Thursday, December 30, 2010
ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News. During his visit to Diyarbakır, President Gül emphasizes the official language of Turkey is Turkish while embracing other languages used in the country. Saying he is proud of the different elements in Turkey, Gül adds, ‘We should work together in a constructive, positive manner in order to solidify our country’.
Traveling to the Southeast during a period of tensions over the Kurdish issue, the president reaffirmed Thursday that Turkey’s official language is Turkish, but said other languages used in the country are also “Turkey’s languages.”
“The official language of the Republic of Turkey is Turkish. This will continue in this way. The language of the state and the public offices is Turkish, too. However, we have citizens using different languages,” President Abdullah Gül told reports in Diyarbakır on Thursday. “Kurdish is used here and there are some other citizens using Arabic in other places. All these are ours, [they are] our languages.”
Gül was warmly welcomed by a large group of citizens in the Southeast Anatolian city, where he was greeted with flowers instead of protests. Visiting the office of the governor of Diyarbakır, the president said he had visited the city two times since assuming office and that he was very pleased to be back.
“Diyarbakır is one of the most important provinces in Turkey. Diyarbakır has been the center of civilization, trade and culture throughout history. I am here to see the problems of Diyarbakır,” Gül told reporters.
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Tags: Kurdish, Turkish
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By Jason Gutierrez (AFP) – 2 hours ago
MANILA — The Philippines is wrestling with what authorities say is a language monster invading youth-speak in Internet social networks and mobile phone text messaging.
The phenomenon has triggered enormous social debate, with the government declaring an “all out war” against the cyber-dialect, called ‘jejemon’, but the Catholic church defending it as a form of free expression.
The word ‘jejemon’ is derived from ‘jeje’ as a substitute for ‘hehe’ — the SMS term for laughter — and then affixing it with ‘mon’ — taken from the popular Japanese anime of cute trainable monsters called “Pokemon.”
Education Secretary Mona Valisno believes it could blunt the Philippines’ edge in English proficiency, which has long helped the impoverished country attract foreign investment and sustain its lucrative outsourcing industry.
“Texting or using wrong English and wrong spelling could be very bad,” Valisno told reporters recently as she declared her war on jejemon, urging teachers and parents to encourage the nation’s youth to use correct English.
“What I am concerned about is the right construction, grammar. This is for their own improvement, for them to be able to land good jobs in the future.”
Jejemon emerged over the past year as young people tried to shorten text messages on mobile phones, language experts say.
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Нашим соотечественникам на Украине будет легче изучать родной язык
Члены президиума Международного совета российских соотечественников рассказали во время онлайн-конференции «Роль общественных объединений российских соотечественников в развитии российско-украинских отношений» о дальнейших перспективах изучения русского языка на территории Украины. Во время трансляции встречи, которая проходила в Киеве, они также обсудили вопросы взаимодействия Международного совета российских соотечественников со структурами Организации Объединенных Наций – ООН и Европарламента, а также проблем русскоязычных граждан и других меньшинств Украины.
С момента создания Международного совета российских соотечественников (который объединяет свыше семисот организаций из более чем пятидесяти стран) заседание его президиума впервые прошло в Киеве.
Накануне президент Украины Виктор Янукович лично принимал делегацию МСРС. В этом члены президиума совета увидели важное и знаменательное событие, знак внимания и уважения со стороны президента Украины к российским соотечественникам, проживающим во всех странах мира.
По мнению депутата Верховной рады Украины, председателя правозащитного общественного движения «Русскоязычная Украина» Вадима Колесниченко, во многом именно благодаря объединениям соотечественников проблемы русско-культурных граждан Украины представлялись на европейском уровне и даже на уровне Организации Объединенных Наций.
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Tags: Russian, Ukrainian
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By Anita McNaught. SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2010, 20:30 MECCA TIME, 17:30 GMT
Turkey’s history as a corridor and a prize for migrating and trading peoples – whether nomads, refugees or conquering empires – has made it, in the words of etymologist Professor George Hewitt, a “linguistic treasure-trove”.
But if more is not done to save these languages, it could become a linguistic graveyard.
Unesco has classified 15 languages spoken in Turkey as “endangered” and criticised the country for not doing enough to save them.
But language – and linguistic and cultural identity – has often been an explosive issue in modern Turkey, where many Turkish speakers view any diversification of Turkey’s “Turkishness” as a threat to the integrity of the nation state.
