Uldis Ozolins

THE IMPACT OF EUROPEAN ACCESSION UPON LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE BALTIC STATES

The deliberate changes to language regime undertaken in post-Soviet Estonia and Latvia have had significant repercussions for their accession to the EU and NATO. Charges of discrimination against Russian-speaking minorities have led countless European delegations to survey the Baltic States, resulting in a mixture of approval, advice and warnings on language, citizenship and integration issues. While these intervention shave been justified by assertions of international human rights standards, such standards as exist have been devised for very different minority situations, and their relevance to the Baltic States is often contested. The article points to an evolving critique of the minority-rights based approach of European institutions, and examines the specific sociolinguistic situation in the Baltic including the often unrecognized attitudes of the Russian-speaking minorities. The Baltic case has wider resonance for other small national languages seeking to reassert their status against former imperialistic language regimes.

Monolingual short courses for language-specific accreditation: can they work? A Sydney experience

The continuing flows of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers throughout the world place significant pressures on translating and interpreting services, particularly in finding competent practitioners in many small minority languages. Training is seen as a necessity for many such practitioners who are without qualifications and often without a professional understanding of the field. However, the small size of many of these language communities entails that established interpreting courses can often not find the number of students, or the teachers, to cater for these languages. Many attempts have been made internationally to provide short courses – often generic, sometimes language-specific – for these languages. After surveying such training internationally, this paper describes one such short course in minority languages run for women in Sydney, Australia in 2011, with an emphasis on domestic violence, health and law. The course prepared participants for work in these fields and to sit for Australia’s accreditation exams. The outcomes of the course, while positive in many ways, show the difficulties of short courses in helping a very diverse participant population achieve acceptable standards of interpreting.

The language situation in Latvia 1850–2004

Abstract Latvias sociolinguistic situation has changed dramatically over the past 150 years as a result of historical and political forces. German, Russian and Latvian have all serially been the dominant language in the territory at various times, while numerous linguistic minorities have been variously oppressed, ignored or recognised and supported. The political environment has directly affected both the number of speakers and the status of the various languages, and affects sociolinguistics today, which is still closely tied to the politics of reestablishing Latvian as the official State language after the Soviet period. Concern for the status and at times the purity of Latvian has been the leitmotif of Latvian linguistic work from the time of the national awakening in the late 1800s onwards. Newer sociolinguistic work is beginning to give a more detailed view of actual language use and variation in Latvia, but political imperatives — guarding against Russian influence and negotiating entry to Europe — still influence the direction of the sociolinguistic field.⟨p⟩

Language and Economics: Mutual Incompatibilities, or a Necessary Partnership?

Misunderstandings between economic approaches to language and the field of language policy/language planning arise from deficiencies in the literature of both camps. This paper examines four examples: (1) liaison interpreting, where traditional economic analysis points to surprising benefits of engaging interpreters, often not recognised by practitioners themselves; (2) sometimes exaggerated claims by language professionals for the economic benefits of studying languages; (3) unresolved issues in language use in international organisations and trade; and (4) misinterpretations of links between multilingualism and disadvantage. Lack of understanding by economists of language issues is often matched by illiteracy in economics on the part of language professionals.

