Many of us are used to the sounds of city life from the moment we wake up. The cars revving, the trundle of the city cleaners, the distant siren and the dog barking. Not to mention the all-night amber haze of streetlamps, the low cloud of light pollution obscuring the stars, and the lingering smell of petrol fumes…
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Who needs an alarm clock when you have screeching seagulls to do the job? Especially in summer, when the influx of food-bearing tourists attracts flocks in search of tasty tidbits. But your auditory senses are not the only ones assailed in the little seaside town of Courseulles-sur-Mer in Normandy, northwestern France. When the tide is low, the air is rich with the smell of fish, seafood, weeds and salt, flooding in the moment you open the window…
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It’s hard to picture two more different places than the Kathmandu Valley and suburban Toronto, but such extreme contrasts form a natural part of the narrative of Bimal Man Shrestha’s life.
It’s 480 years old and is one of the largest cities in the Americas. Santiago de Chile (St James of Chile), to give it its full name, was founded in 1541 by the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, and has been the capital since colonial times. With a downtown core of 19th-century neoclassical architecture and winding side-streets, dotted by art deco, neo-gothic, and other styles. Santiago's cityscape is shaped by several stand-alone hills and also the soaring, if unimaginatively named, Gran Torre Santiago, the tallest skyscraper in Latin America.
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What do you do when you’re a rebellious tomboy growing up in a conservative country dominated by the Catholic Church, with education run mostly by nuns and priests, 25% unemployment, the shadow of the Troubles looming further to the North, and a national tradition for exporting its people?
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As we’ve seen throughout our series of Translation Postcards, you can find translators in historic villages, towns and cities all over the world, but few of us live in a place that boasts over 3,400 years of recorded history. Home to Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, Athens (Αθήνα) is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilisation and the birthplace of democracy, largely because of its cultural and political impact on the European continent, and in particular the Romans.
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Many are the reasons we change countries in the course of our lives. For the majority of us, those reasons are innocuous enough – we are drawn to different cultures, or climates, or lured by romance. And yet such life choices are sometimes far harder, as we’ll see in the case of translator and interpreter Mahdi Abdulbasit, who fled Ethiopia for Egypt in 2016.
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Persecution: enslavement, forced assimilation, segregation, genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II, and other human rights violations – the history, both ancient and modern, of the Roma of East-Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, is a litany of suffering.
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In this week’s Language Watch, we head for the first time to Canada, and the indigenous peoples known collectively as the First Nations. We zoom in on the northern boreal and Arctic regions and on the Dene people, who speak a group of languages that are described as Northern Athabaskan.
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It may not be a pretty city, but it’s certainly a historic one, with roots that date back to the pre-Viking, Anglo-Saxon era, and a port that was already a busy international transit hub when William the Conqueror was on the throne in the 11th century. Some of the ancient city walls are still visible – the most famous relic being the iconic Bargate.
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The world’s deaf communities have long suffered from discrimination. Aristotle himself deemed the deaf unteachable, paving the way for centuries of prejudice. It was not until the 16th century that Italian physician Girolamo Cardano proclaimed that the deaf-mute people could “hear by reading and speak by writing”.
Take a look at the video below and within seconds you’ll realise where we’re headed in this week’s Language Watch. So far in our series, we’ve travelled to Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Europe, shining a spotlight each time on minority and endangered languages throughout the world. Now for the first time, we’re in Oceania, in Australia’s Northern Territory to be precise, and the world of the Yolŋu Aboriginal people.
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It’s the city that gave us both Lionel Messi and Che Guevara, and the birthplace of the Argentine national flag. For those reasons alone it’s worth taking a much closer look at Rosario, the third largest city in Argentina, set on the pampas alongside the broad brown waters of the Paraná, which gets its oxide and colour from its origins far to the north in Brazil. Scorching hot in summer, and cold and wet in winter, at least Rosario escapes the snow.
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