One of the languages on the endangered list is Laz.
Laz was spoken by a people who originally lived in the Black Sea region – an area that also includes parts of modern Georgia.
The various forms of this tongue are known as Kartvelian.
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Tags: Laz
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Reported by: Steve Linscomb. Last Update: 5/13 8:46 am
SAN ANTONIO-Census workers are knocking on doors to get unanswered forms, but what would you do if that worker couldn’t speak your language? That’s what happened to one woman recently. When we first asked the Census Bureau about this incident that a viewer wrote us about, they found it hard to believe, but when we told them we ran into the very worker ourselves, and he really could not speak english, they had some questions to answer.
Sylvia Turner told us she was shocked. The census worker she talked to was very nice and courteous, but could not hardly put two or three english words together. “I tried, I stood there, I tried to be very patient and he could not speak one work clearly.”
She said she was surprised because she thought every census worker was tested for fluency in at least english. She didn’t want to get the worker in trouble, but somehow, the system broke down.
Her question was “are they speaking to these individuals or are they just taking applications.”
When we cruised around this north side neighborhood we happened to run into a census worker. And wouldn’t you know it…it had to be the same guy, because after talking to him for ten minutes, neither one of us knew what the other was trying to say. We didn’t want to embarrass him so we aren’t identifying him, but we did ask the census bureau if workers are tested and screened to communicate with the public.
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Tags: English
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Tue, May 11, 2010, The Sunday Times. By Janadas Devan, Review Editor
Many foreigners would have been baffled by the passion Singaporeans have displayed debating the place of the mother tongue languages in the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).
Such intensity over an examination for 12-year-olds? Such furore over whether the mother tongues should have the same weight as mathematics or English for entry to secondary schools? Can the future of Chinese, Malay or Indian culture here really turn on the PSLE?
People are passionate about this issue because language equals identity. We use mathematics; we not only use but also are the languages we speak. Nobody is likely to feel justified knowing eight multiplied by eight is 64; we are justified by the culture that shapes our world-view and the language that gives us access to that culture.
The equation of language and identity, moreover, tends to be sharper in multilingual societies than in monolingual ones. A Chinese in Beijing, for example, wouldn’t spend any time wondering if he is Chinese; he simply is. By contrast, questions of identity can become fraught for Chinese in Singapore precisely because one can choose between languages in multilingual societies – and with that, there is the possibility of particular identities atrophying.
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By Kevin Dougherty and Hubert Bauch, Montreal Gazette May 10, 2010
MONTREAL — As the Quebec government prepares to unveil its replacement to Bill 104 this week — which is expected to clamp down even harder on the loophole that allows access to English schooling — a new survey of Quebecers’ attitudes on education shows that two out of three prefer the right to send their children to any school in the province, public or private.
The poll, conducted for The Gazette by Leger Marketing, asked whether students other than those now allowed, including francophones, should have access to English-language schools if they wish.
A total of 66 per cent of a representative sample of Quebecers agreed that they should, including a 61 per cent clear majority of francophones.
Non-francophones were even more overwhelmingly in favour, at 87 per cent.
Marcus Tabachnick sees generational change in the results.
“The average 30 or 35-year-old today has a very different view of language than does the average 60 or 70-year-old,” said Tabachnick, chairman of Montreal’s Lester B. Pearson School Board who argues that the government has a responsibility to ensure the viability of English schools by respecting the Supreme Court ruling last fall that struck down Bill 104.
“This is about the future of the anglophone community in Quebec,” Tabachnick says.
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Tags: English, French
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Robert McCrum. The Observer, Sunday 9 May 2010
‘Throw away your dictionaries!’ is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In this extract from his new book, Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of a linguistic phenomenon – and its links to big money.
Globalisation is a word that first slipped into its current usage during the 1960s; and the globalisation of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation. Combined with the biggest IT innovations since Gutenberg, it continues to inspire the most comprehensive transformation of our society in 500, even 1,000, years. This is a story I have followed, and contributed to, in a modest way, ever since I wrote the BBC and PBS television series The Story of English, with William Cran and Robert MacNeil, in the early 1980s. When Bill Gates was still an obscure Seattle software nerd, and the latest cool invention to transform international telephone lines was the fax, we believed we were providing a snapshot of the English language at the peak of its power and influence, a reflection of the Anglo-American hegemony. Naturally, we saw our efforts as ephemeral. Language and culture, we knew, are in flux. Any attempts to pin them down would be antiquarianism at best, doomed at worst. Besides, some of the experts we talked to believed that English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants. The Story of English might turn out to be a last hurrah.
