Metaglossia: The Translation World

Events
'Intercultural communication through English as a lingua franca: the role of intercultural awareness'.
NOV
28
2012
Wednesday 28 November
14:30 until 16:00
Language Learning Centre, Arts A.
Speaker: Dr Will Baker, University of Southampton, UK.
Part of the series: Research on ELT
'Intercultural communication through English as a lingua franca: the role of intercultural awareness'.

The use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has raised important issues concerning how we interpret culture in intercultural communication. If ELF is not associated with any particular community, least of all native speakers of English, is culture still a relevant concept in the study of ELF communication? In this presentation it will be argued that culture is still a valuable concept but that it needs to be approached in a non-essentialist manner. Culture should be viewed as a resource that is made use of in emergent, fluid and hybrid ways with users drawing on and across, individual, local, national, and global references. Intercultural awareness will be presented as a way of modelling how participants in ELF communication are able to do this. Given the increasing role of the socio-cultural dimension in ELT such changes to our understanding of culture have significant implications for teaching. These implications will be investigated through data from an exploratory course in intercultural communication for English language learners that translated insights from ELF studies and intercultural awareness into pedagogic practice.

Dr Will Baker, University of Southampton, UK.

English is a language that offers us myriad choices. We can be unfailingly precise, but also poetic, and even funny. A sense of humor pervades many of the newest words entering English, via the technology industry.

Je suis particulièrement fier de me retrouver ici au Centre linguistique américain cet après-midi, dans le cadre du lancement de la troisième promotion de notre programme de bourses pour l’apprentissage de l’anglais, intitulé « English Access Microscholarship Program ». Je me félicite vraiment de l’ampleur croissante de ce programme au Cameroun. En août 2011, nous avons démarré ici même au Centre linguistique américain avec 30 étudiants. Avec cette nouvelle promotion, le nombre de jeunes Camerounais recevant des cours d’anglais au Centre pilote et au Centre linguistique américain grâce au programme Access s’élève désormais à 92. Cela représente un investissement total de plus de 75 millions de francs CFA que les Etats-Unis consentent en vue d’appuyer les efforts du Cameroun en matière de formation de ses futurs dirigeants.

Nous savons tous que l'anglais a un statut spécial au Cameroun. L’anglais et le français sont les deux langues officielles du pays. Cela signifie que tous les Camerounais devraient être à l'aise dans l’une et l’autre langue. En outre, l'anglais est devenu ce que les spécialistes appellent « une langue internationale. » La maîtrise de l’anglais permet aux Camerounais d’être plus compétitifs tant au niveau national qu’à l’international. L'anglais est en effet une passerelle pour l’accès à l'enseignement supérieur et aux possibilités de carrière au niveau local et à l’échelle mondiale.

L'Ambassade des Etats-Unis félicite le Ministre des Enseignements secondaires, et à travers lui, le Gouvernement de la République du Cameroun, pour les efforts remarquables qu’il déploie en vue de faire de l’enseignement de l'anglais une priorité nationale. La décision récente de créer un diplôme d'enseignement secondaire bilingue pour les élèves francophones est une preuve supplémentaire de la détermination des autorités camerounaises à adapter le système éducatif à un monde en pleine mutation. Dans un monde interconnecté et globalisé, nous devons nous atteler à promouvoir les perspectives en matière d’éducation des jeunes, l’investissement dans l’avenir de la jeunesse étant un investissement direct dans l'avenir de la nation.

