Infographie : le français, 5e langue mondiale

 Version accessible de l’infographie "Le français, 5e langue mondiale" - (PDF, 40.7 ko)

http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/politique-etrangere-de-la-france/francophonie-et-langue-francaise/la-francophonie/infographie-le-francais-5e-langue-mondiale/

The Sardinian professor fighting to save Gaelic – and all Europe’s minority tongues

It is an impending extinction that will change the world and how people communicate: within 20 years, half of all the planet’s languages will be dead.

Experts agree that nothing can stop it happening but one academic is trying her hardest to slow it down, to help preserve what may be part of a golden ticket for our brains. Professor Antonella Sorace – a Sardinian who was discouraged from learning her own dying language in favour of “proper” Italian – is one of a growing number who believe learning a second language has enormous untapped benefits for the human brain. This is true not only for young children but also for adults and people at risk from dementia, where research consistently shows that learning a new language could delay the onset of the disease for four to five years – a better result than with any medication to date.

It is those benefits of bilingualism that should encourage us to preserve and protect Britain’s minority languages – Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Irish, Cornish and Ulster Scots, she says.

“All minority languages are declining,” said Sorace, professor of developmental linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. “If a language is not learned by children then that language is bound to die. There are big forces out there that help to speed this process along. Eventually Gaelic will die, Welsh and Sardinian will die. Many of these are languages that are still relatively healthy; others are being actively suppressed or stigmatised.

“We are trying to contribute to slowing that decline. We know linguistic diversity is important because it makes us human. We lose that and we lose an essential part of what it means to be human.”

Already her work and the project she founded three years ago in Edinburgh,Bilingualism Matters – now expanding across Europe and in the US – have convinced the Scottish government to introduce languages to primary schools. From 2020 all Scottish children will be learning a language other than English in their first year at school, with two other languages being introduced later.

“It’s all about the teaching, but young children are adept at picking up tones, so tonal languages, like Mandarin for example, are a lot easier for children than for adults,” she said.

Just as disappearing forests take with them secrets of undiscovered medicines, disappearing languages can take the key to a longer and better quality of life. The first battle is to unpick the popular myth that bilingualism might damage children’s brains. There were even suggestions it could encourage schizophrenia.

Study after study has shown the reverse to be true, says Sorace. “These prejudices are ingrained, but we are perhaps halfway to persuading people that the brain can cope. Then we have to persuade people that it is actually of benefit.

“In Sardinia, if a child speaks Sardinian it’s thought they can’t then speak Italian very well. There is an inferiority complex around these languages. My mother insisted I speak Italian, not this common dialect.”

Bilingualism Matters is working to encourage businesses to consider the benefits of their staff learning languages. “In business, people say ‘English is the language of business, why would I need to learn another language?’” said Sorace. “Maybe it would mean you could do better business.”

There is also the question of how long English can hold its dominance, not only because of the possibility of leaving the EU but also because of China’s emergence as an economic force.

The British are notoriously poor at languages, and interest in taking the subject among schoolchildren has been waning for years – encouraged, Sorace thinks, by parents who do not understand their value. “Monolingualism is a privilege, but also a limitation. Why is Chinese emerging as a powerful language? Because the economy is. The pace is much more rapid than it used to be, so who knows how long it might take for Mandarin to overtake English?”

The Scottish schools language initiative is expected to include Chinese as one of the three languages that will be introduced to primary curriculums.

The refugee crisis is throwing up another concern for Sorace. Many people arriving in new countries are encouraged to take up the language of their new home instead of – rather than alongside – their own. “It is true that some families feel their home language is a problem. They want their child to fully integrate and they think their language will hold them back. This is sometimes the message that comes from the school.

“Even in the Netherlands, a bilingual country, there is this message, you should speak Dutch as soon as possible. Yes of course you must learn to integrate, but don’t speak Dutch to your child. Unfortunately we have this perception that there is a good kind of bilingualism and a bad kind. There is no bad kind.”

