It’s been said by a wise man that basketball is a universal language, and, while that may be true, it’s a lot easier to pick up when you have some help. For that reason, PeacePlayers International – Middle East, led by former PPI – ME Fellow David Lasday, developed the “PPI – ME Hebrew English Arabic Basketball Dictionary,” a collection of key basketball terms translated from English into Arabic and Hebrew, complete with both original and transliterated spellings.

A taste of the PPI - ME Hebrew English Arabic Basketball Dictionary

On one level, the dictionary is simply functional. It’s a lot easier to run, say, a pick & roll, when you can actually say “pick and roll” in a way that your teammate can understand (It’s “hajz wa eltifaaf” in Arabic, by the way, and “pick v’roll” in Hebrew).

David gets ready to blow his sofarah/shreekah and start another integrated lu'be/mishak.

But on another level, the dictionary means much, much more. It’s a living example of how, regardless of visible differences between people or cultures – differences like ethnicity, language, religion, dress – we’re really all in this together. On the basketball court, as in life, we can all work together to achieve our goals as long as we have the courage to overcome seemingly daunting challenges, life’s versions of the full court press (That would be “daght al mala’b kamel” in Arabic and “lahaz hal hamigrash” in Hebrew).

You can access the whole dictionary here, or – if you don’t have time right now to fully explore over 100 terms in three different languages – we’ll be posting periodic snippets of the dictionary on Twitter.  Follow us and bring your game global. Know a little Hebrew or Arabic? Please tweet us some new additions! Hashtag: #BBallDxnry

P.S. Don’t forget to vote for PPI with Chase Community Giving on Facebook! We could win $25,000 or more – up to $1 million! All it takes is one minute, a few clicks, and absolutely, positively NO money to take action and help us bridge divides with basketball.

Guillaume making his home-brew

Today I was home alone with Guillaume. He’s a sweet guy. He really does try to make conversation with me and I know it’s hard. It would help if he were a little less shy because he tends to look away when he talks to me and as they say, 80% of all communication is non-verbal. I was able to understand conversations in Rwanda before I leaned to speak Kinyarwanda because I could see from their expressions and gestures that someone had broken into the lab to steal chemicals. I remember very effectively communicating to one of the builders at the school that I had a swarm of bees in my kitchen by jumping up and down and making buzzing sounds, then gesturing at my house and saying ‘Mu rugo, Mu rugo’. Mu Rugo means ‘My home’ or ‘in home’, the buzzing is obvious, as for the jumping up and down, I think it was my way of demonstrating that I was panicking.

We were washing the dishes together. He’d helped me to install some more plastic insulation for the windows, we’d made lunch and now we were experiencing that awkward silence that falls when all of the obvious conversation has been expended. I decided that it was time to bring out the ‘True, False’ game. I managed to explain it fairly well and then, based on his language skills, asked him to go first. He looked shy and muttered something. It could have been his attempt at playing the game or he could have been explaining that he  didn’t want to go first. Either way, there was another awkward silence, followed by him turning on the radio. I admit that I did feel like giving up at that point. I’ve realised that one of the lessons I’ve learned from being here is to be persistent. It is SO much easier to just speak in English, but I need to speak French. So, I told him that I would go first.

Five minutes later I found myself in the midst of a conversation about bungee jumping, abseiling and rock climbing, for which I had ZERO vocabulary, but with the aid of a lot of hand waving we were getting by just fine.

p.s. I`ve spent the last hour or so teaching Guillaume how to play a piece of piano music, in French. And that’s a whole lot of new vocabulary!

Michael Winning

It says in the Daily Mail that burgulators are using a form of sign language to each other. Well what did you exepct, they had to learn something in State Schools under New Labour so I guess this was it. here’s some@

And here’s some I drew myself just now@

Keeep away from crazed property-protector!

Better not try going in here...

Football. If only it had been ice hockey. Only joking. I do not get football, and would never willingly watch it. But that’s not to say I can’t read a book about the subject.

