look for a Western equivalent that might convey the meaning more to the reader but might be less culturally specific?
TAMPA — When they started their lives as elementary school students in the United States, they were no different from any of the other kids at Bellamy Elementary School.
It was a whole new world, one with challenges and new experiences. But, at Bellamy, many of the incoming students don’t speak a word of English.
All Hillsborough County public schools have non-English-speaking kids enter every year, but Bellamy is a little different. The school has students, parents, and staff from 37 different countries and they can speak about 19 different languages. The kids who enter Bellamy without much command of the English language might be scared, but it’s a challenge that ESOL Resources Director Monica Roehm understands.
“They are here to learn to speak English,” she said. “But they have to learn to absorb the language first. Some of them learn by a sort of sign language, but with so many diverse students we have to make sure they can blend in with all of the other kids. It takes some work, but we hope they aren’t scared when it gets started. It’s a scary experience to go in with a lot of kids who you don’t understand, but we have a great faculty and, eventually the kids start to fit in.”
Fourth-grader Jean Cruz, 10, said he is still trying to fit in. He is from Puerto Rico and speaks fluent English even though he, like many of the Bellamy kids, is shy and not as verbose as some of the others.
“I learned to copy what other kids were saying,” Jean said. “All of us are nervous but, since we didn’t speak the same language we had to learn it and it wasn’t easy.”
With so many Hispanic kids in Hillsborough County, Jean knew plenty of people who at least spoke some Spanish. But Huy Nguyen, 9, a third-grader from Vietnam, said he was extremely shy because he felt lost trying to figure out how to perform in school when he didn’t know how to communicate.
“All I knew how to do was copy what everybody else was doing,” Huy said. “I am shy anyway but I watched and tried to learn. I started learning English in kindergarten. I was always afraid the kids would make fun of me and I wanted to go back home, but they have been nice. I’m learning more every day.”
Bellamy has four teachers who are trained to help the Hispanic kids and another one to teach the six Vietnamese kids. Roehm said the school also uses the Rosetta Stone learning techniques.
No special treatment is given to the non-English-speaking students, she said.
Their English is always assessed and there are more than 200 kids out of more than 700 in the school that are part of a learning program helping them deal with learning and adapting to English.
Mind you, there are other social aspects that aren’t quite as easy. Making friends can be a challenge and it takes guts to simply walk up to another student and try to make friends, especially when they speak a different language.
“I figured they were going to make fun of me,” said Stephanie Cabrara, 11, from Venezuela. “When I started at Bellamy, I was scared. I thought they would laugh at me, but the first day of class I sat next to someone and said hi. The kid was from Cuba and was as scared as me. It made me happy and more comfortable.”
Jhoan Lora Sanchez, 11, is from the Dominican Republic, and he said it wasn’t as hard to make friends as he thought it might be.
“I just sat down at a table in the cafeteria and started to try to make friends,” he said. “I just started to talk to people and told them I wanted to be their friend, because I am a good friend. I learned the language and I can speak all kinds of languages now. Bellamy helped me a lot.”
“These kids are in a great school,” Roehm said. “They all get along and are learning about America and the culture, but the other kids in school are learning about their cultures. It’s a great experience.”
Our mindset and thought processes are fundamentally related to our cultural background, and vice versa. In the world of translation services we usually pride ourselves in being trained not only in the literal translation work, the languages themselves, but also in understanding and appreciating the cultures behind the languages. Effective language translation requires that you have an appreciation for the culture that produced a text, both for understanding the underlying themes and subtleties of a text and for recognizing local sayings, oddball idiom, and concepts that are difficult to translate simply. But, I often ask my peers: Do we really have an understanding of these other cultures? Too many of us take a superficial approach to the question: Because we know the sayings, the politics, and the beliefs, we say, yes, yes, of course we know the culture. But this is a superior, missionary-amongst-the-savages attitude that says because we learn the folk songs we know what it's like to be from a particular country, region, or ethnic group. The fact is, it's much more difficult. In fact, many of the disagreements and conflicts we get into with other ethnicities, especially in Asian cultures, stems from differences that are more fundamental. Until we understand these fundamentals, our attempts at understanding from a personal perspective and localisation from a business perspective will be flawed, and possibly doomed to failure. Culture and Thought It's widely accepted today that culture and the mechanics of thought are closely related -- in other words, people from vastly different cultures do, in fact, think differently -- not just believe different things, or speak different words, but literally have a thought process that is alien to other cultures. I think we've all had the experience of an uncanny sense of a barrier between us and someone from another culture -- particularly, in my experience, Asian cultures -- that prevents us from truly understanding each other. We may understand the words and even the concepts we're exchanging, but we're not really understanding how we came to those conclusions, or why we're having those emotional reactions. Impact on Localization This is interesting as a personal project, but ought to be interesting to our clients as well, because this difference in thought process is making localization not only more difficult, but also more expensive. When you're trying to communicate to another culture it's tempting to think that all you need is a translator to make your words into another language -- but if you're not able to understand how the other culture thinks, you're still shooting in the dark, because you really don't know if you composed your message in an effective way in the first place. How can we overcome these divisions? It starts, I think, with introspection: Understand how your own thinking works and how those processes might be related to your own cultural background and upbringing. If you can see your own 'source code' you will have a much better chance of perceiving and understanding someone else's.
