For many immigrants with school-age children, parent-teacher conferences are a family affair. The student arrives with a slew of relatives in tow, all with varying degrees of English proficiency, and all working in tandem to fill out paperwork and make sure that the child knows where to catch the bus and how much to pay for lunch. Whereas the American child brings mom or dad, the children of immigrants often have one relative who translates, one who signs the paperwork, and yet another who drives everyone to and from the school.

While it is obvious that immigrants face many challenges in educating their children in America, the method for alleviating these challenges is less clear. Recently, a new study has been released by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research and Reform, that offers new insights in the field of teaching non-native speakers of English. In this study, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education, researchers examined the developmental progress of Hispanic kindergarten students in low-income neighborhoods. Children were assigned to either English immersion or bilingual classes and study results were drawn by the time the students entered the third grade. Researchers found that no significant difference could be found between the two groups — it was only the caliber of the education that impacted their reading, writing, and comprehension.

This information comes in light of a recent poll sponsored by the Nielsen Company and Stanford University, which found that just 20 percent of Spanish-speaking parents were able to communicate “extremely well” with their child’s school. Furthermore, fewer than half of the parents polled stated that it was easy for them to help with their child’s school. While American children feel comfortable asking their parents for help with their homework, only 57 percent of the Hispanic parents polled stated that their children came to them with questions. This disparity puts Hispanic students at a disadvantage compared with their English-speaking counterparts and, frequently, encourages them to abandon their native language and culture in favor of more readily assimilating. Some schools are combating this trend by providing dual-immersion courses to non-native and native English-speakers alike. Judging from the results of the recent Johns Hopkins study, this approach may be the most beneficial one, allowing students to retain their heritage while providing them with the necessary tools to succeed in American schools.

Linguaphiles and gadget lovers alike are waiting in anticipation for August 27th, when Amazon will finally release the latest version of its popular Kindle e-Reader. The third generation Kindle quickly sold out on Amazon.com, and the product is currently receiving the type of media fervor reserved for Steve Jobs and company. Technology and social commentators throughout the Internet tend to agree that this generation Kindle coupled with the i-Pad will save the publishing industry. That’s not Beyond Words’ call to make, but we can go ahead and join the crowds of eager readers waiting to see what the buzz is all about.

According to Amazon, the new Kindle will feature built-in Wi-Fi, a higher contrast e-ink screen than last generation’s, crisper and darker fonts, a much smaller body size and weight, increased storage space, and even a longer lasting battery. If those product specifications are even half true, old Kindle users won’t be disappointed, and–as the company is hoping for–general consumers may decide it’s finally time to make the jump to e-reading. Already, Kindle’s e-book business has out-shined Amazon’s hardcover book sales.

Still, you don’t even need to buy e-books to take advantage of the Kindle. One of the most interesting features of e-books is the availability of free books from sites like Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks.net. These sites make available thousands of books that are in the public domain due to expired copyright. ManyBooks has a large catalog of public domain books that can be downloaded in the Kindle’s .azw file type. We’ve compiled some of the most interesting free e-books about language from their site. We hope you enjoy these digital reads!

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Salish

As a recently arrived transplant to Kalispell, Montana, I couldn’t help noticing that several of the road signs on Highway 93 are written in English and an interesting looking language that I later learned was called “Salish.” Salish consists of consonant clusters (sometimes as many as 13 in a row) with few vowels. It originated with the Flathead Indians still found today in parts of Montana and Washington.

Here are a few examples of written Salish:

The town of Kalispell is named for a Salishan word meaning “flat land above the lake.” During the 1700’s Salish was so prevalently spoken that settlers who spent time with the Flatheads noted that speaking solely Salish “one [could] converse from the United States to the Willamette without the necessity of an interpreter.” Father Gregory Mengarini, a Catholic missionary sent to convert the Flatheads in the Rocky Mountains, learned the language so well that he printed a Salish dictionary in 1879.

Today, several dialects of Salish still exist. Currently, there are around 50 fluent speakers of Salishan dialects working to keep this endangered language alive. If you would like to hear Salish spoken, the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive has greatly contributed to the fight to preserve the language by recording and archiving several tribal elders and teachers speaking the language. The Salish Language Revitalization Institute is also an excellent resource for learning more about Salish grammar and vocabulary and the importance of keeping the language alive.

Stay tuned as I explore other Indian languages and cultures during my stay in Montana!

Related Articles

Endangered Language Watch: Shiyeyi

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Images © Copyright Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes

Episode 12: The Language News Report

Welcome to ALTA’s Beyond Words Podcast. Our podcasts provide listeners with the latest language news, language-related interviews, and language lessons that can be applied to real-world situations. They’re always brief, always informative, and always entertaining.

