Language is Everything

Aiming high

Language is Everything was featured in the Goole Times last week as we launched our latest training and development programme: within two years, every one of our operations staff will have a Level 3 NVQ in Customer Service.

 

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Promoting the use of Spanish on the internet

The Royal Spanish Academy, the official guardian of the Spanish language, has launched a project to 'crowd-read' the classic novel Don Quixote. The book, which was written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605, has been divided into 2,149 segments, each of which will be read by a volunteer (in Spanish) and uploaded onto YouTube.

  

"The Spanish language does not occupy the space that it deserves on the Internet," said Dario Villanueva, the secretary of the academy. "We want to denounce that and do something to correct it."

You can sign up for the project here.

In our 2009 annual report, Language is Everything asked the question: "Which languages are 'punching above their weight' online?" We looked at 117 languages with more than 5 million speakers and calculated the 'relative online strength' of each one. Our list was headed by languages from the Nordic countries, with English ranked 15th and Spanish 38th. You can read the full story here (pages 8-9).

Meanwhile, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday that Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished authors, was the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.
 

305 and counting

The Languages Work Pledge Counter is up to 305 (see our previous post). Signatories include Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, who said: "Learning languages helped me to get where I wanted to be in English football. When I learned English, I never imagined that one day I would manage Arsenal, but learning a language completely changed my life."

When Language is Everything signed the Pledge we said:

"We fully support the pledge. We would also welcome wider debate on the question of which languages young people should be learning: we are encouraged by the strong rise in the number of GCSE entries for Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese, for example. We also believe that the UK could do more to capitalise on its 'hidden' multilingual talent: according to one study, 30% of all London schoolchildren speak a language other than English at home."

You can sign the Pledge here.

The value of language learning

 

Languages Work, the national information service about careers with languages, has launched a Pledge on its web site:

"In order to compete in the global economy, we believe that every young person should leave school with the ability to communicate in more than one language and have an appreciation of other cultures."

You can find out more here.

Critical Link on Facebook

The post-conference Facebook page for Critical Link 6 is now live (click here).

Critical Link 6, which took place from 26th to 30th July at Aston University in Birmingham, was the first major public service interpreting event to be held in the UK.

The theme of the conference was 'interpreting in a changing landscape', and Language is Everything presented a paper on interpreting and education in partnership with Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

You are what you speak?

This week's New Scientist magazine takes a look at the question of whether language affects the way we experience the world.

The idea that language guides human thinking and shapes perception has a long and turbulent history. Philosophers have toyed with it for centuries, but its reputation became tarnished before modern psychologists could begin putting flesh on its bones.... Recently, however, the idea has made a comeback. Studies in the late 1990s indicated that infants are better able to group objects into categories - animals versus vehicles, say - if they have already learned the category names.... Such findings suggest that language does indeed have benefits beyond communication, for children at least. But is this also true for healthy adults?

Click here to read the full story.

Interpreting in a changing landscape: Critical Link 6

Dawn Bowes, our senior account manager, presented a paper at Critical Link 6 last month. Running over five days at Aston University in Birmingham — and based on the theme of "Interpreting in a changing landscape" — this was the first international conference devoted to public service interpreting to be held in the UK. In a joint presentation with Gillian Trainor, the lead nurse at Brent Mental Health Services, Dawn presented a paper on interpreter training and education.

Critical Link 6 in numbers

• 300+ delegates
• 36 countries
• 167 papers
• 10 panel sessions
• 7 workshops
• 5 round table discussions
• 3 plenary sessions
• 2 general meetings

Critical Link 6 in quotes

• Multilingualism is an asset not an obstacle
• English is not enough
• Maybe it's time to put forward a proposal for an international standard
• I do not work as an interpreter. I am an interpreter
• Positioning of interpreters when interpreting: some say this, some say that. Should there be a standard?
• Continual Professional Development is imperative
• Is there room for apprenticeships?
• Invest in interpreters
• Everything has its place as long as there are guidelines
• Are there limits to telephone interpreting?

In today's Guardian

Today's Guardian featured Carolyn Burgess (our chairman) talking about the effect of the economic downturn on the interpreting and translation industry.

On public sector cuts:

• "Things haven't fallen back yet, but I do see it coming"

• "This is a fantastic way to change how the public sector buys its services"

On resisting the temptation to cut rates of pay for linguists:

• "These are qualified linguists we are talking about often with specialisms such as in medicine or law ... As a business, without our linguists we are nothing"

On the private sector:

• "There's a big drive by people to do business in China, India, Brazil and Russia"

You can read the full article here.

Mirror, mirror...

Why do children who are learning to write confuse the letters "b" and "d" — and occasionally write their names back-to-front?

According to Stanislas Dehaene, the director of INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in France, it's because the area of the brain that we use for reading originally evolved for recognising objects and their mirror images.

Speaking at the 7th Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam earlier this month, Dehaene said: "It's no wonder that children have so many difficulties with mirror reading and writing. They are trying to learn to read with precisely the area of the brain that has the most sensitivity to recognising mirror images."

You can read more here on the New Scientist web site.

Language really is everything?

A new study suggests that language helps people to solve spatial problems.

Jennie Pyers, a psychologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, tested people who use Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was created by deaf children in Nicaragua about 35 years ago.

"The language is becoming more complex in the hands of the children of the community," she says, "and most older members of the community do not learn the new complexities introduced by the following generation. As a result, the language of the younger adults in the community is more complex than the language of the older adults."

The team of researchers found that the younger signers performed better on spatial tasks:

In one task, participants entered a small rectangular room with three black walls and one red wall. Identical cups were located in each of the four corners of the room. After watching the researcher hide a small object in one of the cups (to the left of the red wall), participants were blindfolded and slowly turned around until they were disoriented. They removed the blindfold and then searched for the small object.

A second task required people to rotate an object mentally. After watching the researcher hide a small object in one of four corner locations of a small box with three black walls and one red wall, the participants were blindfolded and the box was rotated. They removed their blindfold and searched for the hidden object in the rotated box.

In both experiments, the researchers found adults with more complex language skills performed better than the adults with more basic skills.

Click here to read more on the Wellesley College web site.