Telephone interpreting: Understanding practice and identifying research needs

This is an exploratory inquiry into signed language interpreters’ perceptions of interpreter e-professionalism on social media, specifically Facebook. Given the global pervasiveness of Facebook, this study presents an international perspective, and reports on findings of focus groups held with a total of 12 professional signed language interpreters from the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, all of whom are also Facebook users. The findings reveal that Facebook is seen to blur the traditional boundaries between personal and professional realms – an overlap which is perceived to be compounded by the nature of the small community in which signed language interpreters typically work –necessitating boundary management strategies in order to maintain perceptions of professionalism on the site. Facebook is considered a valuable professional resource to leverage for networking, professional development, problem solving and assignment preparation, but it is also perceived as a potential professional liability for both individual interpreters and the profession at large. Maintaining client confidentiality was found to be the most pressing challenge Facebook brings to the profession. Educational measures to raise awareness about e-professionalism were generally viewed favourably.The study probes into translation students’ perception of the value of online peer feedback in improving translation skills. Students enrolled in a translation degree in Australia translated a 250-word text on two separate occasions. On each occasion, the students were given another fellow student’s translation of the same text to mark and provide anonymous peer feedback. The original translations from all the students, together with any peer feedback, were uploaded onto an online forum. The students were encouraged to download their own translation to review the peer feedback in it. They were also encouraged to download and peruse other students’ peer reviewed translations for comparison. Upon completion of the project, the students were surveyed about their perceptions and appreciation of their engagement in the process in the following three capacities: (i) as a feedback provider, (ii) as a feedback recipient, and (iii) as a peruser of other students’ work and the peer feedback therein. Results suggest that translation students appreciate online peer feedback as a valuable activity that facilitates improvement. The students found receiving peer feedback on their own translation especially rewarding, as it offered alternative approaches and perspectives on tackling linguistic/translation issues. In comparing the three capacities, students perceived reviewing feedback on their own work and perusing other students’ work as more beneficial than engaging in giving feedback to others.Title: Tarjamat al-khadamaat al-’aammah ( Community Interpreting and Translation) Author: Dr. Mustapha Taibi (University of Western Sydney) Year of publication: 2011 Publisher: Dar Assalam , Rabat (Morocco) ISBN: 978-9954-22-088-7 191 pagesAccent is known to cause comprehension difficulty, but empirical interpreting studies on its specific impact have been sporadic. According to Mazzetti (1999), an accent is composed of deviated phonemics and prosody, both discussed extensively in the TESL discipline. The current study seeks to examine, in the interpreting setting, the applicability of Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson and Koehlers (1992) finding that deviated prosody hinders comprehension more than problematic phonemics and syllable structure do. Thirty-seven graduate-level interpreting majors, assigned randomly to four groups, rendered four versions of a text read by the same speaker and then filled out a questionnaire while playing back their own renditions. Renditions were later rated for accuracy by two freelance interpreters, whereas the questionnaires analysed qualitatively. Results of analyses indicated that 1) both phonemics and prosody deteriorated comprehension, but prosody had a greater impact; 2) deviated North American English post-vowel /r/, intonation and rhythm were comprehension problem triggers. The finding may be of use to interpreting trainers, trainees and professionals by contributing to their knowledge of accent.The title Conference of the Tongues at first sight raises questions as to the particularities of its pertinence to translation studies, i.e. the range of possible subject matters subsumed, and is somewhat loosely explained in the preface by a short and factual hint to its historical origins (in sixteenth-century Spain in a paratext to a translation of Aesop). There is no further elaboration on the motivation for the choice of this title however.The market for translation services provided by individuals is currently characterized by significant uncertainty because buyers lack clear ways to identify qualified providers from amongst the total pool of translators. Certification and educational diplomas both serve to reduce the resulting information asymmetry, but both suffer from potential drawbacks: translator training programs are currently oversupplying the market with graduates who may lack the specific skills needed in the market and no certification program enjoys universal recognition. In addition, the two may be seen as competing means of establishing qualification. The resulting situation, in which potential clients are uncertain about which signal to trust, is known as a signal jam . In order to overcome this jam and provide more consistent signaling, translator-training programs and professional associations offering certification need to collaborate more closely to harmonize their requirements and deliver continuing professional development (CPD) that help align the outcomes from training and certification.Interpreting is rather like scuba diving. With just a bit of protective equipment, we interpreters plunge for a short time into an often alien world, where a mistake can be very serious, not only for ourselves but for the other divers who are depending on us to understand their surroundings. And as all who dive, we interpreters find this daily foray into a new environment fascinating, exhilarating, but also at times, challenging. One of the high-risk dive sites into which we venture often is the sea of healthcare, where the strange whale-song of medical dialogue, the often incomprehensible behavior of local denizens such as doctors, and the tricky currents of the healthcare system itself require special knowledge and skill to navigate successfully. Did you ever wish for a dive manual for unique world of healthcare? Well, here’s a good one, from linguist, RN and interpreter trainer, Dr. Ineke Crezee of New Zealand.Among all the difficulties inherent in interpreting, numbers stand out as a common and complex problem trigger. This experimental study contributes to research on the causes of errors in the passive simultaneous interpretation (SI) of numbers. Two groups of Italian Master’s degree students (one for English and one for German) were asked to interpret simultaneously a number-dense speech from their respective B language into their mother tongue, Italian. Note-taking was allowed during the test and both the study participants and their lecturers completed a questionnaire afterwards. Data analysis was conducted with statistical and qualitative methods, combining the cognitivist and contextualist approach. The objective was to ascertain whether one main variable may be held responsible for the high error rate related to interpreting numbers and the difficulty perceived by students in the task. The analysis quantifies the relative impact of different causes of difficulties on participants’ delivery of numbers. It stresses the crucial role of the subjective variable represented by interpreters’ skills. Didactic implications and directions for future research are discussed in the conclusion.