Her colleague and research collaborator, Thomas Bak, a reader in human cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, agrees: “It is the most important change in our understanding of the brain in recent times. Now we know the brain is not static, a set of drawers where things are stored, it has an elasticity, a cerebral elastic. Now we know that brains adapt and adjust all our lifetime. If you start a sport late you may not get to the Olympics, but it will still impact positively on your health. That’s how I look at it. Linguistics meets neuroscience.”

Bak also grew up “protected” from what were then perceived as the dangers of bilingualism. “As a son of a Polish-speaking father and German-speaking mother in Kraków, my parents took a considered decision to not teach me German, to protect me. They were educated people but thought they were doing what was best.” In the 1960s there were academics linking a “foreign language at home” to “mental retardation”.

But is taking up French really necessary to stave off dementia, as opposed to doing crosswords and sudoku?

“Yes, to use the sports analogy, the fact that swimming is good for you is not to say tennis isn’t,” said Bak. “But with language it’s not just words, its about sounds, social interaction, cultural interaction.” He said there was already some early language research suggesting that the prevalence of dementia may already be declining.

“Maybe we are starting to see the first effects of people trying to avoid the risk factors. Bilingualism doesn’t make you immortal, it doesn’t cure dementia but it delays it. In stroke patients twice as many people in the bilingual group recovered their cognitive abilities completely after a stroke than monolinguals. The bilingual brain is better equipped to cope with the damage.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/13/sardinian-professor-fighting-to-save-gaelic-bilingualism?CMP=twt_gu

Comunicazione e traduzione a confronto: l’Occidente incontra l’Oriente

In determinati contesti comunicativi tra più persone, per esempio una visita presso un conoscente o una conversazione tra amici, la comunicazione “occidentale” tende a presentare per prima cosa il fatto come si è svolto, per passare successivamente ad eventuali spiegazioni e commenti. Nei paesi arabi invece, la situazione è capovolta. Osserviamo i seguenti dialoghi:

Comunicazione occidentale

• Ho perso il treno
• C’era un traffico terribile e l’autobus è rimasto bloccato per quaranta minuti nel centro.
• Sai, piove, e qui appena cadono due gocce diventa un pantano.
•  Questa città è sempre più invivibile...
•  È un periodaccio…

 Comunicazione araba

•  È un periodaccio...
•  Questa città è sempre più invivibile…
•  Sai, piove, e qui appena cadono due gocce diventa un pantano.
• C’era un traffico terribile e l’autobus è rimasto bloccato per quaranta minuti nel centro.
•  Ho perso il treno…

Questo modo di procedere nella comunicazione interculturale, quali riscontri può avere? Senza dubbio gli occidentali sono noti per essere spesso troppo diretti ed irruenti in certe circostanze, e allo stesso modo gli arabi ci percepiscono in questa maniera: diretti ed invadenti. Dal loro punto di vista, si evita prima di tutto di entrare nel cuore dell’argomento, anche quando ricevono una visita, solo dopo una accurata accoglienza e convenevoli si passa ad instaurare un dialogo sui fatti da raccontare.

Come si ripercuote tutto questo sul linguaggio e sul pensiero? I processi cognitivi si attivano interagendo con le persone e con il proprio ambiente sociale, portandoci poi ad interiorizzare dei processi ed interagendo con il nostro mondo individualmente. Quindi la natura umana presuppone una competenza sia individuale che sociale, vale a dire il nostro pensiero è anche influenzato dall’esterno, ma tuttavia individualmente prendiamo coscienza delle nostre azioni, riflettiamo, ci confrontiamo e decidiamo il comportamento a noi più vicino e opportuno. Perciò anche il linguaggio è influenzato da questo aspetto sociale, ma è bene precisare che esiste anche una sorta di linguaggio “interiore”, che fa parte della nostra sfera individuale e permette lo sviluppo della consapevolezza metacognitiva e lo sviluppo delle competenze individuali. In breve, ogni lingua è influenzata dall’aspetto sociale, dall’ambiente in cui è nata e che la circonda ed è noto come questi margini siano oggi anche influenzati dagli aspetti linguistici e sociali della globalizzazione.