Thank you, Rodolfo for this interview. It is an honour to have you as my first guest in this series of short interviews with experienced terminologists who can guide us on our journey in the terminology field. In parallel with your tasks in the European Parliament, you are teaching terminology at the University of Luxembourg and I cannot think of a better person to give us a perspective of terminology from an academic and a professional point of view. What has been your most rewarding experience and what has been your biggest challenge both as a teacher and as a terminologist? Having studied and dealt with languages for many years as translator at the European Parliament, I am inevitably a word lover. My other passion being culture, I am convinced and it is a personal mission for me to convincethat language is a fundamental cultural right. The very quick expansion of terminology becoming a science connected with the needs of multilingual globalised communication and with a presence in all institutional, industrial or academic activity makes terminology an ideal field for transmitting the passion of language and culture. In general terms, how is terminology managed at TermCoord? Is there a systematic step-by-step process or do you handle terminology on a case-by-case basis? How many people are involved? The European Union is the most multilingual institutional translation “machine” with 24 official languages and 552 language combinations. The European Parliament now has real legislative power making each translation an original legislative act. Linguistic consistency and terminological accuracy is now the pillar of quality work, not only for translators but also for drafters usually writing in a language other than their mother tongue. Terminology is thus an inherent need of every EP political or administrative activity. Translators, interpreters and drafters constantly encounter terminological issues and they need to consult reliable resources. All our terminology work has as main tool the common EU terminology database IATE. Since terminology is a living being exactly as languages are, reliability of a database means constant updating and therefore this database that you from outside can only consult (and you are 3500 to do so every hour), IATE is for us in the EU Institutions an interactive platform, fed every day by all translators with some 300 new terms resulting from the research needed during translation. Terminology is thus produced in the translation units in all institutions and the Terminology Coordination Unit coordinates, organizes and supports this work. In the Parliament, each translation unit appoints at least 2 (but up to 8) terminologists, who undertake terminology consolidation and validation at language level. They make our Terminology Network of more than 100 translators-terminologists coordinated by our team. TermCoord has 10 permanent staff members, one “rotating terminologist” seconded for 3 months from a translation unit and one coordinator of the (still internal) interinstitutional portal EurTerm. In the 6 years of its existence, TermCoord has had some 80 very high skilled trainees in the fields of terminology, communication and computational linguistics, which learn how to evolve in a public institution but also help us connecting with the constant evolution of the science of terminology. The terminologist’s job description includes a long list of duties, but what would you say is his/her most important responsibility? The responsibility of a terminologist in a public multilingual legislative institution is ensuring quality and linguistic consistency of translation. Keeping a huge database with more than 11 million terms updated and reliable needs advanced knowledge; from the basic philosophical distinction between concept and term to the practical know-how related to definition and referencing. This work needs a special skill that is fixed in the “terminology framework” of the EP and provided by special training that TermCoord offers tailor made to various groups, terminologists, translators, trainees, interpreters and drafters of legislative documents. What is your recommendation for terminology beginners? As I said before, terminology is becoming more and more a science per se but also an interdisciplinary need for any activity. All companies with a worldwide activity have or use huge translation services and have also a high standard terminology service and database. This offers very wide possibilities of training and acquiring advanced skills, a constantly increasing and easily accessible collection of resources, more simply said: a wonderful new world to explore touching the most fascinating aspects of our globalised world: multilingual communication, multicultural coexistence. So first step for a new terminologist is to see this task as a passionate adventure and challenge; and then to explore and use the best channels to acquire the deep knowledge of mining, producing and managing terminology combining all approaches, from the academic knowledge based approach using ontologies to the more terminographical one used for huge databases like IATE and the ones of other big international organizations and industries. Some people might think that new technologies and tools will replace translators and terminologists. But, in your opinion, what is the future of terminology management? Should we consider it as a promising career path? We, linguists, know better than anyone else that there will never be a machina sapiens. Especially for content like language that is constantly evolving and related to each thought of the human brain in so many different cultures, human will always teach the machine and will always select its output. So, the machine is not a competitor but a tool. And through the evolving research and IT evolution, it becomes a very useful tool. Translation and interpretation will partly be done in next future by or with the machine using huge combined translation memories. But a translation memory that only reproduces a former translation is a very dangerous threat for the quality of any translation if it is not combined with the terminological quality control. Therefore today in the CAT tools used by translators, also in the European Institutions, we integrate automatic term recognition from reliable terminological thesauri. Every technological effort to ease translation and to increase output is inevitably connected with an effort of terminological accuracy. All of us have tested various automatic term extractors, but in any development of such software, linguists are required to set every research criterion, even the purely statistical filters that do not deliver if they are not based on a linguistic logic.
