With the Olympics right around the corner, it’s hard not to think of the role language plays in the international event. With over eighty countries and 5,500 athletes and officials, the Olympic Games draws together an incredibly diverse group of people — all in the name of friendship and sports — and although English and French are the official languages of the Games, hundreds of other languages and dialects will pop up everywhere from the hockey arena to the luge. The task of addressing all of these languages at the drop of a hat is certainly one goal of the organizers, but how exactly do they do it and how has Vancouver prepared for the millions of people descending on its city this week?

During the Summer Olympics in Beijing, language played an important, and sometimes confusing role. According to a Telegraph article from 2008 , taxi drivers and Olympic officials completed an intensive English training course, but despite the country’s best efforts, much of the accented English was barely decipherable. In response to the language barrier, one company developed a new translation platform called Jajah Babel, which was essentially a free telephone service that translated English into Mandarin and vice versa. Marketed at visitors, the IBM-based platform helped Olympic tourists navigate simple questions and answers at the touch of a phone.

Some translation issues, however, cannot be navigated by a simple iPhone-type application. How do coaches and athletes and officials communicate during events? Almost all communication between officials and athletes or coaches occurs in French or English (or in the home country’s tongue, which, this time, is English and French, coincidently), but for visitor navigation and other Olympics-related language barriers, the home country, in this case Canada, supplies the translators.

According to Werner Patels, the blogger behind Translation-Language-Culture-Communication , Canada may not be prepared for the onslaught of Olympic crowds. In April of 2009, The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, reported that Graham Fraser, the Commissioner of Official Languages, i.e. the official promoter and supporter of a French-English bilingual Canada, appeared before the House of Commons’ official languages committee and stated that Olympic organizers were falling behind in their efforts to make the Olympics fully bilingual. Apparently the federal government was holding back on assistance to the Olympic organizers — an ironic stance given that the government aims to promote bilingualism.

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The 82nd annual Oscar Awards are coming up, and while most people have their eyes on the Best Picture or Best Actor/Actress nominations, I’ve got my eyes on the Best Foreign Language film list.

As usual, five feature length films were nominated — Ajami, El Secreto de Sus Ojos, The Milk of Sorrow, Un Prophète, and The White Ribbon. I immediately looked up the films to get a description of each one and share them here.

Ajami

Israel’s official submission to the Academy Awards is a coming of age story of Nasri and depicts the conflict and confusion of growing up in a Jewish-Arab neighborhood in the Mediterranean city of Jaffa. Directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Smith, it is the fifth ever Israeli movie to be nominated for an Oscar. Copti hopes that the film nomination will give people “a chance to understand what a Palestinian living in Israel is” (Ynet News). To further the cause, the film is the collaboration of both Jews and Palestinians and much of the dialogue is written in both Hebrew and Arabic. Peace is not easy to come by in the Middle East, but maybe this film will help break down some barriers. (source IMDB)

El Secreto de Sus Ojos

The project of Argentine director Juan José Campanella, it is based on Eduardo Sacheri’s novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question in Their Eyes). The movie is based on the flashback of Benjamín Espósito, a federal justice agent who becomes entangled in the investigation of a woman who is raped and murdered in her house in Buenos Aires. Set in the mid-1970s during a time of political upheval, the story also revolves around Espósito’s love and his determination to write the events into a novel. For the ending you’ll just have to watch the film. (source IMDB)

The Milk of Sorrow

Again, from South America, The Milk of Sorrow is a Peruvian film directed by Claudia Llosa. It addresses the violence toward women in recent Peruvian history. Set during the 1980-1982 uprising of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in the Andes, the film explores the trauma experienced by the women raped by members of the Maoist group. The film is an attempt to catalogue and explore trauma and testimony and relies heavily on contemporary psychoanalytical trauma theory, including that of Jean LaPlanche and others, and posits that trauma is passed from the raped mothers to their newborn babies through the act of breast feeding. Already the film has received the prestigious Golden Bear award and FIPRESCI Prize from the Berlin Film Festival. (source IMDB)

Un Prophète

From Europe, Un Prophète and The White Ribbon received nominations. Un Prophète is the French selection and is directed by Jacques Audiard. The film follows the life of Malik El Djebena who is sentenced to prison for six years. Although he is originally illiterate, he learns how to read and write under the tutelage of a Corsican Mafia group and through various missions and murders he eventually gains independence from the Mafia. The film already holds the Grand Prix Award from the Cannes Film Festival, Best Film Award from the London Film Festival, and Prix Louis Delluc, a French film award. (source IMDB)

The White Ribbon

Das weisse Band (The White Ribbon), on the other hand, is the project of Michael Haneke, an Austrian filmmaker. The movie is set in the village of Eichwald, Germany, between 1913 and 1914 (the eve of WWI) and follows the lives of the Protestant villagers ruled by a puritanical pastor. Strange things begin to occur in the village and the tension between local leaders — the pastor, the baron, the schoolteacher, and midwife — heightens as strange and brutal events occur. At the Cannes Film Festival it won the Palme d’Or and FIPRESCI awards and later the FIPRESCI Grand Prix award for best film of the year. At the European Film Awards, the movie took home Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenwriter. Regarding the Academy Awards, there has been some tension due to the fact that the film was submitted by Germany although the writer-director is Austrian. (source IMDB)

Overall it looks like the competition is going to be stiff in the Foreign Language category and I can’t wait to find subtitled copies of the films.

