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An Indian scholar in Ethiopia has so far published over a dozen books specially designed for foreigners to learn Ethiopia's languages, particularly Amharic. His story reads like a journey in reverse to the one made centuries earlier by the Siddis - Indians of East African descent brought to India mostly as slaves, who live mostly in Gujarat and have embraced the local language and culture. Apart from 'Amharic for Foreigners', K. Sekhar from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, who teaches business management at Mizan Tepi University in southwestern Ethiopia, has also written language primers in Tigrigna, Oromifa, Nuer, Kafi Noono and Hadiya. The last two are the first to be written by an expatriate. "Languages have a trait of similarity at some point and finding out these traits is the way to understanding them," Sekhar, a self-thought linguist and lexicographer, told IANS in an interview. "The similarities I feel between the two countries (Ethiopia and India) are also important and made things easier for me", he said.
FOR modernising African languages and developing new terms in technical subjects like science, translation is one of the tools emphasised by researchers, such as Madiba (2001). I agree that translation is a valuable tool to use, but it is only possible to a certain extent, because it does not allow all necessary concepts to be translated from one language into another language by means of single terms. The link between language and culture is complex. One can express any thought or feeling in any language, but the cultural overtones and resonances differ from group to group. The difference occurs because what is true in one culture is not the same in another culture, and what is considered valid in one culture might not be valid in another (Gee, 2003).
FOR modernising African languages and developing new terms in technical subjects like science, translation is one of the tools emphasised by researchers, such as Madiba (2001). I agree that translation is a valuable tool to use, but it is only possible to a certain extent, because it does not allow all necessary concepts to be translated from one language into another language by means of single terms. The link between language and culture is complex. One can express any thought or feeling in any language, but the cultural overtones and resonances differ from group to group. The difference occurs because what is true in one culture is not the same in another culture, and what is considered valid in one culture might not be valid in another (Gee, 2003). This includes the way individual ethnic groups do things, and the way each cultural group understands the world. Thus, translation is not workable in every situation, more especially in the lower primary phase, where teachers deal with small children who are still in the early stage of their language acquisition. Some translations might mislead because they will not accommodate all the necessary analogous ‘contextual’ realities, due to cultural differences. One good example of the problems observed relates to colours, due to the fact that the colour spectrum is segmented differently in the English language and indigenous languages like Rukwangali for example. The conceptual spaces occupied by each ‘colour’ in each of the languages do not always coincide. Certain colours in English might differ from the ‘same’ colours in Rukwangali, so it must not be taken for granted to be the same in both languages. The colour of blood is red and it applies in English, as well as in Rukwangali. At the same time red is used in many cases for various reasons e.g. in English, the colour of ripe fruit such as papayas or lemons is refered to as yellow or orange, while in Rukwangali the same colour is considered red. In this case papayas or lemons are not actually red, but are considered red to indicate that they are ripe. Also, domestic animals like cattle(red cow, red bull) are categorised in three main colours, black, white and red. These will make brown cattle to be considered red. In one word ripe fruit andbrown cattle fall under the red colour scheme in the Rukwangali language. Learners need this kind of conceptual understanding to make things meaningful in their mother tongue for social communication purposes. The explanation given above would enable learners to differentiate colours, and to know when to use which colour and when to avoid it. Against this background teachers are advised to ‘teach outside the box’ as it were. Therefore, I concur with the suggestion for the new curriculum for schools in Namibia to strengthen and prolong mother tongue instruction at an early age insofar as teaching and learning is concerned for the following reasons. It will allow learners to establish a solid foundation in their language acquisition
Every South African has the right to be educated in their mother tongue. Indigenous languages are recognised in the Constitution and laws as is the right to live free from discrimination on the grounds of language. Unesco says people also have the right to establish and have access to media in indigenous languages. When asked if he thought African languages were facing extinction Professor Kaschula said: “In general terms they are not facing extinction. Millions of people are using African languages in various forums – one just has to check social networks.” “There are of course languages that are dying and that are being swallowed up by other bigger African languages as well as the non-indigenous colonial languages. But as long as people speak languages they will not die.” UmXhosa Ikroti LakwaXhosa has written a book entirely in IsiXhosa called Isihobe Isidlo Somphefumlo. The book is also available in an audio disc. “The book is targeted at the youth, I want reading to be exciting, I want the reader to visualise what I’m saying – create a theatre of the mind.”