Africans from ancient times have had words for everything. It was the language, oiled by words and vocabulary, that took centre stage in the functioning communities. Africa had almost everything stolen from her.... except language.
That, too, has been a casualty of white-washing Africa and the discrediting of everything ancient African. The decimation of African languages and culture wrecked havoc on the collective psyche of African thought and advancement.
Loss of, and stunted language, denuded a people of pride, history and purpose. For generations spanning centuries, Africans spent half their time learning and mastering the languages, cultures and religion of their oppressors, to the detriment of their overall well-being.
Over time, especially during the period of colonization, words disappeared from use and circulation. And those remaining, their meanings were often lost and distorted. In order to oppress the natives and fulfil their objectives, Europeans had forced Africans to take on their language and culture so they could see themselves through the lens and the paradigm of the enslaver. This gave Africans a false sense of belonging; a soothing determination to be seen to belong and yet not be a part of; a distorted sense of purpose in helping advance the economic upliftment of their oppressors while gaining little else other than a pat on the back.
This form of outright racism and hate is perhaps best explained by Edwin Smith, the 18th century missionary. He wrote in detail about the methods European colonizers used to suppress Africans and make a success of colonization. In his book The Golden Stool he writes on page 186: "The first method begins by destroying the institutions, traditions, religion of the people and then superimpose upon the native ruins whatever the conquering governing power considers to be the better administrative system. The other method is to graft our higher civilization on the soundly rooted native stock, bringing out the best of what is in the native tradition, and moulding it into a form consonant with our modern ideas and higher standards."
Uka Wu Ilu – a compendium of Igbo idioms and proverbs, by Florence Chinyere Duru, Oyster St. Iyke & Prince Osita Ike Ventures’ 2014
Michael Echeruo “Imust commend our author, Loolo Florence Chinyere Duru, for her deep interest in the Igbo language and its proverbs. Proverbs are the wisdom of a people in a nutshell. Complex stories and situations are concentrated in a few words and phrases which capture and retain the essential meaning of the experiences from which they derive. As the author points out, we cannot fully or properly understand these proverbs if we are not schooled in the traditional life and thought of the Igbo people who invent and use them. To understand Igbo proverbs, and enjoy their power and beauty, therefore, we have to know the language and the cultural context in which these proverbs are used. This Compendium not only lists the proverbs, but tries to convey their general meaning in English, both literally and idiomatically.
The author also reminds us that the Igbo language has several “dialects.” As a result, many of us may not immediately understand the meaning of proverbs owing to the perhaps strange dialect of words therein contained. I believe—indeed I know—that languages are made richer by the wealth of dialectal variation which they can demonstrate. As we become more acquainted with these dialects, we begin to appreciate our total inheritance as Igbo language speakers. Inevitably some words and phrases in these dialects will fall by the wayside; but many—very many—will become part of our language-world. As with many other languages today, while we may not always speak all the dialects, we will understand these dialects when spoken.
A Compendium of Igbo proverbs in their original dialect is, therefore, very much to be appreciated: We thereby come across new words, become aware of new local customs and habits, and perhaps appreciate the complications which entered our language when the various Christian denominations confronted the three Igbo dialect words, enyi, iko, and oyi, for example.
