UN forum: Inuit and Saami vow to “fight the tendencies of linguicide”

Source: Nunatsiaq online

Inuit and Saami are feeling the joint pressure of development and cultural and linguistic appropriation.

That’s at the heart of a message delivered this week by Inuit Circumpolar Council chair Aqqaluk Lynge in New York City on behalf of the Saami Council and the ICC at the 12th session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The two organizations, which form the Arctic Caucus at the Forum, say they want to “promote linguistic diversity, fight the tendencies of linguicide and promote youth initiatives to keep our languages strong.”

“The Arctic cultures must be made an essential focal point when development decisions are taken concerning Arctic regions, in order to avoid undesirable assimilation or destruction,” Lynge said at the Forum now underway at the United Nations headquarters.

In order for Inuit and Saami to continue to develop as distinct peoples, conditions for the continued growth and enrichment of their cultures must be assured, Lynge said.

And, with cultural development and the protection of the Arctic environment “inseparably linked,” he said “we do not want to dance to the tunes of the resource extraction companies.”

“It is therefore of utmost importance that the principle of free, prior and informed consent is respected in those cases and appropriate democratic infrastructure is in place to protect our culture and identity,” Lynge said.

As well, the collective rights of Inuit and Saami to their traditional knowledge must to be respected, with Inuit and Saami credited with the full benefits, including both cultural and financial benefits, such as royalties, he said.

See: Nunatsiaq online

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Kannada awaits Man Booker crown

Source: Deccan Herald

Prof U R Ananthamurthy, an accomplished academic now shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize has focussed the spotlight on Kannada literature.

The Man Booker International Prize is an international version of the Man Booker Prize which is applicable to specific countries. While this award considers writers across the globe, it is awarded for their entire body of work which is available both in their regional language as well as translations. It is appropriate to therefore ponder over issues of translation and Indian writing in English. Ananthamurthy’s work facilitates fertile ground to explore questions, speculate and search for answers as Indian English readers, who are still steadily grounded in their regional language cannons.

Ananthamurthy’s writing pioneered the Navya, a modernist literary movement in Kannada literature. His novel ‘Samskara’ along with short stories became the hallmark of this movement. His writing goes beyond mere narration, or the prose that is poetry but the questions that his characters pose. Interestingly the plots that he crafts about these mundane characters, brings out conflictual situations not only among them, but also draws readers into dilemmas over old and new values, the search for an identity in the light of constantly changing times. For instance, his short story ‘Suryana Kudure’ available in English translations encapsulates this style that is so unique to Ananthamurthy, his characters and their fate in his fictional world.

While most of Ananthamurthy’s work is available in English translations, he otherwise writes in Kannada. More.

See: Deccan Herald

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The Financial Times debuts Spanish-language service in Latin America

Source: BtoBbonline

The Financial Times has launched a new service in Latin America through FT Syndication, that provides top FT news and analysis translated into Spanish. The service will include two articles each weekday, including an opinion piece written by an FT columnist and a news story from the world news, global economy or companies section.

Media organizations using the service are offered a variety of branding options, such as use of the FT logo, the right to republish a regular FT-branded page and the use of the FT brand in promotional materials.

See: BtoBbonline

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Translation error boosts Sony stock

Source: Market Watch

Sony Corp.’s Japanese shares JP:6758 -5.90% were already primed to jump Wednesday morning ahead of the Tokyo market open. After all, their ADRsSNE -3.34% had chalked up a gain of more than 9% in U.S. after-hours trade.

Part of the late U.S. rally for Sony may have been connected to investors’ confidence that the firm’s PlayStation 4 would be able to compete with Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT -0.98% latest iteration of the Xbox gaming console, which the latter unveiled at an event in Redmond, Wash., late Tuesday.

But the really big story for Sony was an item in the Nikkei business daily saying the company was leaning toward a proposal from hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb to spin off the conglomerate’s massive entertainment division.