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Tags: English, Globish
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By Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune. May 07, 2010, 5:27PM
Vietnamese fishers facing an economic catastrophe from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are in double jeopardy — facing lost fishing income and isolated by the language barrier from government and oil industry programs to keep them informed and send them temporary relief.
No one speaks Vietnamese at a Delaware-based contractor hired by BP to accept claims applications from fishers, and there are few or no Vietnamese speakers in BP’s program to hire fishing vessels to fight the spill. Even U.S. Sen. David Vitter acknowledged that he has no Vietnamese speaker on his staff to field emergency complaints from Vietnamese fishing families. He promised to correct that soon.
All those revelations surfaced Friday when 200 Vietnamese fishers from Texas to Florida gathered Friday at Mary Queen of Vietnam Parish to be briefed on the spill by BP and state and federal officials — and to tell those officials they are out of the communications loop.
The Rev. Vien The Nguyen provided live translation between briefers and audience.
Vitter and U.S. Rep Anh “Joseph” Cao addressed the families, with additional briefings from officials from the Coast Guard, EPA, Small Business Administration, the city’s emergency operations office and BP, among others.
Joel Waltzer, an environmental lawyer who has worked with the Vietnamese community on landfill issues after Hurricane Katrina, urged the group to organize as it did in those days and press for useful, accurate information in their language.
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Tags: Vietnamese
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April 28, 2010|By Ron Grossman, Tribune reporter
Chicago isn’t quite what it was a century ago, when the city’s Association of Commerce half boasted, half complained that its “confusion of tongues is the worst since Babel.”
That view of Chicago was remarked on by visitors for decades. But a new report on the nation’s linguistic diversity, released Wednesday by the Census Bureau, documents how those bragging rights now belong firmly to New York and Los Angeles. Both of those cities have greater concentrations of foreign-language speakers than Chicago.
That is not to say the king’s English hasn’t continued to give ground to other tongues in and around the Windy City. In Middle America, Illinois is unrivaled as a home to transplanted cultures: 21.8 percent of residents now speak something other than English around their dinner tables, the report said.
Chicago still has more Polish speakers than any other American city. Its enduring linguistic stew ranks it among the top four cities with speakers of Arabic (4th), German (2nd), Greek (2nd), Gujarati (2nd), Hindi (3rd), Hungarian (4th), Italian (3rd), Korean (4th), Russian (3rd), Serbo-Croatian (2nd), Spanish (4th) and Urdu (2nd).
While the report documented a big increase in Spanish speakers throughout the U.S., Spanish now is spoken by almost a million people in Chicago and its nearby suburbs — a number equal to one-third of Cook County residents who report knowing only English, the report showed.
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By ANDREW JACOBS. Published: May 2, 2010
SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
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Tags: English
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Published: April 29, 2010 at 6:17 PM
WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) — A U.S. Census Bureau report indicates 20 percent of residents 5 years and older speak a language other than English at home.
The report, which analyzes data collected between 1980 and 2007, found the number of residents speaking a language other than English at home more than doubled during the past three decades, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday.
The census said the number of Spanish speakers in the United States increased by 211 percent, or 23.4 million.
The report also said Chicago, once home to the largest population of foreign language speakers, has been overtaken in the category by New York and Los Angeles.
Source: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/04/29/Census-Foreign-language-speakers-doubled/UPI-62231272579421/
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Jonny Dymond, The Observer, Sunday 25 April 2010
The phrase “plucky Belgium” is not heard much any more. When the country’s neutrality was violated in 1914, and the allied newspapers were full of wild stories of raped nuns and babies being tossed on to the bayonets of fearsome Huns, Belgium was a plucky place. But over the decades, its reputation has slid. Contempt, genial or otherwise, is the general tone used when writing or speaking about this wet corner of northern Europe. Upon entering liberated Belgium, a British general is reported to have remarked that the Belgians appeared to have eaten their way through the war. That set the standard for the next 60 years of commentary.
This is curious, because Belgium is a glimpse of what Europe might have been, might become and will never be, depending on your view. Its ethnic divisions between French-speaking Wallonia and Flemish-speaking Flanders, constitutionally entrenched through linguistic separation, have driven the country ever more frequently towards ungovernability.