Technology is changing the way we communicate. From 140-character Twitter limits to an ever-expanding list of text messaging acronyms, technology is clearly having an impact on language and the words we use to relate to one another.
For more than 200 years, Collins Dictionary has been one of the world's most respected dictionaries and a gatekeeper of the English language. Recently, we at Collins opened up CollinsDictionary.com to crowdsourcing, inviting English speakers from around the globe to suggest words they believe should be included in the lexicon.
As a result of our crowdsourcing initiative, we're discovering that social media is playing an important role not only in introducing new terms into the dictionary but also in accelerating the rate at which new terms reach critical mass in the culture. More important, we're learning that social media and crowdsourcing are helping us do a better job in achieving the objectives at the heart of our publishing.
Crowdsourcing the English Language
Staying current with the pace at which the English language is evolving is difficult. Online technology is a driving force in the rapid creation and proliferation of new words. These days, people are just as likely to turn to a dictionary to look up terms they encounter online as they are to search for words they have encountered at school or work.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2012/8889/how-social-media-is-changing-the-english-language-and-why-it-matters-to-marketers#ixzz26L3KJYNz

COLUMN

"Born a child." Nigerian children almost never conjugate the verb "bear" to reflect tense when they refer to the act of having babies. So expressions like "my mum born a child yesterday," "my auntie will born twins next month," etc. are very typical. But "born" (or borne) is the past participle of "bear," and the past tense of "bear" is "bore." That means the first sentence should have read "my mum bore a child yesterday" or, better still, "my mum gave birth to a child/had a baby yesterday."

The unconjugated "born" is clearly derived from Nigerian Pidgin English where the word is always uninflected for tense. Examples: "My mama born pikin yesterday" [my mom had a baby yesterday], "My sister go born pikin tomorrow" [my sister will have a baby tomorrow], "The woman dey born pikin now" [the woman is having a baby now], "The woman no fit born pikin" [the woman can't bear a child]. In the above examples, "born" remains unchanged even whether reference is made to the past, the present, or the future.

"Very well." Nigerian children use "very well" to heighten the intensity of what they are saying. For instance, if they want to say their teacher beat them up at school really hard, they would say something like: "my teacher beat me very well." This will confound many native English speakers.

In native-speaker English varieties, the expression "very well" often conveys at least three senses. In the first sense, it's used to mean "quite well" as in: "he did his job very well." Unlike the way Nigerian children sometimes use the expression, it always has a tone of approval; it's never used to intensify negative things. "Very well" is also used to weaken the effect of modal auxiliaries like "may," "might," "can," and "could." Example: "he may very well come." The "very well" in the sentence increases the probability that he will come. It is more assuring than merely saying "he may come." Finally, "very well" is a fixed phrase that usually occurs at the beginning of a sentence when a speaker in a dialogue wants to indicate grudging agreement with something the other speaker says. Example:

Speaker A: I don't want to go home now.

Speaker B: Very well then, let's go home when you're ready.

"Vacate." This is a popular word used in educational institutions in Nigeria to mean "take an official break from school." It is a back-formation from "vacation," the American English word for what British speakers call holiday. (In British English, vacation is only used to indicate the formal, temporary closure of universities and courts of law, not primary or secondary schools).

In today’s world, many of us simply accept modern language as a given. English is so widely spoken that it seems almost impossible to consider that it is actually a relatively new tongue. All languages have been on an incredible journey, shaped by human migration, politics, colonialism, and war, and English is no exception. With its roots in Germany and the Netherlands, English has evolved over many years, and still it continues to grow.
Originating from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders and various settler groups, English has been developed out of the West-Germanic language groups. With the kingdom of Britain being built from such a diversity of roots, Old English was initially a conglomeration of a number of dialects, until eventually Late West Saxon became the dominant voice.
During the Middle Ages the language was shaped into more of what we see today in modern English. In 1000 AD, the vocabulary and grammar of Old English was more akin to that of old Germanic languages like Old High German and Old Norse, but by 1400 AD, the language was largely recognisable to what we see today. This alteration in the language came as result of two further waves of invasion, bringing Scandinavian and Norman dialects into the language; the Scandinavian influence simplifying the language grammatically and the Normans developing Anglo-Norman where a large quantity of modern English vocabulary has its origins.

[image]Learning English was never about winning a personal challenge - it was about survival for Japanese writer, translator and freelance film co-ordinator Izumi Uchida.