The Nikkei enjoys a very strong reputation for breaking business news in Japan. In fact, its website includes a small section devoted solely to that day’s exclusive stories.

But it turned out that this particular development was the figment of a lone translator at the newspaper. Sony quickly pointed out that the original, Japanese-language version of the story said only that Sony had agreed to look at the proposal, but that ultimately, it still considered the entertainment arm as a key component of the company. It called on the Nikkei to correct the English version, which it did.

And so, after trading more than 11% higher in early Wednesday action, the Japanese shares of Sony pared their advance, though still managing a solid 6.9% gain in late afternoon trade. Perhaps that 4-point difference before and after the correction of the English-language report represented the money of investors who don’t speak Japanese.

See: Market Watch

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Lydia Davis wins Man Booker International Prize

Source: Los Angeles Times

Lydia Davis, known for writing powerful, compact short stories, was announced as the winner of theMan Booker International Prize for fiction Wednesday. The prize, which was presented at a ceremony in London, comes with an award worth more than $90,000.

“Lydia Davis’ writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorize them?” Sir Christopher Ricks, the chair of the judging panel, said while giving the award. “Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?”

He continued, “There is vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative attention. Vigilance as how to realize things down to the very word or syllable; vigilance as to everybody’s impure motives and illusions of feeling.”

L.A. Times book critic David L. Ulin has written that Davis’ stories “are masterpieces of spare, objective writing, acute and often edgily funny: the very definition of sharp.”

Davis’ most recent collection is the chapbook “Cows,” released in 2011; two years earlier, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the omnibus collection “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis,” which totaled more than 750 pages. More.

See: Los Angeles Times

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Turlock kidnapping trial waiting on Somali interpreter

Source: The Modesto Bee

A judge Tuesday reluctantly suspended a criminal case against a man accused of kidnapping a woman on Highway 99 in Turlock because the defendant says he needs a Somali interpreter.

A preliminary hearing for Aden started last week, but it was stalled after he told his defense attorney he did not understand everything said in English.

There was only a Somali court interpreter in Southern California, so Stanislaus County Superior Court officials thought an Arabic interpreter would suffice.

On Tuesday morning, the Arabic interpreter spoke with Aden. The interpreter told the judge that Aden seemingly understood Arabic, but responded to her in English. The defendant told the interpreter he doesn’t understand Arabic, only Somali, according to the judge.

Judge Thomas Zeff then was forced to schedule a hearing June 21, when the court can bring up the Somali interpreter from Southern California. The judge said he wasn’t so sure the defendant doesn’t understand English.

When Zeff asked Aden if he agreed to waive his right to a continuous preliminary hearing and a speedy trial, the defendant quickly answered, “Yes.”

“If you understand that, I find it very difficult to believe you don’t understand English,” Zeff told Aden as Tuesday’s hearing ended.

See: The Modesto Bee

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Urban Dictionary defines slang for some court cases, but is it accurate?

Source: ABA Journal

Confronted with unfamiliar words that aren’t defined either by Webster’s or Black’s dictionaries, some lawyers and judges are turning to a street-slang resource, the Urban Dictionary.

It has been used by courts to define terms including “iron” (a handgun), “catfishing” (Internet predators using fabricated identities) and “dap” (the fist-bump alternative to a traditional handshake). But just because the online definitions have popular support, such crowdsourcing can be a recipe for inaccuracy, experts tell the New York Times (reg. req.).

Using definitions developed by popular consensus to define words in court cases “is a terrible idea; they don’t claim to be an authority or a reference,” says senior editor Tom Dazell of the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. While he himself is a fan of Urban Dictionary, “there is more chaff than wheat,” he contends, calling it “a lazy person’s resource.”