Last week saw the five-party coalition government fall as outraged Flemish liberals withdrew over the inability of anyone to agree on a sensible compromise over a mixed constituency that allows French-speaking Walloons to vote for Flemish parties, thereby breaking the constitutional separation between Francophone and Flemish political groups.
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2010-04-25 08:50:00
When advocate Govinder Singh rose to make an argument in the Delhi High Court this month, he did what no lawyer had ever done before him and addressed the judge in Hindi.
Singh’s action was generally applauded for striking an overdue blow against a decades-old rule that insists on English — the enduring legacy of British colonial rule — as the working language of the Indian capital’s top judicial bench.
A similar linguistic challenge was thrown down last November by Abu Azmi, a newly-elected legislator in the Maharashtra state assembly, when he opted to take his oath of office in Hindi, rather than the state language of Marathi.
Azmi’s reward was to be slapped and roughed up on the floor of the assembly by four state MPs from a right-wing party that campaigns aggressively for the rights of the state’s Marathi-speaking majority.
Language has always been a battleground both within and between nation states, but only in a country as astonishingly diverse as India has it been fought with such frequency and on so many different fronts.
While confrontations in courtrooms or state legislatures grab the media spotlight, smaller skirmishes occur on a daily basis — not least in the homes of the growing number of mixed-language families.
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20.04.10 – 11:48
La Commission de l’Intérieur du Sénat a adopté mardi une proposition de loi de Christine Defraigne (MR) visant à assurer que les appels d’urgence puissent être traités dans la langue de l’appelant, à condition que ce soit l’une des trois langues nationales ou l’anglais.
La ministre de l’Intérieur Annemie Turtelboom a estimé le coût de la mesure à 3 millions d’euros sur base annuelle.
Amendée la proposition prévoit également d’offrir aux muets et malentendants la possibilité de s’exprimer par voie électronique.
La proposition a été adoptée à l’unanimité moins l’abstention du Vlaams Belang.
Source: http://www.rtbf.be/info/belgique/sante/les-appels-durgence-bientot-traites-dans-la-langue-de-lappelant-208684
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Submitted by Ketan Mukherjee on Fri, 04/09/2010 – 09:54
MPs have stated that the General Medical Council must be allowed to carry out tests as a ‘matter of extreme urgency’ as failing to check skills of overseas doctors working in the NHS has cost lives.
Language skills or clinical competence of European doctors can not be checked by the doctors’ regulator when registering these doctors to work as GPs in health services under an EU directive.
Despite being capable to conduct language and competency tests on doctors from the rest of the world, it must accept qualifications from within Europe and cannot do further exams.
The Health Select Committee stated that the prevailing rule should be changed following the case of David Gray, who was killed following a fatal dose by a German doctor Daniel Ubani.
Mike O’Brien, health minister said, “I am making absolutely clear that PCTs should have been, by law, since 2004 looking at language skills. They had no discretion on this; it was a legal obligation. They should be doing it now. If they have not been doing it, and we know Cornwall was not doing it, then they were in breach of the law.”
The EU Directive is due to be reviewed in 2012.
Source: http://topnews.net.nz/content/23174-gmc-should-carry-language-tests-doctors
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By AL BAKER and RAY RIVERA. Published: April 9, 2010
The Justice Department has begun reviewing how the New York Police Department interacts with New Yorkers who do not speak English, focusing on whether language barriers play a role in matters like car stops, emergency calls, arrests, crime prevention and the filing of complaints.
In a letter this week outlining its effort, the federal government emphasized that its review was a “routine audit,” to determine if the city’s central police agency was complying with federal civil rights laws.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the audit had not been prompted by a complaint, but rather was part of a standard review process of agencies that serve large numbers of people with little or no English proficiency.
The department has conducted about 50 such reviews since 2002, when it issued guidelines requiring all recipients of Justice Department grants to provide services to non-English speakers, said the spokeswoman, Sarah Matz.
The police departments of Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia are among those that have been audited, but this will be the first review in New York, she said.
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By CHRISTINE ARMARIO (AP) – 1 day ago
MIAMI — Schoolchildren who are still learning English made progress on state tests over the last three years, according to a report that may indicate tougher accountability standards have resulted in positive gains among a growing segment of the U.S. public school population.