I noticed earlier that Helena Pielichaty has a new series about girls’ football, and wondered what it would be like. Having been sent book six I know now. (I’m especially grateful it was number six.) Very entertaining and really inspiring for girls the right age. Me, I’m grateful if I don’t have to run about after a ball.

So, book six, What’s Ukrainian For Football? is interesting because it looks more at what it’s like to be an – unwanted – immigrant than it is a regular football story. It’s also got a very heart rending story from World War II, which young readers ought to be interested in. Very far removed from the Beckhams and the Rooneys. And not as sweet as the Christmas match in World War I.

Nika goes to a World Cup Tournament for young girls, and experiences a number of things there; prejudice, blistered feet, friendship and the fun of competing. She learns something about her own family background which she shares with the rest of her team.

There could be more books like this, about newcomers to Britain, and about people who find it hard to pay for football boots. I can see how a football series could be as addictive as horse books. (But I do wonder what Helena was doing putting the Swedish team at the bottom of the table?)

(part of this post was formulated as a response to a question on HTLAL. several people seemed to find my response useful, so I decided to elaborate here)

A question came up recently about what to do when you get stuck thinking in your native language (L1) too much while trying to learn a new language (L2). Maybe you don’t get things when you don’t translate them back to something comfortable. And then you start to worry that you’ll ever start to actually think in your target language.

I suggest that you try this: Try reading but “ignoring” the meanings of the words. Instead of reading like you have been, just try to go through a whole page where you just look at each L2 word sequentially, and try to say each word out loud or in your head. Don’t even try to “understand” anything, just look at those words and hear their sound in your head. focus on that sound.

If there are any words you don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Pretend they’re all words that you don’t know, and just look at them and think of their sound in your head. just keep moving slowly and steadily through the entire page, looking at every word, but not consciously trying to understand.

I think what you’ll actually find is that you really will understand a lot of it. What this should help with is removing any anxiety about needing to know the meaning of every single word, which is probably one of the reasons you’re trying to translate them in your head. By focusing purely on the sounds, and their feel, you can remove the temptation to do any English, and just absorb yourself in the experience of looking at and sounding out L2 words.

Perhaps part of the frustration is that you’ve been trained by school to think that you must get everything 100% right. This is a useless habit to be in when learning languages, because you’re guaranteed to get some things wrong for a long long time. You have to learn how to accept this and move on. You learn a lot by simple exposure to the language, especially exposure to content that is just a little bit challenging, a little bit out of reach.

Another part of the problem might be that your balance of Intensive and Extensive reading is out of whack. Intensive reading is where you investigate every detail of a small portion of text, whereas Extensive reading is focused on letting go and just reading lots and lots. During Extensive reading you have a much higher chance of enjoying the material, and of being absorbed into it. You want to lose track of time and fall into the book so that nothing else matters. Ignore all problems, ignore all words that you don’t know. Just read them and move on.

It’s important to cultivate this skill of Extensive reading. Don’t stick purely to the perfectionism of Intensive work. This comes in handy when watching TV in your L2, for example. When I worry about understanding every word, I’m constantly rewinding and turning on subtitles and looking up words, and I lose all enjoyment of the show. It becomes too much about “work” and I don’t want to do it anymore. On the other hand, when I just take a deep breath and let go, I start to fall into it and enjoy it. To do this, I remind myself that we’re all supposed to suck at the start. It’s just the way things are. There’s no way I can expect to know all these words they’re saying, but if I hear them enough in context then they’ll at least start to become familiar.

If I succeed in letting go of my inhibitions and I just watch the show, an interesting thing will happen. I’ll start to feel like I’m actually understanding what they’re saying. I won’t need a little English voice in my head translating, I’ll just get it. I’m not getting every single word; in fact there might be lots and lots of words that I’m missing. But by being absorbed in the show, it doesn’t matter anymore.

This “feeling” is not the same as total comprehension. If someone suddenly asks me “hey, what did he just say?” then it can be very difficult or impossible to translate that phrase into English. It’s like waking from a dream and not being able to remember the events. You know you understood it at the time, but now the feeling is gone.