Definitions, regardless of how respected the resource, can also pose a problem if the person using the terminology meant to say something different than what is conveyed to readers, the newspaper notes. Several years ago, the Nevada Supreme Court said the state’s department of motor vehicles had to issue the vanity plate “HOE.” Although some saw the word differently, motorist William Junge, 62, had picked the term because TAHOE, in honor of his Chevrolet Tahoe, had already been taken.

“That was their interpretation,” he told reporters, referring to the state department of motor vehicles, at the time of the 2009 ruling. “Shame on them.” More.

See: ABA Journal

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Lack of interpreters in Ontario courts becoming intolerable according to judge

Source: The Globe and Mail

An Ontario judge has blasted the province for failing to remedy a long-standing shortage of qualified interpreters in the courts.

Frustrated over an impaired driving case he felt compelled to toss out, Ontario Court Justice Peter Tetley said the number of cases being adversely affected is at an intolerable level.

“It is unfair to the public,” Justice Tetley said. “It is unfair to the defendant who hires counsel … Hopefully, someone with authority will do something, or they – and I suppose it’s the government of the day – will have to face the unpalatable consequences of circumstances like this.”

The defendant in the case, Singh Chohan, allegedly had three times the allowable level of alcohol in his bloodstream when he was arrested.

“In fact, it was in the unconscionable range,” Justice Tetley told him.

“It’s amazing that you could even stand, let alone operate a motor vehicle … That would suggest to me that there is a significant public interest in ensuring that this matter, and matters of this kind, are tried on their merits.”

Faced with an influx of defendants with an inadequate understanding of English, the province has been struggling for years to deal with the shortage of interpreters.

Mr. Chohan’s lawyer, Peter Lindsay, said the right to a fair trial guarantees that defendants be capable of comprehending the case against them.

“In a multicultural society like Canada, it is completely unacceptable that there is such a shortage of proper interpreters in major languages, such us Punjabi and Mandarin,” Mr. Lindsay said.

See: The Globe and Mail

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92 percent of Google Translate users are from outside US

Source: Tech2

Google Translate, as we know, now works in 71 languages. Only this month Google added five new languages – including Marathi – to its repertoire of existing languages. Google also added some more languages, like Bosnian, the official language of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cebuano, spoken in the Philippines, Hmong spoken in countries like China, Vietnam and Laos and Javanese, the second most-spoken language in Indonesia. Google added Marathi to its mix of already existing Indian language options like Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

Interestingly, 92 percent of Translate’s usage comes from those residing outside the United States. Not only stats, Estelle shared with his audience the company’s roadmap for Translate. Needless to add, the inclusion of more language support to the service remained at the top. He said that while Google had 71 languages sorted, there are thousands of languages in the world. Estelle added that when deciding which language to support next, it always becomes a matter of getting more data. Quality is next. Estelle thinks Google’s existing translations are “really usable”, but admits they’re not perfect. They’re not good enough to be used to power a website for use in multiple languages. More.

See: Tech2

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Hindi in Australian schools

Source: Times of India

The report by Melbourne based think tank Australia India Institute argues for the inclusion of Hindi in Australia’s school curriculum, saying it should be an essential part of the Commonwealth’s Asia policy. More.

See: Times of India

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C-DAC to launch ‘Translator’

Source: The New Indian Express

(…) The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is all set to release a Malayalam book translated from English using its home-developed translator Paribhashika. The translator is a pattern directed, rule-based English to Malayalam Machine Aided Translation (MAT) system that is slated to be launched soon.

Badran V K, associate director, Language Technology, C-DAC said that such a software for translation from English to Malayalam is being developed for the first time.

“The key feature of the software is that intelligible translation can be carried out and it shows all possible translation.  Text input and file input facilities are provided, also post editing option is available,” he said.

C-DAC would also collaborate with the State Institute of Languages for translating their publications using the new software. More.

See: The New Indian Express

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Google Translate now serves 200 million people daily

Source: cnet news

Google Translate provides a billion translations a day for 200 million users, the company revealed here Friday at its Google I/O show for developers.