With all this talk about immortality splattered across the news and the unique individuals possessing rare disorders which disallow them to age, it brings the topic of eternal life to the forefront of worldwide conversation and debate. To many, immortality and eternal life sound like a tortuous idea of life-extension with no known escape, for others – it answers the long held belief in something thought possible in the quiet spaces of the mind, yet never vocalized for fear of ridicule. There is one factor that may be crucial in the discussion of eternal life and longevity- and that is the way we speak. Our languaging may contribute to the experience of an immortal existence based on the premise of quantum and meta-physics. It is becoming more and more understood how the words we use affect us. By constantly repeating negative ideas and beliefs, we are suggesting the very things -we do not wish to experience- to our cells and subconscious mind, no doubt perpetuating our fears. Those suffering from illnesses such as cancer and other degenerative dis-eases, have shown marketed improvement and even miraculous healing by changing their mental chatter to positive affirmations and nourishing words. World famous author Louise Hay healed herself from cancer by using positive affirmations as a main tool, and has since helped thousands of others with a multitude of ailments to do the same. Dr. Emoto from Japan has documented how speaking positive words such as ‘joy’, ‘love’,’ peace’ and ‘kindness’ to water, the molecules themselves change from distortion to order. So what about immortality? Is death the same thing as a disease that needs curing? Some would argue that death is a natural part of the life cycle; just as the seasons change, so we too must be birthed, mature, age and die. But is this really true? There are places on the planet such as Hawaii – often referred to as paradise – where the seasons do not change…life goes on blossoming in an endless procession of beauty, fragrance and warmth. Can that be true for us as well? It sounds much like the Christian Garden of Eden, before the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ existed. Could the ‘evil’ referred to be knowledge of decay and death? Are we really meant to ‘break-down’ and loose our faculties as so many people do? If we take a look at the common language we hear and share not just in one culture, but largely throughout the world, most people speak of aging and death as though they are natural. But what if we didn’t? How many times have you heard an older person say ‘just wait until you’re my age’ or ‘first your sight goes, then your hearing’ ? Advertisements and marketing for the senior population are all geared toward supporting a body that decays and loses functions. People have come to expect it from aging. You never hear ads about living forever, keeping your youth or hitting a new peak of health beyond age 70. Why not? Are we so conditioned to believe in death and decay that we think it wrong and useless to promote health and life-extension beyond a certain point? What if we began to change our language around age and started to use words and ideas which could contribute to an attitude that included immortal existence as a possibility? What would that sound like?
I recently had the privilege of interpreting for Chef Kurt Ramborger on the Food Network show Chopped. Every time I interpret for someone so talented and dedicated to pursuing their dreams, my own passion is reignited. My clients inspire me to do the best job I can do, and remind me why I became an ASL interpreter in the first place. I feel blessed with the perspective I gained growing up in a deaf family. I’ve never thought of deafness as a disability and, through my interpreting work, I have been able to expose many hearing individuals to the Deaf Culture that I know and love. Deaf people tell jokes, have parties, go to concerts, drive cars, work jobs, and watch TV. They attend classes, and go out to eat, and communicate on the phone (using a video phone or relay). As an interpreter, it’s interesting to note how many hearing people simply assume deaf people cannot enjoy things. That notion couldn’t be more misguided! As I. King Jordan famously said “Deaf people can do anything hearing people can do, except hear.”
Linguist, with interest in the relationship between Language, Thought and Culture, the way Language creates meaning (syntax, semantics and pragmatics), logic, cognitive science and philosophy.
Johannesburg - ‘Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.” If these words by US writer Rita Mae Brown are true, what do they mean for the 80 percent of South Africans who have vernacular languages as their mother tongue? It’s a fact that the usage and potency of the country’s vernacular languages is diminishing. Research conducted by the Department of Basic Education in 2007 showed close to 80 percent of children were taught in English or Afrikaans. By law, pupils must be taught in their mother tongue and a first additional language, while a second additional language is optional. When registering their children, parents must indicate in which language they want them to be taught. According to the South African Schools Act, it’s the responsibility of the school governing body (SGB) to develop the school’s language policy. Schools are supposed to be multilingual. The fact that a majority of children are taught in English despite it not being their home language is attributed to the fact that black parents choose it as it’s an international language and they feel it will enable their children to succeed in higher education and in the workplace. The fact that vernacular languages were previously marginalised and not developed in the academic sector as English and Afrikaans were also played a role in this. Developments in the basic and higher education sector are intent on changing this. When delivering the basic education budget vote two weeks ago, Minister Angie Motshekga announced that “in 2014, a new policy will come into effect mandating the learning of an African language in all schools”. Questions to the department’s spokesman, Panyaza Lesufi, and Motshekga’s spokeswoman, Hope Mokgatlhe, on whether the department had enough vernacular language teachers to roll this out on a national scale, among others, were not answered. SGB associations, however, whose responsibility it is to develop school language policies, didn’t hold back in expressing their views.
APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONInformation publiée le vendredi 10 mai 2013 par Matthieu Vernet (source : Katrien Lievois) Date limite : 15 octobre 2013
Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (LANS – TTS) is the journal of the Department of Translators and Interpreters, Artesis University College Antwerp. It is a peer-reviewed, annual publication devoted to the study of language, translation and culture, with a special focus on translation in its many oral and written manifestations. The journal is not bound to any particular school of thought or academic group. Editorial Board Fabio Alves Federal University of Minas GeraisCecilia Alvstad University of OsloPhiliep Bossier University of GroningenLouise Brunette Université du Québec en OutaouaisWalter Daelemans University of AntwerpJorge Diaz Cintas Imperial College LondonGéraldine De Visscher (editorial secretary) Artesis University CollegeLieven D'Hulst Catholic University of LeuvenMarco A. Fiola Ryerson UniversitySandra Hale The University of New South WalesChris Hutchison Kingston UniversityKatrien Lievois (chief editor) Artesis University CollegeIlse Logie University of GhentJeremy Munday University of LeedsAline Remael (public relations) Artesis University CollegeIsabelle Robert (proofreader French) Artesis University CollegeIris Schrijver (review editor) Artesis University CollegeJimmy Ureel (rating & advertising – proofreader English) Artesis University CollegeDirk Van Hulle University of Antwerp Proposals for thematic issues for review by the journal’s editorial board Proposals for thematic issues Guest editors submit proposals for thematic issues to the journal’s editorial board. Proposals include the names of the guest editors, a proposal title and a short summary (between 500 and 1,000 words) with a presentation of the theme proposed. Proposal reviews for thematic issues The editorial board examines proposals based on their originality and on thematic (non-)redundancy with former thematic issues (http://www.lans-tts.be/FormerIssues.htm). A proposal generally consists of a general description of the theme proposed, followed by more specific research topics and/or suggestions for research questions. Please do not provide an exhaustive list of research questions. Proposals for thematic issues are examined at the annual meeting of the editorial board, which takes place annually in November. The editorial board may accept the proposal, reject it, postpone it or ask guest editors for modifications. Deadlines for 2013 and 2014 Submission of a proposal for a thematic issue: 15 October 2013Acceptance of the submitted proposal for a thematic issue: 1 December 2013First call for papers: 1 February 2014Submission of proposals for papers: 1 May 2014 (title and abstract of approx. 300 words, references not included)If necessary, second call for papers : 1 June 2014Acceptance of the submitted proposal: 1 July 2014. The proposals for papers will be reviewed by guest editors, the editorial board and the journal’s chief editor. Upon acceptance, authors will receive a stylesheet as well as a template for their texts.Submission of papers: 1 February 2015 (maximum 38,000 characters, including references, notes and spaces). Papers will be double-blind peer reviewed between 1 February and 1 April 2015.Acceptance of papers: 1 April 2015Submission of the final versions: 1 September 2015. Guest editors will accept the final versions of the papers after they have proofread them one final time for form and contents (in accordance with the stylesheet, which can be found online at www.lans-tts.be).The editorial work takes place between 1 September and 1 November 2015. The editorial board takes care of the final editing work, adding the review articles (Review editor: Iris Schrijver) and producing the final PDF file.Publication: in the course of December 2015 Double-blind peer review process Guest editors must make sure that the papers are double-blind peer reviewed. Reviewers are selected from a list of experts made available by the journal. Guest editors may suggest additional experts for the reviewing process. Reviewers may comment on papers by using the referee form and/or by adding their comments in the papers themselves. Guest editors are invited to write summaries of evaluations and/or suggestions and mail them to the authors before 1 April 2014. If need be, authors will be invited to take these suggestions into account in final versions. The final versions will be reviewed only by guest editors, if necessary with the support of the journal’s editorial board. Languages English, French, German and Spanish Contact Please send proposals for thematic issues or any question to lans.tts@gmail.com.
By perpetuating the use of a single cultural marker to create an hierarchy of Africanness, aren't we simply deploying the same tools colonizers used to divide and conquer? Aren't we essentially continuing the work the British Empire started? Last year, I attended a conference that brought together African thought leaders. In a session about African identity, we explored the question of whether one could claim to be African without being fluent in any African languages. A passionate, and near disruptive debate ensued almost instantly. What Language Do You Speak? (aka Do You Speak "Us"?)
I've had this conversation about language and identity time and again with Africans I meet on my travels. My afropolitan (i.e. world citizen) accent throws them off -- a mix of American, Nigerian, and what's often mistaken for British diction, simply because I enunciate my Ts. (Perhaps it's the remnants of attending a British-run primary school; not likely though.) Bread-breaking usually comes to a halt until the matter of my accent (origin) is cleared up. They simply must know which language I speak so that they can place me in one of two boxes: one of us, or one of them. When I tell the cultural gatekeepers that I'm from Nigeria, and my accent is the result of living in the states for the past 12 years, they're still not satisfied. "Are you sure you weren't just born there?" they ask, "You don't sound like you grew up in Nigeria." I usually respond by asking them what a Nigerian who grew up in Nigeria sounds like, then hear some variation of "Like the people inNollywood movies." And when I tell them, I'm sorry to disappoint, I'm not an actress but an activist, I'm Nigerian through and through -- I just went to the states for university, they deliver the kicker, "Well, prove it. What language do you speak?" The minute I respond with English ("Oh..."), it's all downhill from there. To Speak or Not to Speak: Assimilation vs. Accents
From tensions in Spain over mandating Spanish (versus indigenous languages like Catalan) to U.S. debates over bilingual education and attempts to ban speaking Spanish at school, the issue of language is a sore spot for many communities. Such language restrictions are often seen as direct attacks on minority cultures, especially for black immigrants who struggle to affirm their cultural heritage in the absence of their native language. Yet, ironically, immigrant parents in the U.S. are less likely to teach their children their native languages, for the purpose -- or rather, the sake -- of easing their assimilation into English-speaking culture. The latter scenario resonates deeply with me. I grew up with a father who wasn't fluent in his mother tongue, Agbor (a region-specific dialect of Ika), because his father had outlawed the language being spoken in the house. My grandfather -- who worked as a civil servant during Nigeria's colonial era -- had valid reasons for doing so. In those days, speaking "proper" English meant you got the "good jobs," which meant increased access to resources, and an improved livelihood for one's family. Sadly, even though my father openly resents never having learned his family's language, his wife -- my mother -- refused to teach me her native tongue, Igbo, for a similar reason. Colonialism did a number on Nigeria's education system; as I was growing up, public schools were plagued with lack of resources, frequent strikes, cult violence, sexual harassment, and prostitution. Hence, my mother's desire to see me succeed meant equipping me with tools to ensure I could thrive outside of the country I called my home. For instance, I would attend an international British-run private school, where white teachers would single out the only other black kid in the class for not pronouncing "stomach" correctly ( "stuh-muck", not "stoh-mack" apparently); only an American or British university would do; I would not learn my native tongue until I spoke English "perfectly" and no longer risked picking up a "bad, Nigerian accent" that would make it harder for me "over there."