My two-month summer vacation in Nigeria this year gave me a heightened awareness of the distinctive character of the English that Nigerian children speak. My daughter, who has had the benefit of living and going to school in Nigeria before relocating to the United States, helped me to identify this distinctive usage of English among Nigerian children.

In what follows, I chronicle a sample of the errors and peculiar usage patterns that my daughter and I noticed among both Nigerian children for whom English is a "native second language" (refer to my last week's write-up to know what that means) and those for whom it is a second language.

I have left out learners' errors that children (including children in native-speaker environments) often make and overcome as they grow older. I have instead isolated only common, recurring errors that are the consequence of children copying their parents, teachers, and peers.

1. Fusion of Pidgin English and Standard English. In Nigeria, even highly educated speakers of the English language routinely--and deliberately-- mix codes, that is, speak Standard English, Pidgin English, and Nigerian native languages all at once in one speech act. Look at this sentence, for instance: "Shebi the bobo wan show say he is the best thing that has happened to the world since sliced bread." Shebi is a Yoruba word that appears to be an intensifier used at the beginning of interrogative sentences. Bobo is the Nigerian Pidgin English word for "man," "wan show say" is the lexical equivalent of "wants to show that" in English, and the rest of the sentence is standard, idiomatic English. These kinds of constructions are usually intended to achieve comical effects and are confined to informal contexts.

For centuries the language has defined what knowledge and truth are and by embracing it Africa will always be in a unequal position.

OUR COVERAGE

Common sense fails our students

How transformative is our practice of "academic development" in South Africa? I pose the question in the light of several recent articles in the Mail & Guardian on the subject, most recently by Chrissie Boughey and Penny Niven ("Common sense fails our students", August 10 to 17).

I was briefly involved in academic development in the early 1990s after returning from Spain, where I had been teaching English as a foreign language during the 1980s.

In a post-fascist society that had been politically isolated from Western Europe, Spain was trying to make up for lost time and insert itself into a global system in which computer and English language skills were seen as the basic prerequisites for development and progress.

Of course, that was only one ­element of the subjugation of Spain to various requirements for ­integration into the European Economic Community. Having followed the recipe for economic success, the Spanish economy today lies in ruins as large sectors of national industry have been closed because of their inability to compete with powerful German and French competitors.

However, this slow deterioration occurred after my return to South Africa in 1991. At the time I experienced a sense of déjà vu on discovering that, when I started teaching at post-school level, the prevailing concerns and priorities in education were much the same as they had been in Spain. Without proficiency in English and computer skills, no education was complete as South Africa prepared for its debut in the theatre of neoliberalism.

A pedagogical base
After 18 months of working on a pilot project in which nearly all the students were isiXhosa speakers and the teachers non-isiXhosa speakers, it occurred to me that it would probably have been more worthwhile to spend the same amount of time and money developing good study materials and glossaries in isiXhosa to establish a sound pedagogical base.

Despite the intentions of "enhancing the effectiveness of teaching and learning", which seems to be an ubiquitous tag line in academic development, what we practitioners were doing was perpetuating a relationship of power and a ­division between those with and without proficiency in English while contributing to the growth of a vast and lucrative global industry that is premised on the assumption that Western forms of knowledge constitute the "truth".

Many native English speakers have asked me if there are native speakers of the English language in Nigeria. My answer is always that there are native English speakers in Nigeria--depending, of course, on what one means by "native speakers." I will explain what I mean shortly.

Increasingly, thousands of Nigerian children in urban areas--and especially in southern Nigeria--are growing up monolingual; the only language they speak is English. They don't even speak Nigerian Pidgin English self-consciously. That technically makes English their "mother tongue" (although their biological mothers may not speak English as a native tongue) and them "native speakers" of the English language (although they are geographically located in a part of the world where"traditional" native speakers--Brits, Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.--don't live). So what kind of "native" English speakers are Nigeria's English-speaking urban children?

