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.
Recent Posts
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.
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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.
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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.
Do I need to spell out the benefits of networking live with other translators? Probably not, but here’s a little list anyway:
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.
When you’ve spent many years of your life in two world cities: London and Istanbul, then a move to Devon certainly represents a change. But on those occasions when you miss the brightly lit skyscapes, the cosmopolitan hubbub and the busy shops and cafés, the bucolic countryside, spectacular coastlines and quaint streets of Devonian market towns and villages offer plenty of consolation.
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There are some places in the world where life just seems slower… Far from the frenzied bustle of Ho Chi Minh City (which locals still refer to as Saigon) – the economic powerhouse in the South – or Hanoi, the political capital in the North, Hue in Central Vietnam is a city of peace and quiet, palaces and pagodas, tombs and churches. The strains of gentle melodies waft around as you sample the spicy cuisine at cosy restaurants, or while away the time at coffee shops that once served as classrooms for the princes of the long-since deposed royal family.
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Iran is one of those countries that get a bad press internationally – we’re bombarded with images of fundamentalist mullahs, or women covered from head to toe, and dire warnings about nuclear programs… To such an extent that we tend to forget how multilingual and cosmopolitan its people are, not to mention the historic contributions of Persian culture to art, poetry, and civilisation.
Kombo na nga Dachiny, naza mwana ya Congo pe napesi bino banso mbote bisika bozali! Of course you recognised immediately, didn’t you, that this is Lingala, one of the languages of the Congo Republic, and that it means “My name is Dachiny, I'm Congolese and I'm greeting you, wherever you are!” ?