You want to cultivate this feeling of immersion when you do Extensive reading too. Later on, when you go look up a couple of the problem words, you’ll still remember the scene of the book where they happened. Remembering this scene will help you remember the words much better, but you won’t remember the scene if it never got created in your head in the first place. To create the scenes of the book in your head, you have to let the words flow over you. You have to immerse yourself in it, get lost in it. This is very hard to do if you’re constantly translating back to English.

To get yourself into that L2 trance, focus on the sounds of the words like a mantra. Follow the sounds, just try to BE in the language.

One of the long-term benefits of Extensive reading is that you’ll be able to absorb information at a glance. In the past month, I’ve done very little Intensive reading. Instead, I’ve spent my time just reading for enjoyment and not trying to study any of the words specifically. After a month of this, I have trouble pointing to any specific words that I “learned”, but everything has become much easier to comprehend at a glance. When I do my German flashcards, I can go through them much much faster, because I can read the whole card in just one look, and I know exactly what it means. No translating to English.

Another benefit is that I can now read German out loud at a normal speaking pace. Before I would stutter and stop, and my eyes and mind couldn’t move fast enough to comprehend the text in order to speak it out at the right speed. I…would…read…it….like…this. Now I can look ahead and the words just pop into my mind because I’m understanding them in German, not translated into English.

So, don’t give up. This will happen. It just takes time and exposure. Keep your motivation up by doing fun things, and it’ll be more fun if you can get more absorbed in it and stop caring so much about every single word. Later if you go back to studying specific words, those individual words will also make more sense. Do something every day and enjoy it. It will all start to make sense over time.

If being bilingual was seen as a priority for all students, NYC would see their huge population of ELLs as an asset and would be compelled to allocate funds to maintain their biliteracy.

Until then, we will be expected to judge them solely as students who do not yet know English, and who have to learn it, even at the cost of them losing their native tongue.

Basically it’s just been a good day. Hardly one bad emotion has bubbled forth. I made lunch with Jamie and my mom and it was the best – THE BEST – potato soup I have ever had. Mm yeah. Then the three of us plus Ana had my study and I learned how to pronounce names from the bible the correct way. Let’s see…watched Baby Mama after that. Played dominoes with Todd and Abi until midnight. Had delicious faux fried ice cream. Decided on a huge multi year thing I would rather do than kill myself (in case you didn’t know I have a list which I add to every night of things I’d rather do than kill myself. I add one thing right after I write down everything good about the day. GooOoo Gratitude Journaling!) and it is….learn the top five languages used world wide. I’m not sure which I’m going to start with. I already know English enough to get by. So I dont know. I’ll figure that out and get started. So yeah. Hope you all had great days.

A tough time for trade and diplomatic ties between China and Australia, but the loan of this cuddly couple may repair the rift. Wang Wang and Fu Ni, from China’s southwest Sichuan province, will be sent to the Adelaide zoo by yearend in a 10-year loan for research purposes. Relations have been tense between China and Australia after Chinese state-owned metals firm Chinalco failed in a $19.5 billion bid for a stake in Rio Tinto, and separately four Rio employees were arrested on suspicion of corporate espionage. A decision by Australia’s government in July to grant a visa for exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer further soured ties. But panda diplomacy may be answer.

http://blogs.reuters.com/china/2009/11/19/chinas-goodwill-pandas-ready-for-australia-mission/

It is becoming very trendy to teach Chinese to children of non-Chinese heritage these days.  As stated in this article,  parents’ aim would be “to make their babies competitive in the global economy”.  How many of those will really speak fluent Chinese when they become adults? My guess is not many.  And even less will ever write it.  Mastering a language is an long term commitment,  both for the parents and for the learner, and in the long run resources like a good native educator, time, money, or just enough motivation can push down Chinese in the list of educational priorities. But even if that’s to be the case, there are many positives about being exposed to Chinese as a toddler.  A few I identified:

- Chinese is a very different language from Indo-European languages like English, German or Spanish.  That makes it very difficult to learn when you are an adult.  All children around the world seem to learn their mother tongue at about the same age.  That seems to point to the fact that no language is too difficult to learn if you start early enough.