"Indigenous languages safeguard our stories in their hidden meanings and subtext, so much so that the mis-translation of a single word can create a completely different interpretation of history as we know it, and we’d literally lose ourselves. Perhaps that’s why we stubbornly stick to fluency in “the mother tongue” as the yardstick for “Africanness,” “our-ness,” “us-ness.” Perhaps the tune about real Africans being able to speak their mother tongues is only sung in protest against the hegemony of our colonizers’ languages. But is spiting them reason enough to spite each other? By perpetuating the use of a single cultural marker to create a hierarchy of Africanness, aren’t we simply deploying the same tools colonizers used to divide and conquer? Aren’t we essentially continuing the work the British Empire started? We can do better. There are a myriad of other identity markers that reveal the extent of both our sameness and uniqueness and make up the diverse African cultures that span the globe. Africa is complex – Africans, even more so. Let’s not trade in our shared heritage for the exclusivity of an unjust social hierarchy. Let’s not, as our colonizers did, draw borders around poorly constructed monoliths. Our just protest for an Africa with linguistic agency must not turn us into the same masters of imperialist dogma we’re still yet to hold accountable." http://africanarguments.org/2013/04/08/what-kind-of-african-doesn%E2%80%99t-speak-any-african-languages-me/
W hen you put a lot of thought into the costumes, weaponry, and hair styles of your invented culture, you had better give it a proper language too. That way motivated fans — and there will be fans this motivated — can figure out the system to it and even learn to speak it themselves. The producers of Game of Thrones did the smart thing when they hired language creator David Peterson to work out realistic languages for the show. This season fans will be getting to know two new languages, High and Low Valyrian. But before you start trying to tackle those, here are seven cool facts about the language from the first two seasons, Dothraki. 1. Peterson got the job to create Dothraki by winning a contest among language inventors.
The Language Creation Society was founded in 2007 as an organization where people who invent languages as an artistic and intellectual hobby (known as "conlangers" from "constructed language") could share their work and promote their craft. When producers approached them asking for help creating Dothraki, the society held an internal contest and selected Peterson's 180-page proposal (along with dictionary and audio files) to present to the producers, who hired him. http://theweek.com/article/index/242124/7-fun-facts-about-thenbspdothraki-language-fromnbspgame-of-thrones
Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English interior design illustrated. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W interior design illustrated. Jennings interior design illustrated. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the mans' theets of his thought interior design illustrated. A separate volume will consist of his book The Arcades Project, the magnum opus of his Paris years. The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal critic of German literature." But the scene as he found it was dominated by "talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a terrorist campaign would I suffice" to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword. Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany's most influential journals. The volume includes a number of his most important works, including "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," "Goethe's Elective Affinities," "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "The Task of the Translator," and "One-Way Street." He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.
Some people insist that "language is but a tool for communication". Even intelligent people say so. My answer to this is generally simple: "Yes, I agree that there are people for whom languages are but a simple tool. Likewise, there are people, for whom women are but a tool for childbearing." Think simple! Do your job well! What else is there to do in a technologically intricate and spiritually neolithic era such as ours. This is one reason why I dislike working for translation companies who deal with "localizations" and "technical translations". Why, Google Translate is verily a tool and a mighty one for such translators. The natural follow-up of this "toolist" thinking is "language is a function of the brain for making money". And we translators sell our brains and precious time not for creating artefacts of culture, but for localizing other people's means of money-making. Cynical, isn't it? No? Well, then why do you consider the thought of women being tools of genetic translations as cynical? Matter of nature, matter of course! People are highly illogical andinconsistent in their "promotion" of ideas. Laws punish severerly murderers of children, but neglect industrial murderers of Nature which in turn kills millions of children. They prosecute kidnappers of children, but overlook cigarette kidnappers of children's health! There is a world of toolism and duplicity for a simple quest for happiness for you!