This book lists nearly 600 proverbs and idioms grouped under eight sections: Human, Weather/Elements, Plants, Mad Person, Marriage, Death/Dead, Animal, and General. My earnest plea is for the author to expand some of these sections with more instances. In this regard, I will urge readers of this book to encourage this pioneering effort by submitting additional examples of Igbo proverbs to the author, or even making a compendium of their own. This book includes the proverb: Nwa atuuruilu, kowaara, ego ejiluonne ya furuohia. I suspect that originally, in our culture, though the men were supposed to be the primary users of proverbs, it was the women who transferred knowledge of these cryptic adult proverbs to the younger generation.
Loolo Florence Chinyere Duru has acquitted her responsibility most admirably as a wise Igbo mother should. I go further to urge her to consider publishing a companion audio version of these Igbo proverbs and their meanings in English, for the benefit of many would-be users, young and old, who have not acquired the facility of reading Igbo well, especially when other dialects are involved.
This Compendium is a work of pure love for her native Igbo language and culture for which our author deserves our congratulations and our generous patronage”.
Beautifully produced with a remarkable, indeed unique, embossed Nsibidi- themed cover design, and laced with illustrations, the publishers must be commended for an aesthetically alluring, error-free package that will enhance the attraction to this invaluable compendium as a collector’s item. Statesmen, leaders, citizens, scholars and institutions must add this compendium to their libraries, if they wish to be considered authoritative and up to date on the traditions of one of the world’s most vibrant, vivacious, visionary, inimitable and enterprising people – Nd’ Igbo. Ndewo.
-Prof Echeruo writes from the US
At Hebrew University, the narratives in Arabic and Hebrew language textbooks glorify Zionism and blur out any sign of the occupation. The next step? Using force against Palestinian students who dare to protest that very narrative. Fadi Asleh (Translated from Hebrew by Ofer Neiman) Israeli Independence Day is also Palestinian Nakba Day. This is one of those days that is charged with memories, pain, political views, identities, etc. The very choice of name for this day reveals one’s culture, identity and distinct political standing. And language is a front no less important (or violent) than other fronts. According to the late French-Algerian scholar Mohammed Arkoun, it is the interaction between language, history and thought which constructs the world around us. The interaction between thought and history creates language, language and thought are at the core of history, and history and language create thought. Language is important also because it is a tool of enforcement, control and repression in the Foucauldian sense of the word. The study of language is therefore an important tool at the hands of states and their institutions, to enhance their involvement and control. It allows for the instillment of certain contents and narratives, which gradually acquire a “normal” and “neutral” image in one’s consciousness. As time goes by, this consciousness brings about actions to which language serves as key and motive. It is therefore important to examine the way in which language is taught. A critical comparative reading of textbooks for the teaching of Hebrew and Arabic at the Hebrew University would grant us a deeper understanding of what goes on within the academic consciousness in Israel. Right-wing students demonstrate in support Operation Cast Lead at Hebrew University, Dec. 29, 2008. (photo: Activestills.org) A short glimpse of the Hebrew language textbooks suffices for an understanding of their position within the Zionist discourse, as well as the university’s perception – a perception which is an inseparable part of the ideological conflict and the Zionist colonial discourse. Through the contents of the books, the university serves as a Zionist missionary for students of the Hebrew language – and at the Hebrew University these are primarily Arabs from East Jerusalem who did not learn Hebrew in school. Alongside this, the Arabic language textbook destroys the Palestinian narrative for the students – be it through the denial of this narrative, through a choice to ignore it altogether or through rendering it crazy. Everything is done gradually: at the beginners’ level, only a small portion of the content is related to Zionism, lauding it. In the advanced textbooks, however, nearly all of the content is based on the very core of Zionist thought. For example, the narrative which is manifested in “Kmo Kelim Shluvim” (“Like Communicating Vessels”), an advanced Hebrew language textbook by Varda Yishai and Amitai Bar Kol, is so demonstrably Zionist that one cannot help wondering whether it is a Hebrew language textbook or a political science textbook. A random skimming of the headlines suffices: “Why live in Israel in spite of everything?”; “Who is an Israeli?”; “Israeli Judaism”; “Who is a Jew?”; “Letters from David Ben Gurion”; “What are Judaism and Humanism?”; “The Bus 300 affair”; “Joseph and his Brothers”; and “Islam’s View of Politics, Religion and State.” The content carries a Zionist orientation on the political, sociological economic and theological level, which bear an almost one to one resemblance to Shelach lessons in schools (Shela”ch is a Hebrew acronym for a department in the Ministry of Education aimed at instilling a Zionist perspective in youths, primarily through field trips). In contrast, those who learn the Arabic language do not enjoy analogous knowledge. On the contrary, the contents of Arabic language textbooks at the Hebrew University are, as a rule, shallow and negative. For example, part A of “Elements of Literary Arabic” by Tikvah Hasson, presents numerous excerpts from Arabic newspapers such as A-Dustur, A-Thawra, Al-Quds, A-Rai and others, circulated in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, etc. These excerpts amount to no more than letters exchanged between family members, along with out-of-touch articles showing how swell everything is supposed to be and how happy everyone is. For example, one of the articles cites Hassan Barakat, a man from Hebron “whose father is conservative and whose mother is Bedouin. He’s not working but he’s happy with his life.” In another excerpt, a letter written by Bassam Anton to his father is cited, in which he tells his father how beautiful life in Jerusalem is, describing the streets and the holy sites. Not a single word about the daily riots at the entrance to those holy sites, or Israeli brutality on the streets.
