Among the ten films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, one prompted a lot of discussion amongst language professionals: James Cameron’s Avatar, which features the fictional language, Na’vi. In honor of the linguistic work in Avatar, Beyond Words has compiled a shortlist of films that feature invented languages, and a brief discussion of the linguistic research behind each one:

Paul Frommer’s Na’vi Language

For the indigenous Na’vi of the planet Pandora, James Cameron wanted to create a “complete and consistent” language that sounded both pleasing and alien, but was learnable by the human actors who would be required to speak it. He created a list of 30 base words that encompassed the “smooth and appealing” sound that he envisioned for the Na’vi language, and then passed that list on to linguist Paul Frommer.

Frommer, in turn, presented Cameron with three distinct phonetic structures: one tonal, one using different vowel lengths, and one using ejectives. The director chose the ejective structure and from there, Frommer created the 1,000-word language. Na’vi incorporates morphology and syntax from many existing languages, such as the infixes of Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages, and the tripartite language system of the Wangkumara people. In a recent interview, Frommer describes his thought process behind the language’s creation.

The hardest part of Na’vi, according to Avatar star Zoe Saldana, wasn’t speaking the language itself, but speaking English with a Na’vi accent. “It would always sound like Queens.”

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It is estimated that over 50 million people in the U.S. speak two or more languages. The majority of multilingual residents in the U.S. live in cities, and, as language professionals, we were curious which cities in the U.S. are the most multilingual. We combed through census data and developed a scoring system that includes cultural and linguistic factors in order to rank the top multilingual cities in the country –places where a resident might be able to read a газета, have a quick bite of a عجين الفطير, and maybe even take in a few minutes of a poésie reading, all in the course of an average day.

In order to keep the rankings manageable, we included only cities that the 2000 Census cited as having more than 400,000 residents, leaving us with 40 cities. We ranked them using a calculated point system. Each of the 40 cities received a score between 1 – 40 in ten different categories. The lower the number, the better score for the city, as in the game of golf. Here is a list of the categories, followed by the ranking results:

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The 2010 Technology Entertainment Design conference wrapped up on February 13, in Long Beach, California, and the new talks are just now making it online. If you’re not familiar with the conferences, they started in 1984, and showcase some of the world’s most engaging thinkers in short talks about specific topics.

Before we have time enjoy all the new talks in search of the next great language moments at TED, we thought we could at least round up five of the most thoughtful, interesting, and entertaining talks from past TED conferences. The following talks approach the subject of language from diverse fields including linguistics, biology, and digital media.

1. Wade Davis on endangered cultures

National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis, discusses the erosion of the ethnosphere in this TED talk from 2007. He proposes that language loss may be the greatest indicator of weakening global cultural diversity. To use Davis’ own words, the experience of watching this talk might be like “being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity”—and even if it’s not that, it is definitely one of the most entertaining TED talks about language and culture currently available.

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Since the earthquake in Haiti, thousands of medical workers, translators, and interpreters have organized for specialized relief efforts. Translators Without Borders will soon offer a medical triage dictionary for use with Haitian Creole, and ALTA has enlisted our resources to translate and record Haitian Creole medical phrases for aid workers and volunteers. Based on selections from the Emergency Multilingual Phrasebook published by the Red Cross, we hope that the phrases are useful for those who want free Haitian Creole pronunciation practice.

Haitian Creole sometimes has more than one term or phrase to describe a medical condition or English term. In those cases, our translator was asked to choose the most common Haitian Creole variant in order to be understood by all speakers despite regional and cultural differences.

You can listen to them directly on our website or download them for later playback on any standard MP3 compatible device. Each sound clip contains a recording of the English phrase followed by the Haitian Creole pronunciation, and finishes with the Haitian Creole phrase repeated for emphasis. We hope that this resource is helpful and we welcome any feedback.

Haitian Creole Medical Phrases:

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新年快乐, xīn nián kuài lè, 過年好, guò nián hǎo, or Happy New Year!