Guardian News ACCORDING to Crystal Davies, a language conservationist “Languages often hold the only record of a people’s history, including their songs, stories, and ancient traditions. In particular, many indigenous cultures contain a wealth of information about the local environment and its floral and faunal resources, based upon thousands of years of close interaction, experience, and problem-solving. With the extinction of a language, therefore, mankind also loses access to local understanding of plants, animals, and ecosystems, some of which have important medicinal value, and many of which remain undocumented by science. Thus, the survival of threatened languages, and the indigenous knowledge contained within, is an important aspect of maintaining biological diversity.” As a teacher in a school, in Lagos Nigeria, I once asked my class if anyone could name the various ethnic groups that make up Nigeria. James Green stood up before anyone could beat him to it. And with a sense of pride, he reeled out “Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba”. He was greeted with cheers from his mates. And with a sense of fulfillment, he sat. When I asked which of those tribes he belonged, he thought for a while, rolled his eyes up and down, and replied with a tone of defeat “I don’t know sir”. How sad. James belonged to the Okrika ethnic group in Rivers State, sadly enough, he didn’t even know this. He only understands and speaks English as his mother tongue, even his name ‘James Green’, contributed in further distancing his little mind from his cultural identity; his parents ofcourse failed to transmit to him, a clear cultural and linguistic identity, which is one of the fastest ways to kill a culture. In this way, Nigeria has lost a good number of her indigenous languages, and many more, according to the National Geographic Society, are on the brink of disappearance.
When you start an interpreting course one of the first things you that may strike you is how the language you thought you knew just fades away. Interpreting is an extremely complex exercise and your language skills have to be extremely solid. Whether we grew up bilingually or learnt languages later, most of us who are (or were) accepted into an interpreting program probably has the equivalent to a C2 level (mother tongue or near-native level according to the Council of Europe). But let’s face it, when we embark on our first consecutive – it feels like we just learnt our first words in that language. So, although you are a skilled linguist, you will have to work on enhancing your language skills, and probably also the elusive concept of ‘culture générale’. But how do you do it? Since we’re not C3PO we cannot just add another hard drive or software, we just have to do it the good old way. And you probably already know it, but here’s a repetition.
Have you ever wondered why the British spell “color” with a “u” and Americans don’t? Or why the British spell “theater” with an “re” at the end and Americans spell it with an “er” at the end? We all know that these spelling differences exist, but not everyone knows why they exist. Today, we’re going to find out! It turns out that Noah Webster of Webster’s dictionary fame is behind many, but not all, of the spelling differences between British and American English, and his reasons for making the changes were as much political and philosophical as linguistic. I was inspired to do this podcast by a book I just finished, called The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall. I know many of you reading are not Americans, but I hope you will indulge me and end up finding this story as interesting as I do. Early America Noah Webster lived smack in the middle of the time when Americans were still trying to form a country and figure out who they were. To give you some perspective, the United States Constitution was ratified between the time Webster published his first spelling book and when he started working on his famous dictionary. Americans were eager to break with Britain as fully as possible and weren’t even sure that English should be the primary language. Nearly 10% of the population spoke German, so some people suggested German should be our language. Others proposed Hebrew, and others thought we should call our language Columbian. “Zee” Versus “Zed” Noah Webster's influence is why Americans call the final letter "zee" instead of "zed."
Webster undertook his first big project--an American spelling book to replace the British book schools were then using--in part, to settle the matter and convince people that our language should be English, but American English. It was in this book that he took small steps to begin creating American spellings. It was also in the speller that he taught Americans to pronounce the name of the final letter of the alphabet as “zee” instead of “zed” as the British do.
A few milestones in the short but storied history of machine translation: in 1939, Bell Labs presented the first speech synethesizing device, the Voder, at the World's Fair in New York. In 1978, the first spoken words were transmitted across the Internet. June 2012 saw the release of VoiceTra4U-M, an iPhone app developed by the global Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium (U-STAR) which enables voice translation of 13 different languages. Today's translation machines, both written and spoken, "are extremely clever and give us a lot reasons for thought about what language is and how we may understand language better, but the way they work bears little resemblance, in fact, no resemblance at all to the way human beings both speak," says David Bellos, a translator and director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. Watch the interview: Computers decode and reproduce spoken human language in much the same way they translate written language -- by effectively transcribing the speech in the source language into text and putting it through a translation device which "sounds out" the text, "just like your telephone answering device does." (This feature is used and will, says Bellos, always be used in machines that simulate speech translation.) Software translation programs like Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's are essentially statistical engines. Programmers use data to train their algorithms on human-translated parallel texts so that they automatically "learn" how to translate. Over the years, the technology has become more sophisticated, but speaking to an automated voice on the other end of the line is still an exercise in frustration. The results of programs like Google Translate are notoriously comical. Here, for instance, is Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliliquy translated from the original English to Chinese, back to English again via Google Translate: Or not, this is a problem:
Whether this is a noble mind suffer
Outrageous slings and arrows of Fortune
Or take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And opposing the closure, after they die, to sleep
A sleep to say we end
The heart of pain, as well as countless other natural shocks
This flesh is heir to it? As Phil Blunsom, a researcher at Oxford University, told the BBC, "the time when a computer can match the interpretive skills of a professional is 'still a long way off.'" What's the Significance? The limitations of machine translation are indicative of the broader historical limitations of symbolic A.I. Early researchers regarded both the human brain and human language as systems of explicit rules which could be pinned down, catalogued, and unlocked -- but despite a few breakthroughs in the field, we've still not come close to building a brain or decoding the nuances of language. Perhaps the problem is more than technological. Perhaps it is unsolvable. Why? "You possess a skill that hardly any computer programme does," explains the author of a 2009 paper from the University of Copenhagen. In studies, people are able to pick up on subtle distinctions in the meanings of words that computer systems always miss, for example: (1.1) (a) The command interface defines a single method called “execute” that is invoked by the
internal CommandExecutor when a command is to be executed. (b) An Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Rahimian, called today for the leaders of Iran’s
opposition Green Movement to be executed. Google Translate and the automated phone operator fall flat when they try to understand passages that contain complexity and variation -- abstract ideas, shifts in tone, words that mean more than one thing. That's why Bellos believes machine translation will always require the existence of human translators. Still, he says, machine translation has great potential to expand our sense of the possibilities of communications, as civilization grows increasingly global. "The way airplanes fly resembles not at all the way birds fly. It doesn’t have to. What you want is the flight." The overall picture is this. The more machine translation there is the more translation will happen, the more people will expect to be able to communicate with other folk and the more they will realize that although machines can clear the ground the actual translation has to be done by somebody because language is human behavior. It’s machine simulated, but they’re not doing anything like what a human translator is doing. Image courtesy of Shutterstock. Previous Post
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How do you translate a lie? Like Reply
2 hours ago 1 Like HudsonPop Thinker Specializing in Strategy, Systems Architecture & Innovation, Business Troubleshooting and Brainstorming, Computational Linguistics and Intelligence.