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When news of J.D. Salinger’s death was reported late Wednesday afternoon, I was surprised, but then not. Despite being one of the most recognized American authors of the twentieth century, Salinger was also one of the most reclusive. After being thrown into the limelight in 1951 with Catcher in the Rye, Salinger moved to a 90 acre home in Cornish, New Hampshire and, after an unwelcomed newspaper article was published about him by a group of high school students he had befriended, he erected a 6 ½ foot tall fence around the perimeter in order to keep people out.

Even though few of us knew anything about his failing health or major accidents, Salinger was 91 years old, and 91 is a ripe old age.

Salinger’s most recognized work, Catcher in the Rye, faced issues in translation that still haven’t been resolved today, some fifty-nine years later. According to Bernd Wahlbrinck, an English teacher and Salinger enthusiast living in Germany, the novel was harder to translate into certain languages than others.

He writes specifically of Heinrich Boell’s German translation originally written in the 1950s. Part of the inaccuracies of the translation were possibly due to a lack of proper slang or the cultural taboo around slang—‘that David Copperfield kind of crap’ is translated into ‘David Copperfield Zeug’, where ‘Zeug’ more accurately refers to ‘stuff’ and should have been ‘Scheiss’, but also the:

…weird tendency to translate the past tense into German Praeteritum, which is, however, usually stupid because in colloquial language we just don’t use it most of the time. Thus, in the very first sentence of the novel, it says ‘… was meine Eltern taten…’. Actually, nobody says that, certainly not a kid of 17; we would say something like ‘was meine Eltern (so) gemacht haben’.

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Ever since I wrote about the Hmong language in A Note on Hmong Language and Culture, I’ve noticed more and more news items regarding the Hmong people. Maybe it’s just the kind of situation where the Hmong have always been written about and it wasn’t till I was made aware of it that they seemed to be everywhere, but they have popped up in major news articles several times in the past few weeks. A few weeks ago the news was regarding the forcible repatriation of the Thailand Hmong to Laos, but this time, thankfully, the news is a little lighter: the Hmong in California need hunting rules and regulations translated.

Of all of the translation news bits and cultural issues that I find so intriguing, this one tops them all. The New York Times posted an article on January 27 with the headline For Hmong Hunters, a Guiding Voice in Their New Home. Tying in with my previous article which was spurred by the first English language Hmong cookbook, the article focuses on Mr. Yang, the host of an “all-things-hunting” AM radio program in Sacramento. The reason for a hunting radio show—“In Laos a main source of food was wildlife,” so Hmong immigrants are simply adhering to their old customs and heading outside to find some food.

The radio show (which is in Hmong, of course) educates listeners about the various California rules and regulations regarding hunting—what licenses are needed, how to transport heads to Fish & Wildlife offices, the times of the different game seasons, etc. Hmong from all over the area can call in and ask their specific question which Mr. Yang will answer. The show complements the state-run hunting education program—a ten hour safety program required of all hunting license applicants. In California, classes are offered in Hmong, Spanish, Russian, German and Mandarin, but only 15 bilingual instructors teach the classes. Mr. Yang was the first Hmong instructor (there are now two more, both located in Fresno) in the state and already over thirty people have signed up for the next class.

While two other states—Minnesota and Wisconsin—have hired Hmong speakers for fish and wildlife issues, this certainly isn’t something I’ve seen much elsewhere. In the southeastern US, I’ve never heard of this being a problem, and while it seems like it ought to be limited to California, a state of such diversity, the Hmong presence in the Midwest is obviously strong as well. Maybe one day the stereotypes of the “good ol’ boy” out hunting will disappear and be replaced with the thought of people from all cultures—you never know.

Photo depicts Chou, a Hmong man proudly displaying his family knife. Via Napix Hmong Soul

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Last summer while I was researching various journals on translation testing methods, I constantly ran across articles mentioning the difficulty surrounding Cherokee language testing, specifically in the Bilingual Education Program. Although I don’t have the articles anymore, the gist was that under several testing programs it was nearly impossible to create an equal English language literacy and Cherokee language literacy test. In testing young elementary school children of both Cherokee and non-Cherokee background, the program administrators found that bilingual children achieved noticeably lower scores on the English language tests, and that these scores were not due to a limited exposure to English but due to the cultural-linguistic nature of the Cherokee language.