In a study released Wednesday, the nonprofit Center on Education Policy looked at the performance of English language learners — those students with limited English skills — on state tests in math and reading from 2006 to 2008, the years after federal testing for this group under the federal No Child Left Behind law became finalized.
The study notes gains across many states: Twenty-five of 35 states with sufficient data made gains in fourth grade reading among English language learners. In grades four and eight in reading and math, 70 percent of those states made gains in the number of students scoring as “proficient.”
“The report ought to offer some hope that with all the kids in the country now who are English language learners because of immigration, they are progressing,” said CEP director Jack Jennings. “Not as fast as we would want, but the accountability on school districts is resulting on more attention to these kids and them doing better on tests.”
While offering some positive news, the study also noted significant gaps between proficiency levels among English language learners and other students: Of the 35 states examined, 11 had differences of more than 30 percentage points between English-learner students and their non-ELL counterparts.
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Tags: English
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Updated: Wed Apr. 07 2010 6:27:19 PM
A team of Parti Quebecois researchers crunched numbers from Statistics Canada and claims that English will surpass French on the island of Montreal by 2016.
The report says if present trends continue, the percentage of Francophone on the island of Montreal will fall to 43 percent by 2016.
Further, it points out that the usage of English is increasing, while French is falling.
According to the study, between 2001 and 2006, the use of English at home went up 3.3 percent in Montreal, while the use of French went down 1.7 percent.
The data also appears to indicate the learning of English is more attractive than learning French.
“Your power of attraction of gaining people, of getting them in the Anglophone culture, is five times greater than in the French language and French culture,” said the PQ’s language and culture critic Pierre Curzi.
Curzi is raising the alarm, saying the study is proof that the French language in the province is under threat.
“What we see is that there is a big movement towards the English culture but its not proportional to the number in Montreal,” he said.
Christine St. Pierre, Quebec’s culture minister, said the PQ study is nothing but fear-mongering.
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Tags: English, French
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Jul 9, 2009
KATHMANDU – The issue of official language(s) has never been as sensitive in Nepal as it is now. While the interim statute maintains the continuity of Nepali, in Devnagari script, as the language of official communication, some members of the 601-strong Constituent Assembly want to add 11 more languages to the list, giving them the same status, while others are advocating for the addition of Hindi.
Otherwise, the members will resort to writing “notes of dissent”, unwittingly using an English expression to press their point. One contention is that since Nepal is now a republic, it should adopt a language policy to de-link the country’s monarchical past.
If all 11 languages gain equal status with Nepali as demanded, that will still leave Nepal’s 60 other languages and dialects, which are spoken by just 1% of the population in a country of over 25 million people, off the list.
But does Nepal have the required resource-base to have a dozen official languages? Yes, it is possible, said commentator Shyam Shrestha. Since democracy requires equality, the state should be prepared to pay a concomitant price for it, he said in a recent newspaper article.
Countries often cited for their liberal language policies are Switzerland, Canada, India and South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa, for example, has accepted 11 languages to address some ethnic communities. But with the passage of time, English, although fifth on the list, has emerged as the most preferred language there. Efforts to promote Afrikaans as the first language have not produced encouraging results.
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Tags: Nepali
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Last updated July 5, 2009 12:22 p.m. PT By HEATHER CLARK, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — When Brittany Arviso was old enough to take part in a Navajo coming-of-age ceremony, her family grappled with the preparations. Not knowing where to find some of the items for the ceremony, they turned to her grandparents for help.
Her father and grandfather went up into the mountains to get some plants and other things for the four-day ceremony.
But there was one thing that 12-year-old Brittany didn’t have and wished she did had – knowing more of her native language so she could better understand the ceremony.
“If I had been able to speak and understand a little language, it would have been easier and more helpful,” she said.
Her parents hope that a new Navajo language summer school offered by Albuquerque Public Schools this year will eventually help her learn more about her culture and language. Her 10-year-old brother, Lucas, is in the classes, and Brittany may be able to join next year if the program is expanded.
Brittany said such a program would have benefited her during her coming of age ceremony last summer.
The program aims to help Navajo and Isleta Pueblo children living in the Albuquerque area stay connected to their heritage and thereby motivate them to achieve more academically, said Daisy Thompson, director of the district’s Indian Education Department.
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Tags: Navajo
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5 Jul 2009, 0418 hrs IST, TNN
NAGPUR: The second Indian languages conclave will be held in the city from July 10.