Google doesn’t often share details about the scale on which it operates, but Josh Estelle, leader for Google Translate’s front-end and mobile engineering, had a few statistics to share about the service during a talk about it.

Estelle, who’s worked on Google Translate for seven years, also said 92 percent of the usage is from people outside the United States. The Internet is famously English-centric, but it’s expanding gradually to other languages, helped in part by technological change such as right-to-left text support in browsers, and Web addresses that can be written in non-Roman alphabets. More.

See: cnet news

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Scope of Welsh language standards announced

A new set of Welsh language standards will impose duties on the Welsh government, councils and national parks, ministers have announced.

Education Minister Leighton Andrews dropped earlier plans from the language commissioner for being too complicated.

Plaid Cymru expressed disappointment that the measures would not extend to a wider range of organisations.

The standards are due to be in place by November next year, with more to follow “as soon as possible”, ministers said.

Announcing the timetable for the regulations to establish the standards, Mr Andrews said: “The consultation document for the first set of standards will focus on enabling the Welsh language commissioner to impose duties on local authorities, national park authorities and the Welsh ministers.”

The standards are at the heart of legislation passed in 2011 to promote the Welsh language.

They place binding duties on organisations to allow people to use services through the medium of Welsh.

See: BBC

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South African university makes Zulu compulsory

Source: BBC

A leading South African university says it will make Zulu language classes compulsory for all first-year students from next year.

The decision by the University of KwaZulu-Natal is aimed at promoting “nation-building and bringing diverse languages together”, an official said.

Zulu is among the most widely spoken of South Africa’s 11 official languages.

It is the mother tongue for about 23% of the population and is also used as a lingua franca by many others.

However, few people from minority racial groups speak it.

This is the first time a South African university has made it compulsory for students to learn an indigenous African language, the local Mercury newspaper reports.

University of KwaZulu-Natal Deputy Vice-Chancellor Renuka Vithal told the BBC the decision would help students obtain a vital communication skill for their professional and personal lives.

See: BBC

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English translation of first Basque book presented

Source: eitb

A translation into English of a book of verses considered to be the first example of written work in Basque language was presented on Monday in the headquarters of the regional council of Bizkaia.

Published in Bordeaux in 1545, the book contains a modest collection of poems, some religious, others love poetry, one autobiographical, and two extolling the virtues of Basque and its worthiness through publication to be included with the other languages of the world.

Written in the Lower Navarrese dialect of Basque, the poems have found enduring fame among the Basques for their celebration of the Basque language. Included alongside the seminal translation by Mikel Morris Pagoeta is a comparative rendition of the original Basque. The book also includes a foreword by Pello Salaburu, the preface to the 1995 edition by Patxi Altuna, and an introduction by Beñat Oyharçabal.

The translation falls within the classic series collection of the Center of Basque studies of the University of Reno, Nevada. The Basque Classics Series seeks to provide English translations of key texts and authors in the cultural development of the Basque Country.

See: eitb

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UKIP county councillor proposes scrapping translation services in Lincolnshire

Source: Skegness Standard

A newly elected UKIP county councillor has announced plans to safeguard frontline services by cutting ‘wasteful’ expenditure on translators for Lincolnshire’s foreign speaking residents.

Coun Chris Pain, who took the seat for Burgh and Wainfleet at last Thursday’s Lincolnshire County Council election, believes immigrants should pay for the service themselves or learn English rather than burden the taxpayer.

“There are certain services you can’t cut but we don’t need to be spending thousands on translation services,” he said.

“We’ve got to be very studious across the whole range of council services and see if we are getting value for taxpayers’ money.”

With savings of £125 million to make, Coun Pain believes this could be one nonessential service to be cut towards that total.

Coun Pain had not been able to check the cost of such services before raising his suggestion.

But the Standard has since learnt that last financial year Lincolnshire County Council spent £49,500 on translation services, down from £55,000 over the previous 12 months. More.