- Chinese dialects are tonal languages.  Basically, this means that the same word said in different tones changes meanings.  By learning Chinese, you are training your ear.  That can later be useful either for learning music or for learning any other tonal language without the great difficulty usually faced by westerners.

- Learning from a Chinese native is exposing a child to a very different culture and behavior.  Hopefully, he/she will have an easier time understanding different behaviors in the future.

Does it sound appealing?  Before you start looking for a new sitter, consider the following:

- There are many dialects spoken in China. And they are quite different between them, to the point of not being understood by speakers of another dialect.  The one you probably want your little one to learn is standard Mandarin, spoken by nearly one billion individuals, pushed as the official lingua franca in China.  It is important to make sure that the person you select to teach your child masters standard Mandarin.  Having attended university can be a good guarantee.  Still I recommend to double check credentials or test the language with a trusty third party if you want to make sure.

- Cantonese, the prestige dialect of Canton,  might be an interesting alternative, it is spoken in Hong Kong and Macau mainly, and also around the world in many Chinese communities. It has 6 different tones, which makes it more difficult to learn as an adult. It seems that Cantonese natives have an easier time learning Mandarin than the other way around.  Before you think this is nonsense consider the fact that, at least in my experience, speaking English doesn’t get you a job (it might ban you from getting one not to speak it, but that’s different) but speaking for instance Hungarian can indeed get you a job, by itself.  The rarer the better.  And Cantonese is natively spoken by as many people as Italian is.   Wu, spoken in the Shanghai area,  and Min, around Taiwan, are the following main dialects.

- Saturday classes probably won’t do.  At least not on their own.  Studies indicate that children need to be exposed to a different language about one third of their waking hours to become actively bilingual.  Less hours of immersion should lead to a slower acquisition and probably a not so great level.  If a minimum of hours cannot be committed, my advice would be to do something else less demanding than a language.

再见 (zài jiàn)

Try telling the following address by telephone:

Slash_dot_at@dot.com

The English convention of using “at” or “at sign” for describing “@” is so lame. Other languages have done better. Here are some excerpts from herodios.com

Czech (Czech Republic):  Závinaˆc, which means a herring wrapped around a pickle.

Danish:  Snabel-a, “elephant’s trunk.”

Dutch: Apestaartje, “little monkey’s tail,” though sometimes Apeklootje, a rude word for another part of the monkey’s anatomy.

Hungarian:  Kukac, “worm or maggot.”

Italian:  Chiocciola, “snail.”

Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan):  Xiao Lao Shu, “little mouse,”or Lao Shu Hao, “mouse sign.”

Russian:  Sobachka, “doggie.”
Thai: Ai tua yiukyiu, “wiggling worm.”

Let’s be creative and come up with a good name for “@” in Hindi and other Indian Languages. How about:

Hindi: Jalebi (a sweet) [picture of a jalebi]

And why stop at “@”? All the other punctuation signs are just waiting to be described graphically.

Yesterday – or was that the the day before since I lost a day crossing the Pacific? – I spent too long at LAXative airport waiting for a rare (for me, since I hate them) flight after some brilliant days on the train across the USA. One after the other came the announcements – in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, German and so on, followed by American English. (Strangely, they didn’t announce the flight to Sydney in Australian and then American, even though the two languages are often far apart.) Initially I assumed that in each case the announcement referred to a flight to Japan, Korea, China, Mexico, Germany …  But then I began to wonder. What if, I imagined, they were to announce flights in languages entirely unrelated to the destination. So a flight to Mexico would be announced in Chinese, one to Sweden in Korean, one to Sydney in Arabic. My guess is that the confusion would be no greater than that which currently engulfs airports in the USA.

london2012 games

Yes, languages and Olympics go hand-in-hand – how?

We came across a great post (by The National Centre for Languages, UK) in regards to the value and importance of languages to the success of the Games (London 2012).  It’s so true that language skills not only is critical to the execution and smooth running of the event and help bridge the communicate gap for people from around the world gathering in one place where the Games and actions are but also dramatically improve the experience and appreciation of the diversity, Games spirit, city and culture.