Language Policy and its Rationales

David Ingram’s career has traversed several decades of shifting rationale for language policy in Australia. Government and institutional initiatives have at various times favoured traditional foreign language teaching, multicultural imperatives and language diversity, concern for Asian economically strategic languages, or a focus on literacy in English. Ingram’s work has been based on the importance of the traditional teaching of languages in education, but his promotion of diverse rationales for language learning, together with his technological innovations such as the Australian (later International) Second Language Proficiency Rating, have given him a distinct place in the complex development of Australian language policy. While Ingram among others is now concerned that changes in government funding and overarching ideologies have recently been capricious in their effects on language issues, many of the innovative practices introduced in language education, broadcasting, language services and other areas have tenaciously survived.

A Language Policy for Australia

Questions of language policy in Australia have rarely been addressed in a comprehensive manner. Migrant communities have long been concerned with an array of issues covering maintenance of their own languages, and access to suitable English teaching and to services through translating and interpreting, but policy in these areas has developed in a haphazard manner, with often little sustained interest shown by Australian institutions. A good deal of interest therefore has been created by the deliberations of the Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts, which has since May 1982 been considering the “development and implementation of a co-ordinated language policy for Australia”. The establishment of such an inquiry was pressed both by ethnic representative bodies (migrant and Aboriginal) and by organizations of language professionals – linguists, applied linguists, language teachers and academics. Indeed the language issues that have often troubled migrant communities have also in various ways animated language professionals, who have had to cope for example with a decline in foreign language studies in schools, difficulties in establishing and maintaining community language programs, disorganization of translator/interpreter services, serious underresourcing of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses, and above all a severe lack of data and information which could be used as a basis for planning. The Commonwealth Department of Education has been a prime mover for such an inquiry since the mid-1970s, and through its contacts, especially with language professionals, has had a chance to develop a coherent outlook on language – at least those aspects related to education. Also, the Department has assisted or itself conducted most of the important investigations into language teaching in Australia over the last decade: no fewer than 22 reports or submissions are documented by the Department since 1975, attesting to the quiet but persistent growth of interest in this area. The work of a small group within the Department resulted in an important document that appeared just after the announcement of the Senate inquiry – Towards a National Language Policy . Written to encourage interest in language policy and to test community reactions, it set out an extensive agenda of issues that are closely reflected in the actual terms of reference of the Senate inquiry [see pp. 45-46 Terms of Reference].

Diaspora, Islam, Australia: reflections on Australian Arab case studies1

Abstract Theoretical writings on diaspora and on Arab diasporas in particular have stressed the phenomenon of emerging transnational identities, particularly international Islam. This article draws on individual in-depth interviews with two Muslim Arabs in Australia to explore issues of identity and politics and to better understand aspects of the Arabic diaspora. Our first case study shows the persistence of a clear Arab nationalism and diasporic orientation, devoid of religious emphasis, in a Palestinian case. Our second case study shows a decided turning to aspects of Islam, but its motivations are fundamentally embedded in combating social exclusion and marginalisation in specific Australian contexts, with little concern for transnational religious or diasporic identification.