During the Language News Report, you’ll hear summaries of the last two weeks’ top language-related stories. You can listen to the podcast on our website or download it for later playback on any standard MP3 compatible device.

This week, you’ll hear about a poll of Hispanics in the US, Japanese companies’ push towards English, and ancient carvings that may contain the remnants of a language. We hope you enjoy listening!

Listen to Episode 12: The Language News Report

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Articles in this week’s Language News Report

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Every month, Now Playing highlights some of the best foreign films currently playing at the theater. This month we’re running a special feature on the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Since 2003, the excellent Vancouver Latin American Film Festival (VLAFF) has provided audiences with the unique opportunity of viewing Spanish and Portuguese language films in Vancouver.

This year the VLAFF will take place from September 2nd through the 12th. You can view the festival’s lineup of 26 feature films here.

We’re providing you with plot synopses and trailers for three of the films screening at the VLAFF. Hopefully you can make your way to the festival to enjoy these films on the big screen!

Los Viajes del Viento

Director: Ciro Guerra, Language: Spanish, Country: Colombia
Thursday, September 2, 7 p.m. (Opening Night Gala)
Tuesday, September 7, 5 p.m.
Ignacio Carrillo traveled all his life throughout the villages and regions of northern Colombia, carrying music and traditional songs on his accordion, a legendary instrument that is said to be cursed, because it once belonged to the devil. As he became older, he got married and settled with his wife in a small town, leaving his nomadic life behind. When she suddenly dies, he decides to make one last journey to the Northern edge of the country, to return the accordion to the man who gave it to him, his teacher and mentor, so he will never play it again. On the way, he is joined by Fermín, a teenager who dreams of becoming a “juglar” like Ignacio, and to travel all around playing the accordion like he did. Tired of his loneliness, Ignacio accepts to be accompanied, and together they start the journey from Majagual, Sucre, to Taroa, beyond the Guajira desert, finding on the way the enormous diversity of the Caribbean culture and surviving all kinds of adventures. Ignacio will try to convince Fermín to take a different path in his life, having learned that his only led to solitude and sadness, but he will have to face the fact that destiny has different plans for him and his pupil. –© Cannes Film Festival

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Spinning Languages is a monthly feature by Beyond Words that highlights albums from around the world. This month we’re showcasing three great albums from Colombia, Senegal, and Finland. You can order all of them directly from the excellent music store Other Music. Enjoy these August tunes!

Various Artists: Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla &
Afro Roots In Colombia 1975-1991 (2010)

Boasting twenty one pulsating tracks drawn from the northern coasts of Colombia, ‘Palenque Palenque!’ reveals a unique and fascinating story of how Afro Colombian music developed from the 1970s onwards and how the local sound-systems in Cartagena and Barranquilla played such an important role in shaping the sound of the Colombian champeta.

Co-compiled by Lucas Silva (resident of Bogota and owner of Palenque Records) and Soundway Records’ Miles Cleret, the album highlights the long relationship that the Caribbean coast of Colombia has with Africa stretching back to the 17th century. Specifically, the rise of the percussion heavy champeta sound, born out of a wave of popularity for psychedelic Afro, Latin & Caribbean music inspired by the DJs of the time.

The influence of the sound-systems spread to local artists as well as re-energising traditional African folk songs and rhythms that had survived since the days of slavery. Record labels recognized the major change in direction from the days when cumbia and porro ruled the hearts of the ghettoes and began employing bands that began experimenting and tapping into these new cultural and musical movements. Disco Fuentes were one of the first labels to recognize this sudden swing and duly signed Wganda Kenya who went onto record some of the first Afrobeat records in Colombia. The trend in recording African music continued at pace with labels like Machuca, Discos Tropical, Orbe & Costeño quickly adapting to the newly adopted sound of the Palenques and bands like Son Palenque, Cumbia Siglo XX and La Cumbia Moderna de Soledad went onto readapt Afrobeat rhythms with a Caribbean slant. –© Soundway Records Ltd

Preview the album’s tracks below. We recommend track 7, “Dejala Corre”:

“To be an interpreter, you have to be weird.”

That was among the first pieces of advice I was given upon arriving in Monterey, California, to study Russian Translation and Interpretation (T&I). One month ago, your faithful Beyond Words writer packed her bags and headed cross-country to begin a two-year master’s course in Russian T&I in the only university in the U.S. to offer such a program. While most burgeoning translators and interpreters spring-board their professional lives freelancing here and there, many of the ones that decide to make a career of it find that a gregarious nature and a knack for finding the right word do not an interpreter make (at least, that isn’t enough).