It’s refreshing to see that the British and London officials place great emphasis and recognizing the multilingualism in their planning and preparing for the Games 2012, even though English is statistically considered as the most commonly-spoken language in the world.  They see that language capability as a way to boost the tourism and enhance “global brand position” – so languages are a game changing secret tool for the British  now so-to-speak

Not only the British government see language capability (in communicating with visitors in their own languages) as a vital way to leave lasting legacy of a thriving, innovative tourism industry but also plays a critical in the Arts and in making the Games a truly global celebration.

We can’t agree more.  That’s truly in line with LangLearner’s aspiration and mission in helping and contributing to the language learning for traveling, cultural exchange and much more.  It’s what we do and think about day and night (even while we sleep

So, prepare yourself for a great experience, conversation and company with people from around world at the Games by learning  a few new languages now, it’s quick and fun with LangLearner tools

Ciao.

references:

http://www.langlearner.com
http://www.cilt.org.uk/home/valuing_languages/languages_and_the_olympics.aspx
http://www.cilt.org.uk/home/valuing_languages/languages_and_the_olympics/where_languages_come_in.aspx
http://sofiaecho.com/2009/09/24/788861_english-most-G12commonly-spoken-foreign-language-in-eu-new-statistics

Experienced, dedicated, detail-oriented  translator/copywriter, interpreter and tutor,  with background in communications and international business, seeking to work on Spanish/English projects.

QUALIFICATION HIGHLIGHTS

• Multilingual English, Spanish, and German
• Strategic thinker and out-of-the-box problem solver with proven effectiveness in efficiently executing projects

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

TRANSLATION – COPY EDITING – COPY WRITING

Clients: Coca-Cola, Clorox, Maybelline, Garnier, Qwest Communications, AARP, Nutrilite, McGraw-Hill Publishing, California Counties, Pacific Gas and Electric Co, Latin Grammys, among others

Positions: Independent Hispanic Communications Specialist (1999-present)

Hispanic Advertising Agencies, Account  Management (HQ, DDB, SCPF 2001-2009)

Hispanic Multimedia Co, Project Management/Account Management (Batanga.com 2006-2009)

Multinational Laboratories, National and International Sales (1992-1994)

• Created, edited, and translated copy for diverse marketing/advertising pieces:

Online, TV, Print, Radio, Collateral, Catalogues

• Translated technical documents for various industries: retail, consumer goods,
  high tech, telecommunications, educational, governamental, veterinarial, medical,
  and utilities

INTERPRETER

Clients: Corporations and individuals

Positions: Translation/Interpretation Agencies  (1999-present)

Centers for the Blind in TX and CA, Interpreter (1999-2001)

• Interpreting during customers’ conferences, meetings, and interviews
  (business / legal /medical)

LANGUAGE TUTOR

Clients: Adults and children ranging in age (8 to 50) and language levels

Positions: Independent Tutor

• Spanish, English and German private lessons for groups and individuals

EDUCATION

Here in Madrid, you ask to a Spaniard to pronounce special in English (\ˈspe-shəl\) and he usually miss two out of the three phonemes of the word: the first, cause he puts a vowel at the beginning , the second, cause he substitutes sh with a simple s. And no, the guy doesn’t suffer any pronounciation deficiency. Simply, castellano is missing both phonemes: ’sp and sh.

You get curious and you start digging more on this strange deficiency of castellano. You end up discovering that here in the meseta central many phonemes, extensively used in latin and anglosaxon languages, are simply and fully missed:

1) sh as in English “shelter”, in italian sciogliere, in French choix, in Portuguese chuchu

2) sp & st, as in Italian spezia / storto, in English special / stark

3) soft s, as in Italian rosa, in Portuguese rosa, in French rose, in English rose

4) strong z, as in Italian pazzo, in German katze

5) psi, as in Italian psicologia, in French psicologia, in English psicology

6) csi, as in Italian xilofono, in English xilophone

It dosn’t end here: castellano does mix b and v up, they are pronounced with the same sound.