 Per quanto riguarda la lingua araba, benchè sia molto difficile da apprendere, ma non impossibile, è senza dubbio una delle lingue più poetiche, e ai più nota come una delle più antiche del mondo. È la lingua di 250.000.000 di parlanti, la cui letteratura e cultura è tra le più gloriose nella storia dell’umanità, considerando che rappresenta una civiltà che per secoli ha anticipato le grandi scoperte umanistiche e scientifiche del futuro Occidente.

 Inoltre, non tutti sanno che molti nomi di sostantivi italiani derivano dall’arabo. Infatti, come scrisse il semiologo Daniele Barbieri, nel suo articolo Colpisce più la lingua (araba) che la spada, nella frase “la nave era in avaria. L'ammiraglio uscendo dall'arsenale si lamentò degli acciacchi. Giunto a casa si buttò sull'alcova azzurra mangiando arance e albicocche con un po' di alcool”, tutte le parole con la A vengono dall'arabo. Si potrebbe tentare anche con la C: “ Ho messo il caffè nella caraffa. Nella dispensa c'è una cassata con i canditi, nella casseruola un po' di carciofi”.

Altre parole di origine araba che potremmo citare sono: zenit, zero, alchimia, azimut, chimica, elisir, Gibilterra, harem, intarsio, algebra,monsone, nababbo, cammello. Di l'origine araba sono anche i seguenti sostantivi: almanacco, assassino, aguzzino, bagarino,alfiere, bizzeffe barattolo, cerbottana, chitarra, macabro, cotone, crumiro, taccuino, talco melanzane, nafta, divano, dogana, pappagallo, zucchero ragazzo, denaro, facchino, giubbotto, limone, garza, sciroppo, spinaci, tariffa, zafferano traffico, valigia, gatto, giacca, liuto, magazzino, materasso, nuca, ovatta, ricamo, safari, saracinesca, tamburo e  zecca.

La poeticità della lingua araba è nell’armonia del significato di numerosissime parole, nello stile di vita che sa cogliere emozioni e passioni, ma al tempo stesso con semplicità e profondità. Prendiamo ad esempio i saluti:

Buongiorno - Sabaha l-hary - lett. “mattina di bene”

   Sabaha n-nur - lett. “mattina di luce”

Il significato letterale di “benvenuto” è invece:

“ che tu possa trovare famiglia e pianura”

Espressione che risale al più antico periodo beduino, dove la famiglia è simbolo di calore e protezione, la pianura invece è simbolo di viaggio spensierato a dorso del dromedario.

Prego! -  tafaddala  - letteralmente: “ essere così gentile da fare qualcosa” o meglio “ accomodati, favorisci, prego, fa’ pure”. Inoltre secondo i contesti potrà anche valere per “ prendi, serviti, entra, passa prima tu, dimmi, ecc.”

Passiamo ora alla tecnologia.

Quando le accademie di lingua araba furono chiamate a creare un neologismo per l’elaboratore elettronico, il computer, fu naturale ricorrere al verbo “ hasaba” , cioè “contare”, ma anche “ calcolare, elaborare”, applicandogli lo schema raro di a – u di valore intensivo, che talvolta troviamo in parole come faruq “ saggio”, o con valenza strumentale, come nazur, cioè cannocchiale.

Pertanto l’area della famiglia delle parola come “hisab”, cioè “conto”, e “hasub”, cioè computer, è evidente estrapolando la radice h -s- b.

D’altro canto, strascichi di passato coloniale sono ancora oggi evidenti, anche dei modi di dire. Prendiamo come esempio il contesto di un bar.