After some six years of experience in the field, I realized that I was still incapable of direct, one-to-one translations, and that I occasionally faltered in finding appropriate technical terms. That, coupled with the frustration of putting my bachelor’s degree to work waiting tables, was enough to convince me to take on staggering student loans in the hopes of carving out a niche in an extremely appealing and exciting market.

Classes don’t start for another few weeks, but I’ve already been dealt enough insight into the heart and mind of the interpreter to make a few general assumptions. Why is the interpreter “weird”? Because the interpreter lives an independent – even lonely – existence. Through conferences and projects, the interpreter makes brief but instantaneous connections all over the globe. The interpreter does not allow deep connections because of the knowledge that, after a few days, he or she will move on to other conferences (a constant cycle meeting new people and sometimes never crossing paths with them again). Those interpreters who love what they do call this independence.

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ALTA Language Services, Inc. is a recognized leader in language services and language testing in the United States. Currently, we are seeking native to nearly native Korean linguists, preferably with a strong degree of familiarity with the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scales, to be a part of a two-day teleconference panel determining the passing score for government reading and listening comprehension tests.

Passing scores will be set according to the ILR scale for the 0+ – 2 levels. The teleconference is currently slated to take place in September and will last two full working days. If you are interested in obtaining more details regarding participation in the teleconference panel, please contact Jocelyn McFarlane at jmcfarlane[at]altalang.com with an attachment of your current curriculum vitae and a description of your ILR reading and listening comprehension levels in English and Korean. You may also reach her at 404.920.3826.

Please feel free to forward this to any of your colleagues who meet the language qualifications and might be interested in receiving more information regarding the teleconference panel.

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ALTA is a national leader in Language Services for corporations and government agencies, and is an approved language testing provider for the U.S. State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Department of Defense. Find out more about our Language Testing Services here.

Crowdsourcing—the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people —has been a hot topic across the web, stirring up controversy as well as passionate support. Outside of the translation world, crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia continue to flourish with over 16 million articles written and edited by over 91,000 contributors in over 270 languages. Although it isn’t perfect, Wikipedia is certainly powerful—and it uses its vast number of participants to help guide it in the right direction.

Crowdsourced Translation

Efforts to crowdsource translation, however, have been a mixed bag. Many translators, as well as the American Translators Association, were up in arms when LinkedIn asked professional translators to crowdsource its website last year. On the other hand, charitable organizations such as Kiva have harnessed the power of volunteer translators to help alleviate poverty around the world.

One company that has produced crowdsourced translations with both resounding success and huge criticism is Facebook. Through its Facebook Translations application, Facebook has used its members to localize its interface into over 100 different languages. While its success in reaching users around the world has been heralded by many, Facebook has also encountered one of the biggest problems with crowdsourcing: Quality control.

Quality Control & Crowdsourcing

One advantage to crowdsourcing is the sheer number of eyes looking at the material. Wikipedia, for example, uses its thousands of contributors to watch for errors and biases in its articles. However, a thousand untrained eyes may not catch an error that a handful of professionals would see right away. When Facebook introduced its translated interface, it was criticized by many Spanish speakers for its numerous errors and misspellings. And just recently, users took advantage of a flaw in the Facebook Translations application to replace correct translations with profanity.

In other words, crowdsourcing often skips the quality control offered by professional translators—both in terms of their skill and the review process they use.

What Professional Translators Can Learn From Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is not going to go away, and translators will only lose out by trying to ignore it. Many organizations are successfully using crowdsourced translation, despite its flaws, to further their causes.

Why?

• Many potential clients aren’t aware of the benefits of professional translation. By increasing client education and highlighting the quality control benefits of using professional translation services, translators can attract companies and organizations that require high-quality translations.
• Many organizations need a “good enough” translation instead of a perfect one, and the work of amateur volunteers is good enough. It is important to remember that many organizations using crowdsourced translation will always want a faster or cheaper solution; translators must target potential clients that truly need professional services.
• The sheer volume of material to be translated is more than any one translator can take on. Perhaps it’s time for translators to start building their own model of crowdsourcing, harnessing the power of the crowd with the quality control of a professional—whether this means professional, paid translators overseeing amateur volunteers or a group of end users providing input on a professional project. Some translators and agencies are starting to move in this direction, and it’s a direction worth exploring.

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Rachel McRoberts is a freelance Spanish to English translator based in San Diego. Her business, which offers translation, editing, and desktop publishing services, aims to translate Spanish into success for every client she serves. You can contact her through her website or on Twitter at @RMTranslations.