ProZ.com Blog

Take a few minutes to look at the video and take in the sights and sounds of a way of life threatened by extinction. This is the Juma culture in Brazil’s Amazon region. The language, also known as Juma, is a dialect of Kagwahiva, a branch of the Tupii Guaraani family of Amazonian languages. Juma and its phonetics were studied by American missionaries Arne and Joyce Abrahamson, from the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the 1970s.

As we’ll see throughout this series, life can take us on some strange journeys from where we started out to where we end up. In the case of Paul Urwin, who was born and grew up in the sleepy Somerset town of Street, (main claim to fame: it’s home to Clarks, the famous British footwear brand), a number of decisions and chance encounters led him to the life he now leads in Bogotá, Colombia, fluent in Spanish, a happy husband and father, and of course Head of Training at ProZ.com.

Once again, begin by closing your eyes and listening to the haunting tones of this song.

Long before it became a package-holiday destination, or the darling of the low-cost weekend-break generation, the island of Mallorca was known as a favourite summer getaway for royalty, as well as a splendid refuge for artists, writers and musicians in search of inspiration. Golden and turquoise coastlines, magnificent mountain views and rolling hills dotted with vineyards, almond, olive and citrus groves. Away from the glamour of the beaches, the rural backwaters are full of orange trees and donkeys, small villages and traditional ways of life, folk traditions and religious feast days, bonfires and dancing demons, all under clear Mediterranean skies…

In future, our Thursday morning posts, as mentioned last week, will be dedicated to minority and endangered languages throughout the world, helping raise awareness of this vital area of the work of Translation Commons, and simply enhancing our knowledge of a linguistic diversity that’s often hidden from view.

Let’s start with a pronunciation lesson: it’s Kyiv (rhymes with peeve), not Kee-eff. Got it? At least that’s what your modern internationalist in the know says. Problem is, not many people are in the know when it comes to Ukraine. From the media we might glean snippets about wars, orange-coloured revolutions, and political turmoil, not to mention the infamy of Chernobyl. And yes, there’s a territorial war with Russia going on as we speak in the East of the country. But that’s a long way from Kyiv, a vibrant city with a great deal to offer, and where everyone’s in a hurry, whether in bright summer sunshine or crunching over a thick layer of snow.

ProZ.com is in a partnership with Translation Commons to promote and support their important campaigns.

One of the most impressive of those campaigns is the LDI, or Language Digitisation Initiative, which works towards making indigenous languages readable and writeable in onscreen format.

The air is heady with incense. Wherever you look there are colourful offerings – in the middle of a busy street, on the pavement, in little shrines in front of houses, in paddy fields, on the beach and of course at the feet of statues. Dressed in traditional lace tops, multi-coloured sashes and sarongs, women bear these offerings on trays – sometimes even riding a motorbike at the same time. Amid these timeless scenes, the sound of Hindu chanting alternates with the Muslim call to prayer floating in the air.

The country where you were born and bred and spent your first 11 years implodes into civil war, with warlords running riot, and militia groups vying for domination of the capital Mogadishu. Ongoing armed conflict, insecurity, lack of state protection, and recurring humanitarian crises expose your fellow-Somali civilians to serious abuse, resulting in millions of internally displaced people, with many living unassisted and vulnerable. As a family, there aren’t that many choices open to you, if all you want is a quiet life, and a chance to educate your children.

As you know, ProZ.com works closely with Boostlingo to provide Remote Simultaneous Interpreters (RSI), and we have a whole bunch of unsung heroes who are not only providing vital input to communities and individuals in equally unsung places, but making good money from home, popping up whenever their services are needed in real time.

Not many translators wake up every morning to the sound of cockatoos. Or find possums in their back yard. Or set out for a picnic, only to be joined by kangaroos, wombats or spiny anteaters. And don’t forget those sturdy shoes when out hiking in snake season. But then again, not many translators live in Canberra in Australia.

These days, the most oft-cited example of an isolated country ploughing its own furrow, cut off from the rest of the world, is North Korea, but there were long decades in the aftermath of World War II when Albania was a strong contender for the title…

It was a humble beginning. One of eleven children, nine of whom are still alive, Thomas Chahweta grew up in a rural village in Zimbabwe. As in many countries in the South, children were seen by the previous generation as an investment. His parents were subsistence farmers and he and his siblings worked hard in the fields growing crops, selling the excess harvest to pay for school fees.

In March 2020, perhaps inspired by the fact that travel was fast becoming a thing of the past amid a global lockdown, I came up with the idea of a series of Translation Postcards for ProZ.com, featuring colleagues from all around the world — a chance to share an insight into their localities, lives, professional ups and downs, and even habits and diets.