Clearly what is needed is software that can naturally perform Language Comprehension. The common place word-for-word transposition (statistical) approach is laughable and will only ever fail. Although it was a little unfair giving text from Shakespeare to Google Translate since nobody speaks as they did 400 years ago. Always good for a laugh though. Which I think reinforces my first point, that the statistical approach just doesn't work well enough. To approach a solution, developers need to know a couple of things: 1) Robotics is a silly wasteful way to approach the development of intelligent entities. 2) You don't need super powerful computers to perform the computations needed to achieve comprehension. What we've got right now is more than enough. As for the question of ambiguity, and this is a tough one for humans to accept, - deal with it. It goes with the intelligence territory. Just as physics has to deal with spooky quantum mechanics, so humans trying to get by in the world have to deal with ambiguity. This means that when you buy your super-duper language comprehending doo-dah it will still suffer the same issues that any human would when it comes to trying to understand what... show more
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15 hours ago jbucher
What has become clear to me after a career of teaching medical transcription and transcribing surgical procedures is that this field is not the ideal one for voice recognition software. I am bothered that there is not more concern with the machine bungling such phrases as "a mass the size of an orange" (the final copy reading, "the size of an RN).
And yes, this copy passed through the editor. I believe there is a place for VRS in the workplace, but only if it is accurate. We are still human beings with human needs. Like Reply
21 hours ago 1 Like Megan EricksonPop Thinker Megan Erickson is Associate Editor at Big Think, and has worked as a tutor and teacher at several NYC public schools.
Good point--computers are better at catching technical errors, whereas human beings are better suited to interpretation. Like Reply
0 minutes ago in reply to jbucher Patrick ElliottPop Thinker
Cyc. There have been projects, like this, which use statistical interpretations, and the ability to process through new words, and old, to find contextual, and other connections. The problem with them end up being a) storage, b) lookup, and c) processing speed. Due to the fact that the means by which words are stored is based on letters, and do use lookups like that, all of these become a problem. In fact, Cyc can be used as OpenCyc, to build a bot, but it a) doesn't learn like the original, b) the data system is a mess to understand, and c) you have to practically program the things understanding of the language from near scratch, due to it not having a way to learn directly, with the result that you might as well be using an Alice bot. It "should" be smarter than that, by a wide margin, but unless you have 5 years to teach it, it never will be, and by the time it is.. it will become unwieldy, slow, and unstable. Maybe what needs to be done is working on things from the other angle - Have the machine process words as sound, which can... show more
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1 day ago marlem388Pop Thinker
Computer decoding could develop a database to categorize what words in a particular context refer to--animal, vegetable, mineral, etc.
But this strategy probably would work only in translating texts that are mainly pragmatic and do not rely on metaphors to highlight their points.
I see a basic difficulty in translating language and phrases that have multiple meanings (ambivalent or multivalenced words), such as--
"He ratted to the company chair";
"She's fit as a fiddle."
Decoding would also have to find a way to include word play like puns, slang, and wit.
Idiomatic forms of language don't yield well to mechanical forms of translation. Like Reply
1 day ago 1 Like Mr. Zychowski I am the light!