See: Skegness Standard

Krasznahorkai and Stănescu win 2013 Best Translated Book Awards

Source: Rochester

The Best Translated Book Awards for poetry and fiction were announced on Friday, May 3, with Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with Single Spoke, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Archipelago Books) and László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, translated from the Hungarian by Georges Szirtes (New Directions) taking home top honors. Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the United States over the previous year.

This year’s event was part of “Literary Mews,” a new component of the PEN World Voices Festival organized by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and designed to bring more attention to independent publishers. That sentiment was in keeping with the general vibe of the award; nominees of the sixteen shortlisted titles (six for poetry, 10 for fiction), only one title—Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel—was published by a corporate press. More.

See: Rochester

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Maya interpreters trained to open doors to a culture

Source: Mission Local

Have you ever heard the Maya language spoken in San Francisco? If not, listen to our audio story to the right. It will open your ears to a little-known language spoken by thousands of people in the city – but rarely discussed outside its cultural community.

San Francisco is a hub of Maya language and culture, and one of the most densely Maya-populated cities in the country. There are an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Yucatec Mayas — or Mayas from the Yucatan region in Mexico — living within its seven by seven-mile boundaries. The earliest Maya language dates back thousands of years, and modern variants of it survive in Mexico and Central America.

Beyond the Yucatan, over 25,000 Mayas from Guatemala and other regions in Mexico, like Chiapas, have also taken up residence in the greater Bay Area. In the Mission especially, Mayas have left their stamp. Walk around the neighborhood and you’re certain to see a Maya restaurant or two, hear the distinctive vowel-rich sounds of the language, or even catch a sound bite of Maya music, drifting out of half-open windows.

While the Maya language and culture is kept alive in the Mission and throughout San Francisco, the community’s self-contained nature has also given rise to a growing need for Maya language interpreters. A 2003 survey conducted by San Francisco City College students found that 85% of Yucatec Maya immigrants living in San Francisco speak Maya as their first language, and over 95% speak it very frequently at their jobs and in their homes.

See: Mission Local

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A.L. students to present foreign language research to board of education tonight

Source: South Westiowa News

At tonight’s Council Bluffs Community School District’s Board of Education meeting, four Abraham Lincoln High School students will present information on the importance of learning a foreign language. Megan Frush, a junior, Jessica Hipnar, a freshman, Daniel Cano-Pargas, a sophomore, and Thanh Nguyen, a junior, have been working together on a project for a sociology class on the importance of teaching a foreign language early in life because it improve a child’s future both culturally and academically, as well as having an effect on the community.

A new grammar and spelling test arrives in primary schools in England this week

Children are again to be subject to a rigorous examination in grammar. But why does it make adults so cross when other adults break the rules?

A new grammar and spelling test arrives in primary schools in England this week. It is the first time in a while that such emphasis has been put on grammar.

Some of the questions will seem straightforward for many adults, such as where to place a comma or a colon in a sentence. But other aspects – identifying different types of adverbs or distinguishing between subordinating and co-ordinating connectives – might raise eyebrows.

Grammar is not just an educational issue. For some adults, it can sabotage friendships and even romantic relationships.

The research arm of dating site OKCupid looked at 500,000 first contacts and concluded that “netspeak, bad grammar and bad spelling are huge turn-offs”. The biggest passion killers were “ur”, “r”, “u”, “ya” and “cant”. Also damaging to online suitors were “luv” and “wat”.

On the other hand, correct use of apostrophes was appealing. Using “don’t” and “won’t” caused better than average response rates – 36% and 37% respectively, according to the research.

Twist Phelan, an American writer who went on 100 online dates in 100 days and later married someone she met online, says grammar is a vital “filter system”. It shows care has been taken when sentences are grammatically correct. “If you’re trying to date a woman, I don’t expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren’t you trying to put your best foot forward?” Continue reading the main story