translation agency<\/a>, an occasional translator myself, and\u00a0a\u00a0world traveler \u2013 as I enjoy the multicultural delights of Hoi An, Vietnam, a delightful place and a fascinating m\u00e9lange of Viet tribal cultures, Chinese, Japanese, French colonial, and\u00a0\u2013 last but not least —\u00a0American\u00a0linguistic\u00a0traditions, for better and for worse.\u00a0The modern fate of the Vietnamese language, and its\u00a0Southeast Asian cousins, was\u00a0formed in this primordial colonial\u00a0soup.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Southeast Asia\u2019s\u00a0Linguistic\u00a0Romance with Roman\u00a0Characters<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Vietnamese is the Austroasiatic language with\u00a0by far the fewest characters per word and\u00a0by far the most speakers, some 80 million. Most\u00a0are in this\u00a0serpentine Southeast Asian coastal\u00a0nation\u00a0but many, thanks to the tortured\u00a0colonial\u00a0history of this land,\u00a0are flung far in a substantial Vietnamese diaspora. Originally,\u00a0the Vietnamese appropriated Chinese\u00a0pictograms from their northern neighbour,\u00a0but\u00a0colonizing\u00a0European missionaries \u2013 notably Alexander Rhodes\u00a0— faithfully and fatefully transcribed\u00a0the problematic pictograms into Roman characters,\u00a0adding a plethora of diacritics above the Latin letters to communicate the variety of tones and\u00a0pronunciations of this\u00a0complex\u00a0language.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thailand,\u00a0by contrast,\u00a0was\u00a0never colonized and therefore, preserved intact its flowing language of no less than 38\u00a0squiggly\u00a0characters and a healthy collection of diacritics for its somewhat simpler set of tones. Any Thai\u00a0businessperson or educator\u00a0will tell you that having a non-Latin character set\u00a0is a deterrent for economic integration and fluency in Western tongues.\u00a0Former British colony\u00a0Malaysia, by contrast, adopted Roman characters and abandoned diacritics.\u00a0But Thailand, despite attaching itself inextricably to its royal linguistic traditions, had the countervailing influences of\u00a0tilting West and resisting its northern neighbour in modern times, currying favor with the world powers and thus gaining a head start in technological innovation and economic development.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I have a\u00a0family connection to the preservation of linguistic heritage in this region. My brother Peter is among the foremost experts in the translation of traditional Lao palm leaf manuscripts, preserving this\u00a0traditional means of cultural recording\u00a0and this endangered language\u00a0and literature\u00a0for posterity.\u00a0But though Lao moved from palm\u00a0leaves to paper, it never abandoned its squiggly character set. But the leaves \u2013at least some of them — have been digitized.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Holy Writ:\u00a0its Linguistic Preservation and Resurrection<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And how can\u00a0we\u00a0ignore, at the other end of Asia,\u00a0the linguistic heritage of Israel, my homeland, where the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is literally enshrined as the foremost national cultural treasure, proving as it does that the Hebrew language used in everyday parlance in Tel Aviv was used and recorded more than two millennia ago by the residents of Judea, clinging to existence on cliffs above the Dead Sea and preserving their holy writ after the Roman invasion and expulsion at the time of Jesus. Those scrolls are now sequestered in a nuclear-proof bunker in Jerusalem, so great is their importance to Israel\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Nor can we neglect the sequel of that legacy as forged in the last century by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who literally raised the Hebrew language from the dead\u00a0as his indomitable will forced first his family and then his entire culture to resurrect this moribund Biblical tongue to unify a nation of immigrants returning to their long-lost homeland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Recovering Linguistic Heritages Still at Risk<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Across the Red Sea in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone once shed light for the first time on how to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphics,\u00a0a simultaneous translation of an edict on a stele to the Egyptian demotic script and the ancient Greek language,\u00a0key to unlocking the treasure trove of the Pharaoh\u2019s magnificent pyramidical tombs and this wonders of that otherwise lost civilization. That stone today is emblematic of the pivotal role that translation plays in cultural preservation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That struggle is ever underway. African languages die out with each passing year, and with them this history and culture of the tribes that spoke them. Even as Brits and Americans sponsor massive programs for language teaching to cement English as the world\u2019s\u00a0lingua franca<\/em>, there are voices which resist what they see as\u00a0a\u00a0linguistic\u00a0legacy of\u00a0colonialism, regardless of the economic benefits.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Swahili with 100 million\u00a0speakers has some longevity assured, but less popular or localized languages are at risk of going the way of Sanskrit, among the oldest languages in the world.\u00a0Nigeria considers English its official language, even though few of its citizens speak it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Some comfort may be taken by efforts to\u00a0resuscitate the Berber tongue of\u00a0Tamazight, spoken by nomadic tribes\u00a0in the deserts of North Africa,\u00a0but\u00a0long suppressed by Arab nationalist regimes. Now Morocco and Algeria have\u00a0at last\u00a0recognized its validity as a national language.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Machine Translation is\u00a0Rewriting the Rules of Language<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But these days\u00a0there\u2019s another revolution. Neural machine\u00a0translation, driven by innovations in Artificial Intelligence as applied on and through the devices we carry in our pockets and hold in our hands, to make sense of the world around us. Our\u00a0iPhones and\u00a0iPads are the\u00a0Rosetta\u00a0tablets of our generation, conveying in algorithms\u00a0and neural networks the distilled wisdom of all those who trod before us, and their language.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
More than a hundred top languages of the world and thousands of linguistic combinations are now available for us to hear,\u00a0read and voice, even if we ourselves don\u2019t do the vocalizing. We\u00a0press buttons for the magic to occur.\u00a0Our\u00a0personal interpreters instantly translate English to Chinese and back again, doing what previously was the exclusive talent of linguists, document translators\u00a0and interpreters. Each of us can now read a sign or a menu in a language we know nothing about.\u00a0We can bark instructions to cab drivers, or try to seduce\u00a0that lovely Lao lass with honey words. Who is our personal interpreter who gets the rides and gets the girl?\u00a0Our phones.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What is a linguist now? Who is a translator now?\u00a0Will online machine translation one day replace professional translation services? Will translation apps replace translation companies? Or will translating algorithms be made to serve new masters, not replacing but supplementing the skills of human linguists,\u00a0and translation companies\u00a0and, in the process, perhaps, preserving endangered\u00a0languages\u00a0or even bringing the dead ones\u00a0back to everlasting life?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Who, ultimately, controls translation technology? We do, at least for now, because we control our phones.\u00a0With diminishing professional translation services or the most cunning of linguists, everyday\u00a0joes\u00a0have\u00a0become, effortlessly and unwitting,\u00a0expert\u00a0polyglots.\u00a0We hold the power of the word, and thus the world, in our hot little hands.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We have met the universal and eternal Translator. It\u00a0is\u00a0now us.<\/p>\n
Contributed by April Escototo \u00a0\u00a0 www.tomedes.com <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the beginning there was the word. Before the word, the world was formless and void.\u00a0By letting there be light, a distinction\u00a0was made\u00a0between this and that.\u00a0This distinction is what\u00a0separates us from the less linguistically gifted. Here we will talk about how the profession of linguists and translators has shaped and is still shaping our understanding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":663,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":895,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions\/895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ifla.org\/literacy-reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}