Before I answer that question, I will like to briefly discuss the categories of English speakers that scholars have identified over the years. The first is"English-as-a-native-language" speakers who live mostly in the West--and in white southern Africa--and who acquire the language effortlessly because it is the language of their parents and of their immediate surroundings. But "nativeness" in language isn't solely about ethnic identity or culture. It can also be determined by the sequentiality of language acquisition, that is, by determining which language one spoke from birth even if that language isn't the native language of one's parents. A child born to Chinese immigrants in the USA or Britain who speaks only English, for instance, is a native English speaker.

Then you have "English-as-a-second-language" speakers. Speakers of English as a second language come from countries where people have a first--and sometimes a second, even third-- language before they learn English, but where English is not only a school subject but also the language of instruction for all subjects at all or most levels of education. In these mostly linguistically plural countries, English often functions as the lingua franca and as the language of the media, government, the courts, elite social interaction, etc. Nigeria, Ghana, India, Kenya, Bangladesh, etc. are examples of countries with English-as-a-second language speakers. English-as-a-second-language speakers can, and often do, achieve near-native proficiency in the language if they work hard at it.

The English language is constantly changing to accommodate developments in technology and culture. While some words appear quickly and then fade away, others become so commonplace that they immediately become permanent fixtures of our language.

Keeping up with the evolution of the English language is no easy task. In the past, it took years or even decades for word usage to warrant inclusion in the dictionary. Radio and TV shortened the amount of time it took for new terms to gain traction, but the real revolution has occurred over the past several years thanks to the Internet and other technologies.

Now, the development of the English language is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, and dictionary publishers are scrambling to strike the right balance between relevancy and credibility. Social media is at the center of the struggle, increasing the speed at which new words are adopted and creating new words for possible inclusion in the modern dictionary.

Where Language and Social Media Meet

Social media plays an important role in determining how dictionaries learn about potential new words. Instead of waiting for new words to gradually make their way through traditional channels, modern dictionaries use social media to monitor new words.

For example, at Collins Dictionary we have leveraged the intersection of language and social media by opening up CollinsDictionary.com to crowdsourcing for new dictionary words. Our editorial staff thoroughly vets each submission to decide whether or not it will ultimately be included in the dictionary, but in just a few short weeks we have already received more than 2,100 new word suggestions.

Individuals who suggest new words are also encouraged to use social media to stir up support for their submissions. So in essence, social media is being used as a tool for evaluating the strength and popularity of new vocabulary as well as a supply line for new word suggestions.

Social Media Terminology

Dicionário com os termos técnicos do Inglês para Aviação com sua tradução em Português e sua pronúncia correta falada. Aplicativo para Android/Iphone. Dicionário de Inglês para Aviação grátis.

For all our American-speaking visitors, and for everyone who learned English watching reruns of ‘Three’s Company’, Time Out’s resident Canadian Nick Aveling presents a hugely abridged glossary of our shared mother tongue to get you through your trip...

The ranks of word frequency were calculated by running word list in wordnet dictionary database against a few popular search engines from 2002 - 2003. It basically uses search engine index databases as corpus. The size of the corpus ranges from 1 billion to 4 billions.
A link to our online wordnet directory is provided for words which have the frequency rank above 2,000.

An Arab cultural organisation brands a London shopping centre's Arabic welcome banners as "completely incoherent".

A London shopping centre has created Arabic signs that are "completely incoherent" to speakers of the language, a cultural organisation said.

Westfield Stratford is displaying huge banners welcoming visitors from all over the world for the Olympics.

The Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu) said the words were back to front and not joined up as they must be in Arabic.

Westfield Stratford apologised and said it would replace the posters.

The error follows a similar mistake by the train firm First Capital Connect.

The rail firm sent posters to 13 stations printed in English and seven other languages intended to warn people not to leave items unattended.