The problem with technical academic journals is that the amount of background information or history is limited. While the studies made sense and were useful regarding the information I needed for my own project, I was left wondering what exactly were the differences between Cherokee and English, and why exactly the two languages could not be accurately tested in a bilingual situation. I’d nearly forgotten about the issue until recently when I picked up a copy of Christopher Camuto’s book, Another Country.

I read Camuto’s three published books (the three I could easily access, he recently published a fourth book, Time and Tide in Acadia in 2009) in backwards chronology, starting with his most recent, Hunting from Home, then his second book, A Fly Fisherman’s Blueridge. As those titles suggest, Camuto’s writing is interested in the Appalachian landscape, in hunting and fishing and the environment of the Appalachian mountains. Camuto is also interested in language and the way language works in relation to the environment. In his first book, Camuto explores the relation of the Cherokee people to Appalachia and spends a great deal of time discussing the Cherokee language.

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When the 2nd UN Arab Human Development Report was released last year, I discovered some sobering facts regarding literacy in Arab states. With statistics like 65 million illiterate people in a region composed of 22 countries or “the total number of books translated into Arabic during the 1,000 years since the age of Caliph Al-Ma’moun [a ninth-century Arab ruler who was a patron of cultural interaction between Arab, Persian, and Greek scholars] to this day is less than those translated in Spain in one year,” it’s hard not to become discouraged about the state of literacy around the globe. Largely considered to be a cornerstone to political and economic development, the ability to read and write is essential—as well as the exposure to literature.

With heartbreaking statistics like those published by the Arab Human Development Report, it’s exciting when good news regarding literacy and exposure to literature arises. Although it is not in the Arab world, India is a key player in the world political and economic scene, and as a developing country, literacy has been on the forefront of social and cultural development initiatives. In 1947 at the end of British rule, a mere 12% of Indians were literate. The number has risen in recent years to 66% (in 2007), showing a record 12.63% increase in the 1991-2001 decade. Looking at the numbers, of course, this still leaves the country with a 34% illiteracy rate—14% more than the AHDR statistic for the Arab world and well below the 84% world average literacy rate. Additionally, a large gender gap appears in the rates (something which wasn’t discussed in the AHDR). This past year in 2009, the literacy rate for women was 54.5% as opposed to 76.9% for men. That gap, thankfully is closing with a 14.38% increase in women in the 1991-2001 period (during the same time, literacy in men increased by only 11.13%).

So what about these statistics is positive? India, along with the Arab states, is well below the UNESCO literacy threshold of 75%, and although literacy is increasing, and has increased exponentially since independence, the nation still has a long road to travel before it achieves any substantial literacy goal. But there is a bright side—unlike in the Arab states, literature is accessible (or relatively so, depending on region) in India.

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The English lexicon is constantly growing. Urban Exploration, it seems, is the next frontier.

What happens if you’re interested in an activity including extreme heights, technical skill, and strength and endurance but you don’t live near glaciers, mountains, or rock wall cliffs? What if you live in the middle of the city, surrounded by skyscrapers and manholes and taxi cabs, and you want a taste of adventure and the great outdoors? For some, the option is to domesticate, to find a park to run in or ride a bicycle around town. For others, though, a simple compromise is possible—turn the urban environment into an extreme environment, scale buildings and spelunk down underground pipes.

The sport is broadly referred to as Urban Exploration or urbex or UE for short. Defined by James Lester as a sport that explores the “off-limits or seldom seen parts of man-made structures,” urban exploration is also widely categorized by the desire to “[examine] and [understand] the inner workings of our constructed world, of seeing civic society in its real, raw, unpainted, unplastered and unprettied state.” In that sense, the sport is also referred to as infiltration—although the connotation is often that of exploring an “active” or inhabited site as opposed to an abandoned building or one in construction.

Urbex is composed of various activities—most with their own code name—such as draining, urban spelunking, urban caving, building hacking, and buildering. Draining is the act of exploring underground cement tunnels intended to transport storm water (as opposed to human waste). Catacomb exploration falls under the category of draining as well. Urban spelunking and urban caving, of course, fall under the definition of draining.

Building hacking, as the name suggests, refers to entering a building, either abandoned or inhabited. The buildings are generally abandoned and in some sort of decay, or sometimes in the process of being built—urbex does not advocate the breaking and entering of a business or home. Buildering, on the other hand, specifically refers to the act of climbing on the outside of a building or a structure.

Linguistically, buildering is a portmanteau created by combining building and bouldering. Done without ropes, buildering is extremely dangerous, although some attempt free soloing where “the climber (the free soloist) forgoes ropes, harnesses and other protective gear while ascending and relies only on his or her physical strength, climbing ability, and psychological fortitude to avoid a fatal fall.” The sport can be traced back to Cambridge University where students would regularly scramble up the roofs of campus buildings. In the 1890s, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a student at Cambridge, wrote a treatise of building climbing, and the activity is usually traced back to him.