On the opposite, castellano has just one phoneme unknown to Italian, the j in Javier. Well, the ll too is slightly different from italian gl, but they are very very similar.

Conclusions:

1) As the meseta central weather, castellano is a dried up language

2) Spaniards easily kill other languages when they use only familiar phonemes to interpret them (that is … most of the time

Hey, I like to live in the meseta central!

Finalmente li com atenção os câmbios na ortografia portuguesa em vigor desde o começo desse ano. E também li um pouco das discussões sobre o bom e o ruim dessa mudança.

Eu vejo esta tentativa de unificar e simplificar a língua portuguesa como muito boa. Com a Internet, a língua vira uma só, as barreras geográficas caem. Justo que as letras não pronunciadas desapareçam, acadêmicas estas discussões de linguistas.

Mais e mais, o que importa é como os jovens escrevem na Internet, porque somente estas formas são indexadas pelo Google / Yahoo / Bing, e são assim as primeiras a ser encontradas. Se as regras gramaticais são fáceis, os jovens as seguirão, se não simplesmente a evitarão. Tudo este inteletualismo de linguistas fica no papel impresso, em alguns fundos de biblioteca.

Musing on the continuing place of language issues in both research and practice in the information sciences, following my participation in the Zagreb InFuture meeting, I wrote an editorial on the topic for the Journal of Documentation. This post is an amended version.

Languages, in one guise or another, have been a constant feature of the landscape of the information sciences for many years.

There are, for example, the various artificial ‘languages’ – more usually thought of as notations, nomenclatures or ontologies – which have been devised to describe such things as chemical structures and reactions, medical diagnoses and treatments, and the burgeoning data-rich fields of modern biology. There is the presence of linguistics as a subject of seemingly perpetual potential relevance to the information sciences. As Sparck Jones and Kay (1973, p. 1) put it in their seminal textbook: “linguistics and information science are natural bedfellows … but there has been relatively little contact between the two fields”: the situation has not changed much in the intervening decades. There is the now ubiquitous searching of ‘full text’ databases, requiring a greater or lesser amount of ‘intelligent’ processing of the natural languages in which the content of such databases are couched.

But primarily, there is the continued need for handling communication of information in all of the world’s languages. Neither the earnest advocacy of ‘universal’ or ‘auxiliary’ languages, from Leibnitz’ logic-based characteristica universalis to Esperanto, nor the long-anticipated advent of English as a de facto global language (Crystal 2003), has reduced the demand for support for national and local languages, as the provision for 23 official languages in the European Union testifies.

This naturally has consequences for research and practice in the information sciences. A facility with languages other than one’s own has always been one of the requirements of the practising librarian and information officer, even in the traditionally language-averse United Kingdom. Sadly, the requirement for some facility with two languages other than English, a requirement when I studied information science at Masters level, has long gone from the UK, though an equivalent requirement is still largely present in Continental Europe. This manifested itself in a variety of detailed language tools for the information professions, Allen’s 1975 Manual of European Languages for Librarians, being a typical example.

In research terms, language issues have stimulated work on a variety of topics. An early example was the study of the value of ‘cover-to-cover’ translations of scientific journals, particularly from the Russian language following the shock to the Western scientific complacency caused by the Sputnik satellite of 1957 (Tybulewicz 1970). Other long-standing concerns, in the English-speaking world at least, were focused on the ‘language barrier’, the belief that valuable information, particularly in scientific, technical and medical subjects, was being missed because it was not published in the English language (see, for instance, Hutchins, Pargeter and Saunders 1971, Chan 1977, Thorpe, Schur, Bawden and Joice 1988). More recently, attention has been focused on such topics as the information practices of translators, natural language processing and cross-language information retrieval; Some examples of recent Journal of Documentation articles reporting such research, as an indication of its variety, are shown below.