The three-day event being organised by Maharashtra Rajya Hindi Sahitya Akademi will be inaugurated by chief minister Ashok Chavan at IMA Hall. Deputy chief minister Chhagan Bhujbal and MRCC president Kripashankar Singh will be chief guests.
The first-ever national level language conclave was held in Mumbai last year by the Akademi. Like the Mumbai event, literary figures representing 24 Indian languages will participate in the three-day festival here. Minister of state for cultural affairs Suresh Warpudkar will be reception committee chairman.
Prominent among the partcipants from across the regions will include Agrahara Krishnamurti, Mohd Zama Azurdah (Kashmiri), Sundaram (Tamil), Madhuri Chheda (Gujarati), Anil Boro (Bodo), Veena Gupta (Dogri), GM Khan (Oriya), Krishnachandra Tudu (Santhal), Abdul Gaffoor Parikh and Mehmud Ayyubi (Urdu), Shesharatnam (Telugu), Ratanlal Sonagra (Marathi), Rambahal Tewari (Bengali), N Shiadas (Konkani), MS Krishnamurthy ( Kannada), Devraj (Manipuri), Vellayani Arjunan, Chandraprakash Dewal, Deven Das (Assamese), Virendra Gohil, Balshouri Reddy, Usha Upadhyay, Brejendra Tripathi, Laladhar Jagudi and Parmanand Panchal.
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Tags: Events
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By JOHN SCHWARTZ. Published: July 3, 2009
When Maythe Ramirez went to Superior Court in Contra Costa, Calif., for a child custody hearing in 2006, she wanted to tell the judge that her husband beat her and should not be allowed broad visitation rights. The court did not provide an interpreter for her, however, and Ms. Ramirez, who speaks almost no English, could not follow the arcane proceeding, much less participate.
“It is really as if you are doing nothing in court,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter, “standing still and not being able to explain what’s really happening.”
Ms. Ramirez, who came to the United States from Mexico, later divorced her husband and had the visitation rules modified with the help of a lawyer from Bay Area Legal Aid, who got her interpreters for other hearings.
The court system can be a bewildering place for anyone, but it can be terrifying for those who do not understand English. Federal law requires civil and criminal courts that receive federal financing to provide free interpreters for those with limited proficiency in English. But while interpreters are commonly offered in criminal cases, many states do not require the services in all civil cases. The state of California, where Ms. Ramirez’s case was heard, provides interpreters in some civil cases and not others.
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Tags: English, Interpreting
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Jul 01, 2009 04:30 AM. Chantal Hébert. MONTREAL
Raising young children in Toronto in the early eighties, we hooked them on Passe-Partout, Télé-Québec’s popular preschool program, and restricted television access to the length of the half-hour daily episodes.
The only language spoken at home was French, and both kids were home-schooled to read in their mother tongue long before they could decipher a word of English. That was part and parcel of bulletproofing our kids for the inevitable day when they ventured into the largely English-speaking Ontario world.
A few years later, a move to Ottawa, a city where French has a greater presence, brought some relaxation to the parental rules, and we mostly let down our guard when Montreal became our home a decade after that.
Mostly, but not completely. In the age of video games and the Internet, raising children who are as competent as they should be in French is a challenge, even in Canada’s French-speaking metropolis.
Rationing English in favour of French paid off. Our adult sons switch effortlessly from one language to the other, and they have to think twice when they are asked whether the movie they are watching or the book they are reading is in French or English.
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Tags: Bilinguism, French
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By THE CANADIAN PRESS
CALGARY — With the economy in a slump many Canadians are having a hard time finding work and are doing whatever it takes to get a leg up on the competition.
That includes a group of Canadian actors who say they’ve been turned down for work because of their “Canadian” accent.
A language workshop was held in Calgary this weekend to help actors sound more American.
Andy Kreiger is here to teach the actors the nuances of American English.
“I got a call from an American producer who said, ‘Andy we got a problem I can’t hire any actors out of Vancouver because they all talk too Canadian,’ ” said Krieger.
Kreiger makes breaking accents his full time job and says he can eliminate even the heaviest accent in a matter of hours.
This weekend’s class was offered through a local studio, Audition Hell, which offers regular workshops for performers.
Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gC_NCT0vpFGHT002JiG5npDrznaQ
Tags: Accents, English
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