'Nonsensical'

Rail bosses have defended a series of Arabic warning posters that made little sense, claiming they were translated correctly from the original gibberish. Experts had complained that the posters were ‘essentially meaningless’, rendering them ‘as inaccurate as a timetable’ to visiting travellers.

‘May our customers remind us of umbrellas or old bags’ read the original poster. ‘Delays are important to us and also put that bit in Welsh. Don’t lie around or we’ll blow you for comfort and safety. We would like to take this reminder to keep peeled eyes and pricks in your ears.’

Transport secretary Justine Greening has called for future communications to be clearer. ‘We have enabled a discussion environment’ she claimed. ‘We hope to mediate a solution by hosting a blame storm, which should empower some select low-level sackings.’ Civil servants have worked closely with rail employees to hurriedly correct the signs, adding an apostrophe before every letter ‘s’.

"THE United States of America" has become entrenched as one of the most frequently printed phrases in the modern era of written English, a study of 500 years of language evolution has shown.

THERE is a constant change in the vocabulary of any language, and it goes without saying that there is bound to be some losses and gains of words. This article looks at how English expanded its vocabulary during the nineteenth century and after.

To start with, the English language of today has resulted from the dialects of Germanic tribes who went to England about the year 449. Ever since its inception, English has taken in and assimilated words from many foreign languages to add to its vocabulary.

A countless number of words came into English from French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian and other languages. Examples of French words are chauffeur, décor, limousine and cigarette; from Italian English took such words as pizza, mafia, studio and casino; from Spanish guerrilla and tango; from German semester, lager, kindergarten and seminar; from Russian vodka, borsch and dacha.

The word automobile is made up from two languages (Greek auto 'self' + Latin mobilis 'movable').

Some of these words have been borrowed as they are and some have gone through spelling and pronunciation changes. The cosmopolitan feature of English is not only characteristic of the nineteenth century and after, but can be traced to the birth of the English language.

Every year, an increasing number of students take an English-language test so they will be eligible to study abroad. They find these tests more difficult than those in Chinese.

Le torchon continue de brûler entre le gouvernement fédéral, bien décidé à financer des organismes faisant la promotion de la langue anglaise au Québec, et les mouvements de défense du français, qui accusent Ottawa de chercher à angliciser la province en ne défendant pas le fait français en Amérique du Nord. Désormais, le commissaire aux langues officielles Graham Fraser est lui aussi la cible des remontrances pour avoir déclaré, la fin de semaine dernière, qu’il était nécessaire de protéger certaines communautés anglophones du Québec.

Le Mouvement impératif français s’en prend à la déclaration du commissaire aux langues officielles Graham Fraser sur la protection de l’anglais au Québec
Le gouvernement conservateur essuie le feu des critiques depuis son annonce, récemment, d’une subvention octroyée à 22 groupes défendant les langues officielles au Québec – et plus particulièrement à Montréal, dont 17 groupes faisant la promotion de l’utilisation de l’anglais. Néodémocrates et bloquistes ont tiré à boulets rouges sur le ministre de Patrimoine canadien James Moore, l’accusant, lui et le gouvernement Harper, de chercher à noyauter la communauté francophone du pays, en plus de nier les problèmes de recul du français dans la métropole québécoise.

Au contraire, a plaidé le commissaire Fraser dans un article du Devoir publié la fin de semaine dernière; certaines communautés anglophones pourraient être menacées au Québec par l’utilisation du français, et que si l’anglais n’était pas menacé en lui-même, les liens tissés au sein de ces communautés pouvaient toutefois l’être.

Use Your Language, Use Your English: details of Summer School and Taster event 2011 and Summer School 2012.

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:

The European Commission has tried to respond to grumbling in the French press
about the preferential use of English in EU institutions, saying it is doing
its best to maintain multilingualism in the face of budget constraints.

If you translate into English, you may have noticed a tendency to over-use words such as ‘challenges’, 'solutions’ or ‘initiatives’, for example.