Il cameriere viene interpellato con quel termine la cui traduzione letterale è “maestro, insegnante”, termine diffusamente usato anche per interpellare un artigiano, un tassista ecc. ( cit. mastro, capo). Diffuso è altresì nel sud Italia, interpellare alcune maestranze in questo modo. Usuale è anche il francesismo graçon per interpellare un cameriere nei paesi arabi. Il termine standard vero e proprio per cameriere è invece “nadil” che tuttavia viene usato unicamente in letteratura.

E fate attenzione ad ordinare un gelato al bar! Se nel Maghreb /glas/, dal francesismo “glace” , significa gelato, in Arabia Saudita, nei Paesi del Golfo ed in Irak, /glas/ sta per bicchiere!

http://www.torkanweb.com/#!LOCCIDENTE-INCONTRA-LORIENTE/c1jsz/ijpypup265

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Dott.ssa Giovanna Bondanese, laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, laurea magistrale in Traduzione Specialistica, laurea specialistica in Scienze della Mediazione Interculturale. Insegnante di lingua inglese, francese ed italiano per stranieri. Traduttrice, mediatrice interculturale.

How the Cherokee language has adapted to texts

Whenever a new communication technology was introduced into society, the Cherokee people have ensured that their written language could adapt.

From the printing press and the typewriter to today's readily available digital technologies like computers and smart phones, the Cherokee language is fully functional thanks to the help of tireless advocates and activists.

As one of the most actively used native languages in the US, the Cherokee language is spoken by populations in North Carolina and Oklahoma, as well as other states across the country. While more people are now able to write the Cherokee language with syllabics — written characters that each represent a syllable — retaining and encouraging more speakers of the language continues to be a high priority. And the use of technology has been one way to attract increased interest.

A new animated video produced by the Cherokee Nation Education Services and the Language Technology Program tells the story of this adoption of new technologies over time. Narrated by the Cherokee hero Sequoyah, who created the first Cherokee syllabary in 1821, the video introduces viewers to some of these breakthroughs.

The Cherokee Nation Language Technology Program supports those interested in utilizing written Cherokee, with a special focus on digital technology. Its aim is to create “innovative solutions for the Cherokee language on all digital platforms including smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets and social networks.” Available on its website are resources including a glossary of neologisms for technology-related terms, keyboard layouts and fonts.

Communication technology is constantly evolving, and the Cherokee language keeps evolving right along with it.

An animated video tells the story of how Cherokee adapted to new technologies:

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-09-13/how-cherokee-language-has-adapted-texts-iphones

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http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-09-13/how-cherokee-language-has-adapted-texts-iphones

How the languages we speak can affect the way we think

Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post— to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
   .
2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
   .
3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
   .
4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

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http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/19/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think/comment-page-2/#comments

California Translation Bill Veto Misinterprets An Urgent Medical Need

Poulinna Po had just walked into the Long Beach offices of Khmer Girls in Action when she got the news: Governor Jerry Brown had vetoed Assembly Bill 1263, which promised to expand the number of state medical translators. The measure had seemed to offer a straightforward solution to the dilemmas faced by California’s estimated three million Medi-Cal beneficiaries who speak little or no English when they talk to Anglophone doctors or medical staff.

One tragic example of this kind of patient-doctor miscommunication occurred in 2008 at Los Angeles County General hospital, when a pregnant Maria Guevara, who only spoke Spanish, was prescribed an abortion-inducing drug — which she then took, believing it to be part of her prenatal care. She lost her baby.

“That lack of communication between the doctor and me has changed my life forever,” Guevara would later bitterly recount.

For the past year activists with other personal experiences successfully fought for passage of AB 1263 and were stunned to learn of the governor’s veto.

“I was like, ‘What? No way!’ I was left speechless,” said Po.

Po had learned the hard way how difficult it is to navigate a medical conversation between an English-speaking doctor and a patient who speaks little or no English. Two years ago, the then-15-year-old Po was drafted into service as a Cambodian translator for her diabetic father during his visits to the hospital.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/california-translation-bill_n_4124476.html

Beam Me Up...communications that are lost in machine translation

While useful for communicating the basics, machine and online translation tools still can't grasp the nuances of language.