For examples of urbex, visit Urbex.org
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Photo by Paulhitz

Language Hat posted a translation today of the Russian blogger Anatoly’s thoughts on free verse, specifically regarding Russian poetry. Anatoly writes:

There is just such a Problem standing before scholars of literature, a large and natural one: to explain the transition of almost all world poetry to free verse during the 20th century. The rare exceptions—Russian poetry being one of them—do not abolish the rule. These developments took place at different times in different languages and cultures, but gradually all of them converged and arrived during the second half of the century at the same destination: what Gasparov called “international free verse.”

He then goes on to ask why there was such a great shift in poetry at the end of the 19th century, a shift from rhymed and metrical formal verse to that of free verse, a poetry without formal constraints.

While many of Language Hat’s commenters provided interesting and accurate reasons for why the shift occurred—revolution, Baudelaire’s influence, the push against the aristocratic, etc.—it can be helpful to go back and look at the initial terms we’re working with.

The OED defines free verse as “poetic writing in which the traditional rules of prosody, esp. those of metre and rhyme, are disregarded in favour of variable rhythms and line lengths”—following the French vers libre which first appeared c. 1549. The time line puts free verse at 1886, although it probably appeared before then. The opposite of free verse can most easily be described as formal verse, that is poetry with rhyme, meter, and other patterns.

The first comment left in regard to Anatoly’s post states that “a lot European poetry followed French poetry during the 19th century, and the French were tired of the alexandrine, which they found constricting. Baudelaire and Hugo pushed the alexandrine to the limit, leaving not much for others to do except be second rate Hugos, Baudelaire’s, Racines, etc. “ Also, “The 19th century was also a time of conscious modernism and revolution, and the classic forms didn’t seem to fit that. Baudelaire played the pure form and impure content game to the limit, though Gide, Genet, and other picked it up in prose.”

While most of this analysis is spot on, it is important to remember the Baudelaire also pioneered the free verse form (if it can truly be called a form). Far in advance of his time, Baudelaire experimented with prose poetry during the latter part of his life. While no great prose poetry movement caught on, his work certainly influenced the move toward modern experimentation and free verse expression. Yes, the alexandrine and other formal elements were overused, but this hardly accounts for a worldwide shift in poetry. As Anatoly points out, other languages maintained formal integrity—Russian one of many. Far more than a pushing to the limit of form, I think the second half of the comment holds more water.

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New York—home of the Big Apple, the state of opportunity, a region far more diverse than many others—is more than just New York City with its Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Bronx, a place peopled by hundreds of different cultures—it is also the historic New Netherland, the remainder of a large and powerful Dutch colony with a largely heterogeneous society. While many of the European colonies in the New World were peopled by one or two major cultural groups, New Netherland was always a place of diversity. Anyone who came to live in New Netherland—Europeans, South Americans, Africans, Caribbeans, and the Native Americans already living in the region—was considered a Dutch New Netherlander.

Although Dutch was the lingua franca of the colony, several Algonquin languages, German, Scandinavian languages, French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Ladino, and Hebrew were also commonly spoken. Much of the diversity of the colony is due to the open religious attitude of the colony. The Dutch West India Company declared the Reformed Church the official religious institution of the colony, in opposition to the Union of Ultretch which stated that “everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion,” but courts in the colony upheld the original religious freedom by granting residency for Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews and Quakers.

Today, much of the legacy of New Netherland’s diversity and openness is being translated by Charles T. Gehring and the New Netherland Project. Although the colony only lasted until 1674 when the Dutch relinquished the colony to the British after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, over sixty years of seventeenth century Dutch texts have been waiting to be translated and brought to English scholarly awareness. For the past thirty years, Gehring has been painstakingly transcribing, analyzing, and translating over 12,000 pages of water and fire stained Dutch records.

A fire in 1911 singed many of the pages and the first set of translations was lost in the fire. Starting from scratch, Gehring has completed over 8,000 pages to date. Russell Shorto , author of The Island at the Center of the World, explained the Dutch colony’s influence:

It was a place that people fled to in the great age of religious warfare; it was a refuge. At the same time, they were known for free trade; they developed a stock market — and those things, free trade and tolerance, are key ingredients of New York City.

Once Gehring’s translations are completed, scholarly work on American beginnings will have a completely new set of material to work with. As Gehring said, “What you find out is how deeply the Dutch cast roots here and how much of their culture they transmitted to this country.” Much of what we consider to be American may actually be Dutch, and a better understanding of that history is exactly what Gehring and his associates are interested in.

To find out more about The New Netherlands Project, visit their website here .