Yesterday marked the first day of the Lunar New Year and all around the world people celebrated by feasting, wishing each other peace and prosperity for the year to come, and by setting off firecrackers. As the longest and most important holiday during the Chinese Lunar year, Chinese New Year is celebrated in areas with significant Han Chinese populations (the dominant people group in China, representing 92% of the country’s population) including (but not limited to) Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. While not an official holiday in Australia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, significant celebrations occur in the countries’ various Chinatowns and in homes everywhere.

The date of the New Year differs from year to year and is determined by the lunisolar Chinese calendar (the calendar indicates both the lunar phases and the time of the solar year). According to the Gregorian calendar, the new year falls on a date between January 21 and February 20; according to the lunisolar calendar, it occurs during the eleventh month, generally on the second new moon after winter solstice. Each year is marked by an animal of the zodiac—rat (鼠), ox (牛), tiger (虎), rabbit (兔), dragon (龍), snake (蛇), horse (馬), sheep (羊), monkey (猴), rooster (雞), dog (狗), and pig (豬)—along with a ten year cycle of the heavenly stems—the five elements of Chinese astrology: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. The five stems are alternated yin and yang (yang wood, yin water, yang metal, etc.). This year, 2010, for example, is the yang metal tiger, and it happened to fall on February 14, Valentine’s Day.

Chinese New Year Traditions:

Some of the traditions associated with the New Year holiday include a thorough cleaning of one’s house. The act of sweeping away dust and dirt is believed to sweep away the bad luck of the previous year and readies the home for good luck. Once the broom and dust pan is put away, good luck cannot be swept away. The color red is also associated with the New Year, and many cut out paper symbols of luck and prosperity and decorate their homes with them.

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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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Foreign Language Film From A to Z
Beyond Words contributors list their all time favorite foreign language films in this alphabet meme style post.

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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The boundaries between formal and informal language are often blurry. Misunderstandings can arise when a language student or interpreter does not choose correctly when speaking a language that distinguishes between formal and informal personal pronouns. One runs a risk of being considered impolite on the one hand, or snobbish on the other.

The formal singular pronoun is used to express respect to an addressee, whether it is a superior, an older person, a business partner, or a new acquaintance. The informal pronoun, conversely, establishes a sense of closeness and trust among friends and relatives. There is a very special—even intimate—moment when the formal pronoun suddenly changes to its familiar form in the middle of the conversation; or there is a reverse effect of chilling distancing when the formal pronoun is uttered in place of the familiar. Interestingly, most European languages preserve the distinct forms of polite and familiar personal pronouns. In Modern English, however, the practice became largely obsolete.

A similar form of both formal and informal pronouns exists in almost every Indo-European language. Here are a few examples:

In linguistics, the practice of distinguishing personal pronouns on the basis of familiarity and social courtesy is referred to as a T-V distinction, from the first letters of Latin pronouns tu and vos. Common to most of the Indo-European languages, the formal singular pronoun derives from its plural form. Addressing someone in plural has been a universal symbol of inexorable power and authority. According to some sources, the first record of addressing a superior in plural dates back to the Roman Empire during the 4th century. Later, plural pronouns began to be commonly applied to the European aristocracy—so-called “majestic plural.”

In Old English, second-person pronouns thou and you derived from the plural ye. Originally, thou was simply a singular counterpart to ye. The Norman Conquest of 1066 AD marked the age of the French language influence on English. Thou—just like its French version tu—was used to express familiarity, affection, or even condescendence, while the plural ye was reserved for a superior during a formal address. Starting in the Middle English period (mid 15th century), ye gradually generalized to you, which became a standard in both plural and singular forms with no distinct connotation of familiarity or social distance. Thou, which was losing its prominence in the early 17th century, is still preserved in some regions of England and Scotland; it is also commonly used in religious context.

This can pose a challenge to translators and interpreters. They must be aware of the cultural and social circumstances that require a more formal tone to avoid an insulting statement and, at the same time, to avoid archaic and awkward wording. It is even more difficult to reflect the subtle nuances and shades of meaning that accompany the two forms of pronouns. One way to ameliorate the problem is to reserve to the so-called compensating translation. Using a first name or a nickname instead of honorifics or using some informal phrasing, one can “compensate” for the lost meaning or implication.