We as humans no longer are able to make machines on our own. Machines are already made by machines, it is not unreasonable to think that a master machine will start coding machines as well. Once that happens the singularity will take over and artificial intelligence will take over the planet. The only thing we need to ponder is weather it will be a good assimilation or bad. Similar to a Start Trek computer or a Terminator. Perhaps it will be both with integration into the biological, some sort of cyborg. These might be the last generations of homo sapiens as we know them. I can't wait to see how it will turn out. Like Reply
1 day ago Ken Kendrick
I mean to say that a machine cannot be entitled with the level of capability measured from how he performs with the code given. Like Reply
1 day ago Ken Kendrick
The capabilities of machines depend on the capabilities of humans to program. Machines can work better than humans with better code. Like Reply
1 day ago ReptillianPop Thinker
Bah to the idea that translation always will require a human. As if there were something magical, or spiritual, or non mechanical in our use of language. The problems and obstacles faced aren't fundamental, it's simply a matter of increasingly complex programming and processing power. Look at the example given with the word 'execute'. The difference in meaning is in what the word is referring to in each sentence. 'Execute' means something different when it is applied to a person instead of an object like a computer program. Perhaps a program which examines the subject, object, and verb in each sentence and classifies subjects and objects as "person, place, or thing" and verbs as "action, linking, or auxilary" would have more luck interpreting and translating. You could rank words in the sentence on importance, then compare to words in the other language. The alternative is to create a database of human translated phrases, then once an exhaustive database is created; the machine can choose the appropriate translation from the list. That wouldn't be as hard as one might think. Especially since most humans may know thousands of words and phrases, but only use a fraction of them regularly. For the... show more
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I must admit, somewhat shamefully, that in the past I have been woefully mistaken about diversity in the United States. What I pictured in my mind was a more or less homogeneous sea of blonde-haired, fair-skinned people. Later, I realized that darker-skinned people also called it home. I had, of course, also seen some other people in movies – people with long braided hair, wearing colorful feathered headpieces. I knew these people as Red Indians (which I later realized was politically incorrect – at that time I thought it rather odd, since these Red Indians looked neither red nor Indian) and never gave a thought to who they really were or what became of them. To my credit, I was only a child and grew up on the other side of the world much before Facebook and Google were born. Coming from a part of the world where mono-ethnicity is the norm, I can understand why we thought that other countries were the same. We all looked more or less alike, so why should things be different elsewhere? Many, many years later, I experienced a blast of diversity – cultural, ethnic, racial, lifestyle-related, you name it – when I lived/worked in Honolulu and New York City. But not too long ago, I got food for thought when someone (who has never been out of their home country before) asked me if the dark-haired woman sitting in front of us was American. “Why, yes”, I said. “But, aren’t Americans blonde?”. In that moment, I realized my own ignorance – I had witnessed but a drop in the ocean of diversity, as Elizabeth Little proves in her road trip, Trip of the Tongue: Cross-country travels in search of America’s languages (2012). A self-confessed language fanatic, Little drives over 25,000 miles pursuing answers to linguistic mysteries: Why do some languages last while others fade away?…How, ultimately, has the language experience affected the American experience?…why language communities in the United States have, again and again and again, eventually yielded to the seemingly implacable preeminence of English. What is the language experience in America like? To say that the language of America is English, is a bit like saying Americans are blonde. American language, American English if you will, is the result of the co-mingling of different tongues, that happened (and is continuing to happen) at various phases in the nation’s history. European colonization of America brought into contact European languages with Native languages; slavery added African languages to the mix; and immigration, past and recent, is continuing to add more into the pool. Little’s cross-country travels look at each of these phenomena, their influence on American English, as well as the fate of these other languages and the mechanisms of language loss, death and preservation. Colonization and the native peoples …it’s almost easy to overlook the fact that American English owes much of its distinctiveness to words it has acquired in the New World. Firstly, “all Native peoples are not, in fact, part of one big, homogenous culture”, and all Native personal names are not “of the verb-preposition-animal variety”. Sources suggest, says Little, that anywhere between 250 to over 400 languages were spoken in the pre-contact population of North America, and around 175 indigenous languages are spoken in the United States. That, however, doesn’t mean that these surviving languages are in any way mainstream, or are spoken by substantial numbers of people. I am not sure I have heard a conversation in even one of them. What contributed to the decline of these languages?
Language is inevitably conceived with cultural and usually ethnic heritage. It has been described as the soul of every culture of a people.
Language is also an essential source of a peoples collective consciousness since there are certain experiences which may be only comprehensible to people who speak the same language .Linguists find a close and dynamic relationship between language and thought. For it is in language that custom, tradition, ethics poetry, history, religion and rituals are incarnated.
It is therefore a step in the right direction when UNESCO in Nov. 1999 instituted the International mothers language Day. The Day seeks to bring to the fore strategies nations should adopt to preserve the various indigenous languages and cultural diversity.
Prior to formal education, our forefathers used the mother tongue which is the indigenous language in a variety of ways to train their children.
Unfortunately, with the advent of formal education much attention has been focused on English Language; the lingua franca of the country to the detriment of the mother tongues. This unfortunate situation has led to Ghanaian languages being marginalized.
The migration of Ghanaian to western countries is also a contributing factor to the lost of Ghanaian languages, and culture; since most parents abroad do not communicate with their children in their local languages.
WHETHER "data" is singular or plural is one of those hardy perennials of usage debate in which both sides have impossibly entrenched positions. Or so I had thought, but the Wall Street Journal has, as of today, taken an unusually fence-sitting position: Most style guides and dictionaries have come to accept the use of the noun data with either singular or plural verbs, and we hereby join the majority.As usage has evolved from the word’s origin as the Latin plural of datum, singular verbs now are often used to refer to collections of information: Little data is available to support the conclusions.Otherwise, generally continue to use the plural: Data are still being collected.(As a singular/plural test, try to substitute statistics for data: It doesn’t work in the first case — little statistics is available — so the singular is fails to pass muster. The substitution does work in the second case — statistics are still being collected – so the plural are passes muster.)