George Orwell appears to have gotten half the future right in 1984. The world of Big Brother aptly foretells the surveillance state that is watching all of us today. But Orwell's fears about Newspeak, that a totalitarian society could limit human thought by restricting language, failed to take into account the irresistible processes of subversion and change in language. (Or the prevalence of irony. As they used to sum up the essence of the Soviet system, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.") Orwell's Newspeak is a reflection of Whorfianism, after Benjamin Whorf, the belief that language expresses, even determines, the culture of the people who speak it. The popularization of this idea in journalism is something that John H. McWhorter sets out to demolish in The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $19.95). Mr. McWhorter, a distinguished linguist and the author of The Power of Babel and What Language Is, does not deny that language and culture reflect back on each other, but he is impatient with the belief that particular languages embody particular worldviews. He questions any linkage between language and culture "in which grammatical features and vocabulary configurations no native speaker would consider at all remarkable purportedly condition a way of processing life." You may have seen a common example of this kind of thinking, that a given language has no word for x and therefore has no concept of x, can't express x. No, Mr. McWhorter argues, linguistics has ample evidence that "in any language, one can, if necessary, say anything.") (English used to have thou and you but now resorts to only you for both singular and plural. Should we conclude that English speakers have lost the ability to determine whether they are speaking to one person or several?) Language, he argues, with examples from a rich sampling of the planet's six thousand varieties, is not a cultural tool, but "an accretion of random habits." It does not "saddle speakers with blinders preventing them from perceiving what their vocabularies and grammars happen not to call attention to." It does not shape thought, and cultural patterns do not shape how language is structured. "Rather, the way a language is structured is a fortuitously ingrown capacity. It is a conglomeration of densely interacting subsystems, wielded at great speed below the level of consciousness, endlessly morphing into new sounds and structures due to wear and tear and accreted misinterpretations, such that one day what was once Latin is now French and Portuguese."
Read more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-language-isnt-determinist-20140522,0,5935093.story#ixzz32bQwkVgM
The mechanism of language culture is the construction, arrangement and action by which a result is produced; a philosophy that regards the phenomena of life as the means adopted unconsciously towards a subconscious end in culture.
Language is a vehicle of culture, expands and makes known the manner of expressing thought, feeling, speech, artificial system of signs and symbols with rules for forming intelligible communications.
Culture is transmitted from one generation to other generation through language. It moves and promotes culture.
Language is a genetically determined mechanism and core of culture, the social existence holding people together, housing them in art, music or functions of the same universal mechanism of expression.
Language stores up information as the way cells store up energy; deposited all it has built up, and accommodated in the way of mental, memories resources of the sacred realities and material tools; therefore, for a culture to be known and understood its language must be originally known and able to reflect all the realities as it really is.
Nowadays, language can be documented, and written for clarification. The levels of classification are usually orthographic, nasal, letter combination and word combination systems.
The English Language is spoken by about four hundred millions people in the World. Most of the Peoples of Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand speak English as a first language.
English is also spoken in Africa, India and other parts of Asia.Many people who speak other Languages Learn English as a second language. After Chinese, English is spoken by most people than any other Language.
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