These thoughts were stimulated by my attending the INFuture conference in Zagreb, Croatia, in November. A substantial proportion of this conference, which dealt with the future of information science, was devoted to language technologies – including machine-aided translation and natural language processing – and to languages issues in general. The topics covered included the European Union’s CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) project, which aims to compile a series of digital archives with data sources for language-based materials (text and speech corpuses, dictionaries, etc.) together with language and speech technology tools. Particularly aimed at academic users in the arts and social sciences, CLARIN adopts the philosophy that all languages – irrespective of the number of speakers or of their commercial importance – are of equal importance.

It seems clear that the predictions, or fears, of the adoption of artificial languages, and of the ubiquitous adoption of any single one, are very far from fulfilment. We may expect that these issues will be an important feature of the information research agenda for the foreseeable future.

References

Allen, C.G. (1975), A manual of European languages for librarians, London: Bowker

Chan, G.K.L. (1977), Mushroom poisoning, thioctic acid and the foreign language barrier, Aslib Proceedings, 29(6), 237-240

Crystal, D. (2003), English as a global language (2nd edn.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hutchins, W.J., Pergeter, L.J. and Saunders, W.L. (1971), University research and the language barrier, Journal of Librarianship, 3(1), 1-25

Sparck Jones, K. and Kay, M. (1973), Linguistics and Information Science, New York NY: Academic Press

Thorpe, R.A., Schur, H., Bawden, D. and Joice, J.R. (1988), The foreign language barrier: a study among pharmaceutical research workers, Journal of Information Science, 14(1), 17-24

Tybulewicz, A. (1970), Cover-to-cover translations of Soviet scientific journals, Aslib Proceedings, 22(2), 55-62

Examples of recent language-related papers in Journal of Documentation

White, M.D., Matteson, M. and Abels, E.G. (2008), Beyond dictionaries: understanding information behaviour of professional translators. Journal of Documentation, 64(4), 576-601

Pinto, M. and Sales, D. (2008), INFOLITRANS: a model for the development of information competences for translators, Journal of Documentation, 64(3), 413-437

Airio, E. (2008), Who benefits from CLIR (cross-language information retrieval) in web retrieval, Journal of Documentation, 64(5), 760-778

Peng, F. and Huang, X. (2007), Machine learning for Asian text classification, Journal of Documentation, 63(3), 378-397

Talvensaari, T., Lauriiaka, J., Järvelin, K., and Juhola, M. (2006), A study on automatic creation of a comparable document collection in cross-language information retrieval, Journal of Documentation, 62(3), 372-378

These are amazing times in which to live and love Reformed theology.  I’m getting close to submitting and defending my dissertation on the Belgic Confession — a journey that I started in 2004.  One thing that has struck me between the first chapters I researched and wrote and the last chapters is that the landscape has changed so dramatically.  Google Books and other such Internet repositories have opened up so many possibilities especially with regards to primary sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  The only downside is that most of those sources are still in Latin, French, Dutch or German.  I’ve had the privilege of studying those languages and while I’m not an expert in any of them, I can usually find my way with some help.  I saw a news item a few weeks back about how Latin classes in Canadian universities are fuller than they have been in decades.  Is this going to bear fruit for the ongoing study of our heritage?  One can only hope!  If you’re an undergrad, let me encourage you to study as many European languages as you can, especially the ones I mentioned above.  You’ll never regret it.

Meanwhile, there is also a lot of good translation work going on.  The Classic Reformed Theology series holds out a lot of promise.  Volume 1 was Todd Rester’s translation of William Ames’ A Sketch of the Christian’s Catechism.  My review was posted here.  Volume 2 is scheduled to be released early in the new year, a translation of Olevianus’ Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed.  It sounds exciting!  By the way, this volume is something different from Olevianus’ A Firm Foundation, a volume published a few years ago in the Baker series, Texts & Studies in Reformation & Post-Reformation Protestant Thought.

Lately I’ve become really impressed by various articles about Esperanto that I’ve read by Claude Piron. Piron was a psychotherapist and taught from 1973 to 1994 in the psychology department at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He apparently spoke Esperanto since he was a small child, and is a notable author in it.