I admire the attempt to satisfy both tradition and change, but it does leave some leeway that I can imagine many writers having a hard time handling. People crave hard and fast rules: they don't have time to make judgments all the time, like the suggested route of substituting "statistics". (This is the first time I've heard of this remedy, for what it's worth.) But hard-and-fast doesn't always work, as I noted in my last submission on "data". We don't use the foreign morphology of every word brought from a foreign language. But we do sometimes. Since that last post, I have found this excellent one supplying some new counterarguments against always-plural "data". Among them: we certainly don't use "agenda" and "stamina" in the plural, though they have come to us the same way "data" has. (If your boss ever does say "moving on to the next agendum", let us know.) The "media" question remains mixed: some have it singular, others have it plural. We have a strong urge to just have language behave, but regular readers of this column know that, as the original Johnson knew, it just won't. He famously said that "to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride". Less well known, but perhaps more to the point, he pointed to the unruliness of language as the sign of a healthy culture constantly enriching itself:
Letting languages disappear is a crime against humanity, asserted a recent article. .... There are scientific reasons why linguistic diversity is important. Linguistics and cognitive sciences study how the brain processes language and thought; such sciences try to determine what language is, and what combination of influences affects its structures: intelligence, environmental factors,innate factors. The more languages available to study, the better the science will be. As well, 75 per cent of plant-based pharmaceutical drugs we use were discovered though practitioners of bush medicine, whose medical knowledge had been passed on in languages which are now dying, along with such traditional knowledge.
But that’s not why we should care about language death. If we are able to simply step off a plane and hear a speaker of our language and sigh in relief, finally feeling that we are home, perhaps it is difficult to imagine not having such an essential pleasure. The despair of Indigenous people around the world is that their right to belong, to have an identity, which, for many, is located in language, is constantly under threat. And their efforts to preserve such culture are belittled. Read more: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=32073
The Inuit people will now have access to the entire Bible in Inuktitut, the most widely spoken Aboriginal tongue in Canada’s Arctic.
The translation project began in 1978, with the New Testament published in 1991, and the Old Testament translation recently completed. The $1.7 million Inuktitut project was co-sponsored by the Canadian Bible Society and the Anglican Church of Canada.
The work was spear-headed by Rev. Eugene A. Nida, considered the father of modern Bible translation. Rev. Jonah Allooloo, an Inuk priest and canon of the Anglican Church of Canada worked on the project from the start.
Nida, who died in September 2011, introduced the concept of “functional equivalence” rather than literal translation. He believed that truly accessible translations can only be done by native speakers who know not only the language, but the idioms, thought processes and culture of their people. The translations should read naturally while remaining faithful to the original meaning and message.
In the past, translations were done by missionaries. Though they learned the language, the literal translations were often stilted and awkward.
Language isn’t innate, Daniel L. Everett argues. It’s a tool that can be reinvented, or lost. .... How humans learn language is much more easily accounted for by psychologists than the Chomskyans claim. Surely our brains and bodies have evolved to optimize our language abilities. However, no one supposes that our skill on bikes indicates a “bicycling organ.” Rather, language piggybacks on vocal apparatuses and regions of the brain that evolved for other purposes in our animal forebears. Everett makes a case for language having arisen as a combination of three elements: “Cognition + Culture + Communication.” “Language: The Cultural Tool,” full of intellectually omnivorous insights and reminiscences about Everett’s years with the Pirahã (which he memorably described in “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes”), is that rare thing: a warm linguistics book. The quiet smile perfusing his writing is all the more admirable given the criticisms he has endured from linguists wedded to the He-jumping school of thought. This nonconfrontational quality has its disadvantages, though. Everett covers Chomskyan syntax largely in passing, referring to it as “highly technical” and choosing not to dwell on its machinery, even to the extent I have here. This saps his argument of a certain force. To the uninitiated, “technical” alone may sound innocuous and even attractive, not like something to argue against for 300 pages.
What is the one legendary story you wish to be told when you are gone? No doubt, something fantastic. None of us want to be remembered for things said in angry rants or the idiotic slurs on an evening of lost inhibitions. If you were given the opportunity to open your mouth and let words of pure brilliance escape, then capture them in a time capsule, what would you say? Can you imagine sharing a piece of history in the words you spoke with your ancestors, while sharing a shred of your wisdom with future generations? Every spoken word, every written word is a link, insight to where your people have come from and evidence of what you’ve contributed to mankind. How sad would it be if no one remembered you at all? In many cultures around the world, the moment the last elder dies, no one ever speaks their story again. “Every 14 days another language dies “ (World Oral Literature Project). The Arctic Inugguits are a group of people who live in the North of Greenland. Until they were discovered in 1818, they thought that they were the only inhabitants of the world. Their entire culture is based on storytelling. The climate change has forced them to migrate and assimilate into more dominant cultures of the north. No children and young adults have learned the native language, and when their last elder dies, so too will their history. For this reason, Stephen Pax Leonard spent over a year living amongst the Arctic Inugguits, recording their songs, traditions and myths. (Leonard 32)
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