My childhood memories of Star Trek might be hazy at best, but one image did stick in my mind. On some occasions when Captain Kirk met with an alien species he would communicate with them through a universal translation device.

I can't remember whether he flicked a switch or prodded at a device but there was definitely some intraspecies communication going on. The pointy-eared or four-eyed alien would speak in his own language but Captain Kirk and the audience would hear him in English. I remember being fascinated by this as a concept.

Fast forward four or five decades since Star Trek was conceived and there are those who would argue that we are not far off that idea. No, we're not communicating with little green men, but with the advent of online machine translation it is so much easier to at least attempt communication with people from our own planet.

I have come across long-distance relationships, lovers cruelly divided by language as well as oceans, conducted entirely through Google Translate; language students swearing that they wouldn't have passed exams without it. The tool was even said to have been used last year in a UK court when the court-appointed interpreter failed to arrive for the hearing – albeit just to inform the defendant that the hearing was being adjourned because the interpreter was absent.

This is good news if you need to know or communicate something quite basic or to just get the gist of a text. I recently came upon a blog and could not identify the language and just copying a few words into Google Translate did the trick (it was Swahili). It's less good news if you have some serious stuff to translate and want your language to appear – human.

Earlier this year, there was a kerfuffle in the Turkish press after an interview with Noam Chomsky went awry. The Turkish daily, Yeni Şafak, interviewed the political commentator about developments in Egypt over email in English and then translated his answers into Turkish. In a published transcript of Chomsky's "original" replies, the following sentence appeared: "Contrary to what happens when everything that milk port, enters the work order, then begins to bustle in the West."

When the Turkish original: "Aksine ne zaman ki her şey süt liman olur, düzene girer işte o zaman Batı'da telaş başlar" is fed into Google translate then you do indeed get that garbled English sentence above. The words "süt" and "liman" do mean milk and port on their own, but taken together they form an idiomatic expression to indicate calm.

A human translator might have put it thus: On the contrary, when everything has calmed down, then this will be when the West starts panicking.

At the moment, much of machine translation on its own is not sophisticated enough to replicate natural human language. Companies hoping to reduce sometimes considerable translation costs are attracted by a machine/human hybrid collaboration increasingly being offered by translation agencies.

This involves running texts through translation programmes and the resulting copy is post-edited by a human linguist. Of the many winners in this formula, unfortunately the translator is not one of them. Finding themselves at the bottom of a production chain, they find that they have increasingly less room to manoeuvre in a crowded market. Newbie translators, who are perhaps recent language graduates and keen to gain experience and start building their network of clients, may be more likely to be tempted by lower paying jobs such as these.

The modern world demands that messages be conveyed quickly and in a variety of languages. The British Academy's 2011 Language Matters More and More report notes that "the proportion of internet usage conducted in English is already on the decline, falling from 51 to 29% between 2000 and 2009." English may still be the big player on the internet but communicating globally means more languages, not less.

To that end, machine translation serves a particular purpose and serves it well. However, machines can only translate words and not meaning and will be unable to grasp concepts, abstractions or cultural references. Ultimately, machine translation fails to differentiate between the language of a literary masterpiece and a car manual, a United Nations convention and a text message. To the machine it's one and the same.

The homogenisation of language may be the dream of science fiction writers and futurologists but even a machine programmed to have a brain the size of a planet and fed every article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica will still be missing a heart. Algorithms may be able to work well with data but can they deal with syntax, idiom or nuance? Translations should be elegant as well as accurate. Good translation is good writing which reflects a lifetime of experience, creativity and imagination.

I think Captain Kirk would agree that we are not yet in possession of that magical universal translator which will allow us to communicate effectively and accurately. I for one hope that time remains light years away.

http://www.theguardian.com

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Gülay Eskikaya is an English/Turkish interpreter and translator and runsTurkish Business Translations.