I first encountered him as I was reading his instructional novella “Gerda malaperis” (“Gerda disappeared“). It’s a book that gradually introduces Esperanto vocabulary, moving from the basics quickly up to an intermediate/advanced level by the end of the book. It seems very well thought out as instructional material. I’m reading it online at Lernu.net, where it’s available with audio and vocabulary lists for each chapter.

After working through some of this instructional book, I somehow stumbled upon Claude Piron’s articles in English. In them, he demonstrates a powerful ability for critical thinking and analysis of arguments. I particularly enjoyed his Psychological reactions to Esperanto.

Also illuminating was his shorter article, The language of power, wherein English is analyzed. He asks if English is actually an “international language”, and argues strongly that it isn’t. Very few people in the world actually speak English, and because of its great irregularity and mishmash of romance and germanic roots, it takes thousands and thousands of hours of work in order to master it. Only about 3% of people in India can speak it, despite the elite there being quite good at it, and even people in France who rate themselves as “quite good” at English were unable to figure out 3 short English paragraphs in one test.

As a consequence, most speakers of English as a second language who don’t already come from a germanic language background, are from a higher economic class where they can afford to go to fancy schools and spend significant time living or working in an english-speaking country. Not many people have the opportunity to spend 2000 – 10000 hours learning English, and those of us fortunate enough to be born in an English-speaking country have received a free-ride in that department. In the words of one Korean that Piron quotes, he could have achieved several PhDs in the time it took him to learn fluent English. In contrast, Esperanto can be learned by most people in around 150 – 200 hours, so on a scale of months rather than years or decades.

Beyond the realm of language politics, Piron had some interesting articles about the evolution of Esperanto itself. Quite an interesting read from a linguistics perspective, and even more interesting for me as a learner of Esperanto.

In many of his articles, such as Linguistic Communication – A comparative field study, Piron stresses the hierarchy of power that develops in circumstances where some people are native speakers of a language, and have to communicate with those that aren’t. Inherent in this situation is the fact that those native speakers will always be authoritative, and the others will be in an inferior position. This could be remedied somewhat if everyone opted to speak a language other than their native language, to level the playing field, but of course in the realm of power relations this is rarely an option. In such situations, it makes plenty of sense to take as a working language one that takes an order of magnitude less time to acquire, one in which everyone is on equal footing.

It seems clear to me now that this is a role that Esperanto could and should play. Not as a “replacement” for any other languages, but as a tool of international communication that levels the current language hierarchies. Everyone can and should speak their own language or dialect in their “home” situations where everyone else around them can also do so, but in those situations that require communication with outsiders that don’t speak that language, Esperanto is the logical and efficient tool for the job. Whether it is up to the task is an empirical question rather than philosophical, and I think this has been proven by the 100+ year tradition that it has enjoyed as a language for poetry, novels, theatre, children’s play, and international communication.

…in Berlin! Yes, finally Iam in Berlin and will have time to explore Germany`s capital. By now I have been in Berlin, but never for travelling and without time for site-seeing.

We live calmly in an appartment with quite enough space and alot shops in its aroundings. We went e.g. to a public swimming centre that is so incredible hugh next to where we live. It´s a swim sport centre with alone 3 (yes three) 50m-pools and other smaller ones. And the open hours are totally worker friendly, opened till 9pm. Compared to Essen, where in the whole city there was only one public pool with a 50m lane that was opened only untill 4pm in the week, this is just the closest pool next to where we live.

Well, during last weekend I visited Nürnberg in a reunion of friends from Madrid. Nice to see you again, Lisa and Stefan! We climbed a via ferrata. These are pre-fixed tracks along or up a mountainwall secured by a steel cable. It looks like this:

Of course I already toured Berlin and was really excited of how much history this city has on offer. In particular the wall is a part of the city´s history that is mentioned many times and I guess Berlin´s inhabitants are fed up by all the monuments and signs relating that story. However, as Berlin was as well capital before WWII there is a lot of history in that city to explore that affected entire Germany. Iam really excited to see more and will let you know.

For now you´ll find some pics of my first Berlin-trip: