Learning clicking sounds is tough, especially online

In most parts of the world the clicks of Zulu and Xhosa, the languages spoken most commonly at home in South Africa, sound completely foreign. Duolingo, the world’s biggest language-learning platform, is hoping to make them more familiar. Next year it will offer lessons in both to its 40m active users.

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/10/28/a-language-teaching-app-tests-tongues-with-zulu-and-xhosa

“The most conscientious editors of my novels are not those for whom English is their first language, but the foreign translators who bring their relentless eye to the tautological phrase or factual inaccuracy – of which there are far too many. My German translator is particularly infuriating.”

This beautiful article is three years old, but it’s timely now, since Le Carré died a few days ago.

Why we should learn German | Languages | The Guardian

Research also demonstrates brain’s plasticity and ability to adapt to new language environments

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute describe their discovery that even brief, early exposure to a language influences how the brain processes sounds from a second language later in life. Even when the first language learned is no longer spoken.

It is an important finding because this research tells scientists both about how the brain becomes wired for language, but also about how that hardwiring can change and adapt over time in response to new language environments. The research has implications for our understanding of how brain plasticity functions, and may also be important information about creating educational practices geared to different types of learners. Read more.

See: Eureka Alert

(…) It’s often said that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Actually this proverb is, for the most part, not true. For much of the history of modern neuroscience, the adult brain was believed to be a fixed structure that, once damaged, could not be repaired. But research published since the 1960s has challenged this assumption, showing that it is actually a highly dynamic structure, which changes itself in response to new experiences, and adapts to injuries – a phenomenon referred to as neuroplasticity.

Collectively, this body of research suggests that one can never be too old to learn something new, but that the older they are, the harder it is for them to do so. This is because neuroplasticity generally decreases as a person gets older, meaning the brain becomes less able to change itself in response to experiences.

Some aspects of language learning become progressively more difficult with age, others may get easier. “Older people have larger vocabularies than younger ones, so the chances are your vocabulary will be as large as a native,” says Albert Costa, a professor of neuroscience who studies bilingualism at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Picking up a new language’s vocabulary is much easier for adults than learning the rules that govern its grammar or syntax. (…)

See: The Guardian

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

In the increasingly globalised world of work, multinational companies are looking to hire business high-flyers who can communicate in several different languages.

Europe’s top business schools are responding to this need; courses at Insead, IESE, HEC, and London Business School incorporate a language requirement as well as the opportunity to learn and practise another language. Insead teaches Mandarin at Fontainbleu and in Singapore.

For some schools, a language component is a compulsory part of the MBA. The Insead MBA is taught exclusively in English, so fluency in the language is a pre-requisite, but in addition to that, another language at a practical level is also required for entry – and students are expected to add a third language by the time they finish their MBA. “At Insead we believe strongly in the importance of an international outlook and the ability to work effectively in multiple cultures,” says admissions director Pejay Belland. More.

See: The Guardian

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

You’re as cold as ice, I know -Lou Gramm

We like to think that moral judgment comes in too flavors only–steadfast and rock-solid.  No one want’s to be morally wishy-washy . We apply thoughtful, consistent  principles to the resolution of any moral dilemma that happens to come down the pike. With moral certainty our strength, we reject the irrelevant when we make these important moral decisions. Hopefully.

But new evidence suggests that bilinguals don’t. Scientists have shown that moral certitude among multilinguals depends on whichever way the language wind-vane happens to be blowing at that moment. What’s the evidence for this missing moral fiber?

Researchers, Albert Costa, Alice Foucart and Sayuri Hayakaw asked respondents that classic of moral dilemmas: “Should you sacrifice one man to say five?”

You gotta think about that one. Weigh it even, since its a moral decision So with all that moral heavy lifting going on one would hope that your answer would not depend on the language of the question? Costa and team discovered that it made it  big difference. People using a foreign language made “substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas.” In other words, second-language speakers are are more likely to push. More.

See: TranslationGuy

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

This post shares the opinions of 38 language-learning experts about their favorite method for learning vocabulary. Read the article.

See: Smart language learner

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

If there was one method for learning vocabulary that you’d recommend to the world, which one would it be?

Irish students fall far, far below their EU counterparts when it comes to learning languages.

New statistics on language ability from the European statistics agency Eurostat paint a stark picture.

In the EU, half of all secondary school students study two or more languages; in Ireland, the comparable figure is only 8pc.

While in the Czech Republic two or more languages are studied by every single secondary school student, one-fifth of Irish students at Leaving Cert level study no foreign languages.

On the continent, it is normal for children to begin studying foreign languages from as young as three, often because it is compulsory on junior school curriculums. A recent report by the Royal Irish Academy said Ireland was the only country in Europe, other than Scotland, where a foreign language was not compulsory at any stage of the school curriculum. More.

See: Independent.ie

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

Modern languages are in decline at British universities. Can Google’s translation service ever fill the gap?

The number of British universities offering specialist modern-language courses is in sharp decline. Is it possible that this collapse might be partly down to the rise of free software such as Google Translate? After all, why waste several years of your life perfecting every last conversational nuance of a second language when you can listlessly prod “CAN I HAVE SOME CHIPS?” on to your phone and then wave a screen reading “POSSO TER UM POUCO CHIPS?” in the face of a disappointed Portuguese waiter?

Obviously, this is terribly misguided. Google Translate will never be any substitute for learning a foreign language, and here’s why:

1 Google Translate is only good when there’s internet. Without seriously learning a language, all you could say to a French person offline is whatever you memorised at school. In my case this would amount to “bank”, “swimming pool” and “Hello my name is Stuart, I am 11 years old”.

2 If Google Translate had been responsible for the English version of The Girl From Ipanema (originally, in Portuguese, Garota de Ipanema), Frank Sinatra would have had to croon “Girl in the golden body, sun From Ipanema, The It swung its more than a poem”, which doesn’t really scan as well.

3 If everybody relied on Google Translate, exchange trips would become a thing of the past. You’d miss that mutely chainsmoking 14-year-old Belgian boy with a full beard who glowers at you from the kitchen table.

4 “Sixty Two” translated into Filipino on Google Translate comes out as the numerals “62”. This is clearly no use to anybody.

5 United Nations summits would slow to a crawl, because translators would have to type everything anyone said into the internet to figure out what was going on. The icy silences this would create between delegates would almost definitely result in all-out, planet-ending war. More.

See: The Guardian

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

In the era of globalization, bilingualism is becoming more and more frequent, and it is considered a plus. However, can this skill turn into a disadvantage, when someone acquires aphasia? More precisely, if a bilingual person suffers brain damage (i.e. stroke, head trauma, dementia) and this results in a language impairment called aphasia, then the two languages can be disrupted, thus increasing the challenge of language rehabilitation. According to Dr. Ana Inés Ansaldo, researcher at the Research Centre of the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM), and a professor at the School of Speech Therapy and Audiology at Université de Montréal, research evidence suggests that bilingualism can be a lever — and not an obstacle — to aphasia recovery.

“In the past, therapists would ask patients to repress or stifle one of their two languages, and focus on the target language. Today, we have a better understanding of how to use both languages, as one can support the other. This is a more complex approach, but it gives better results and respects the inherent abilities of bilingual people. Considering that bilinguals may soon represent the majority of our clients, this is definitely a therapeutic avenue we need to pursue,” explained Ana Inés Ansaldo, who herself is quadrilingual. More.

Source: Science Daily

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

Every one of the Kennet School’s 280 GCSE pupils sat an exam in a modern foreign language this summer. Were this 2003, this would not be unusual for a state school. At that time studying a language was still compulsory at GCSE level, and the majority of pupils left at the age of 16 with at least one to their name. But when the government announced it was making languages optional in 2004, the decision was marked by a sharp downtown in the number of state school pupils choosing to take them.

At its lowest level, in 2010-11, just 40% of young people who attended a state school studied a language to GCSE level. That number is slowly rising, but this year it was still only 44% of the cohort who took a language.

However, the numbers at Kennet School have never dropped, because headteacher Paul Dick continued to make a language compulsory for pupils.

“English children are not necessarily motivated to learn a MFL [modern foreign language] so it is hard work,” he said. “A GCSE in French or German is considered to be difficult, but we still feel it is important so we have invested more in staffing, so we can have more than one teacher in key groups, and we also have at least three foreign language assistants every year who can link in well with youngsters and get them interested in language and culture.

“There is a tendency to think, ‘Well everybody else speaks English’, but we try to explain that big companies in this country value a MFL qualification very highly, for two reasons. Firstly, it helps to make better contact with their customers and, secondly, it demonstrates you have a practical resilience in these types of skills and an academic ability and perseverance.” More.

See: The Guardian

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

The 1,000 Words Campaign stems from concerns that the country is losing out on international trade and jobs because of poor language skills.

It aims to confront the view that only the brightest can learn a language.

The group say a vocabulary of 1,000 words would allow a speaker to hold a simple conversation.

The challenge is part of Speak to the Future, a wider campaign backed by organisations including the British Council, the CBI, the British Academy and a range of embassies and language teaching bodies. More.

See: BBC

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

The United States is a long way from being the multi-lingual society that so many of our economic competitors are. Only about 10 percent of native-born Americans — individuals who went through our education system — speak a language other than English.

But that’s not the only problem. In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that 95% of American college students studying languages were studying a Western language. That means that less than 5% of our total undergraduate population is being prepared to engage with non-European cultures at home or abroad.

To get a little more specific, the Modern Language Association reports that, in 2010, less than 100 American undergraduates studied Bengali, the 7th most spoken language worldwide. Compare that to the 215,954 who studied French, the 16th most spoken. More.

See: Huffington Post

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

Anew study by a Finnish research group has shown that speech can affect the development of neural networks before birth and have a positive effect on language acquisition. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that auditory stimuli during pregnancy can have a significant effect on the ability of the infant to accurately discriminate language changes and potentially compensate for genetic abnormalities such as dyslexia and language impairment.

Learning, the process of building knowledge or skills through experience or study, is the result of continuous development of brain neurons and their interactions with each other. More.

See: Blouin News

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

Bilingual speakers can switch languages seamlessly, likely developing a higher level of mental flexibility than monolinguals, according to Penn State linguistic researchers.

“In the past, bilinguals were looked down upon,” said Judith F. Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics and Women’s Studies. “Not only is bilingualism not bad for you, it may be really good. When you’re switching languages all the time it strengthens your mental muscle and your executive function becomes enhanced.”

Fluent bilinguals seem to have both languages active at all times, whether both languages are consciously being used or not, the researchers report in a recent issue of Frontiers in Psychology. Both languages are active whether either was used only seconds earlier or several days earlier.

Bilinguals rarely say a word in the unintended language, which suggests that they have the ability to control the parallel activity of both languages and ultimately select the intended language without needing to consciously think about it. More.

See: MedicalPress

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

AS THE new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer’s results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear—the coalition’s emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.

This marks a reversal of a long period in which English schools turned out a rising number of monoglots (see chart). The past two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the numbers of teenagers poring over French verbs, let alone the oddities of German, which as Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, observed, renders a girl neuter but a turnip feminine.

In 1993 over 315,000 pupils sat the 16-plus exam in French, compared with just over 177,000 this year. German had 108,000 entrants in 1993; there are fewer than 63,000 now. Only Spanish fared better, with 91,000 GCSE entrants this year, rising from 32,000 in 1993. Largely to blame for the slump was a decision by the Labour government in 2002 to end the compulsory status of a language in secondary schools. That accelerated a longer period of modern-languages decline, as pupils switched to subjects perceived to be easier or more practical. Now the coalition is claiming that the rise in this year’s exam entries at 16 marks the first step to correcting the resulting monolingualism. Yet progress has been modest—the number of GCSE French entrants, for example, merely returned to 2010 levels, around half the numbers of the 1990s. More.

See: The Economist

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

The age at which children learn a second language can have a significant bearing on the structure of their adult brain, according to a new joint study by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital — The Neuro at McGill University and Oxford University. The majority of people in the world learn to speak more than one language during their lifetime. Many do so with great proficiency particularly if the languages are learned simultaneously or from early in development.

The study concludes that the pattern of brain development is similar if you learn one or two language from birth. However, learning a second language later on in childhood after gaining proficiency in the first (native) language does in fact modify the brain’s structure, specifically the brain’s inferior frontal cortex. The left inferior frontal cortex became thicker and the right inferior frontal cortex became thinner. The cortex is a multi-layered mass of neurons that plays a major role in cognitive functions such as thought, language, consciousness and memory.

The study suggests that the task of acquiring a second language after infancy stimulates new neural growth and connections among neurons in ways seen in acquiring complex motor skills such as juggling. The study’s authors speculate that the difficulty that some people have in learning a second language later in life could be explained at the structural level. More.

See: Science Daily

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

The British Academy, in collaboration with the European Commission, has released a new booklet for undergraduates and school pupils (but it’s really interesting for all of us!) called “Talk the Talk: A Guide to Maximising your Prospects Using Languages”, which promotes languages as a “long-term investment for you, your career and for society”.

The guide includes 24 profiles of linguists in a range of sectors, including: the Chair of UBS; a police constable; the Deputy Director-General and Chief Operating Officer of the Confederation of British Industry; various television and sports personalities; the Head of the UK Representation of the European Commission; and a partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin.

See: From words to deeds

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.

(…) But what makes a language difficult?

How long it takes to learn a language does not answer which ones are hard independent of the learner’s first language (nor the related question “How hard is English?”) Ranking languages on a universal scale of difficulty is itself difficult and controversial. Some languages proliferate endings on verbs and nouns, like Latin and Russian. Such inflection can be hard for learners who are not used to it. Several years ago, two scholars found that smaller languages (those with less contact with other languages) tended to have more inflection than big ones. By contrast, creole languages—which arise between groups that do not share a common language—are thought by scholars to be systematically simpler than other languages, even after they become “normal” languages with native speakers. They typically lack heavy inflection.

But inflection is only one element of “hardness”. Some languages have simple sound systems (such as the Polynesian languages). Others have a wide variety of sounds, including rare ones that outsiders find hard to learn (like the languages of the Caucasus). Some languages (like English) lack or mostly lack grammatical gender. Some have dozens of genders (also known as “noun classes”) that must be learned for each noun. Languages can have rigidly fixed or flexible word order. They can put verbs before objects or even objects before subjects. Yet it is not clear how to rank the relative difficulty of exotic consonants, dozens of genders or heavy inflection. Another recent approach sought to go around the problem by finding languages that had the most unusual features, skirting the question of whether those features were “hard”. Comparing 21 feature parameters across hundreds of languages, they ranked 239 languages. Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in Mexico, was the weirdest. English came in place number 33. Basque, Hungarian, Hindi and Cantonese ranked as among the most “normal”. The researchers did not find any larger similarities between “weird” and “normal” languages. (For example, they do not claim that smaller or bigger languages tend to be “weirder”.) But again, the caveat is that this only compares which languages are unusual in a global context, not which are hard. More.

See: The Economist

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.