In a tribute to singer Jimmy Buffett and the opening of his latest Margaritaville resort in New York City’s Time Square, a trio of klezmer singers are singing his famed “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” in Yiddish.
There was a purpose to this translation.
The Margaritaville Resort Times Square — part of Buffett’s hospitality company, which manages and franchises restaurants, stores and casinos named for the singer’s hit song, “Margaritaville” — is located at the center of Manhattan’s garment district.
The neighborhood once housed three synagogues serving the many Yiddish-speaking garment industry workers. While most of the textile businesses no longer exist, the historic Garment Center Congregation is now on the ground floor and two sub-floors of the Margaritaville entertainment complex, part of a complicated real estate negotiation.
In honor of that unusual situation, Yiddish culture nonprofit Congress for Jewish Culture commissioned playwright Rokhl Kafrissen to adapt Buffett’s tale of a man’s bar hookup into a woman’s Yiddish plea to skip Shabbat dinner and go right to dessert.
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“Midtown New York is a world away from Key West,” said CJC executive director Shane Baker. “We also wanted to remind Jimmy Buffett that in New York, we do everything a little bit differently, even rest and relaxation.”
The song is performed by klezmer performers Sasha Lurje, Craig Judelman and Lorin Sklamberg.
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Songwriter Kafrissen said Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” seemed like a hopeful anthem for a pandemic summer.
“Instead of a man propositioning a woman at a bar, I rewrote it from a woman’s point of view,” said Kafrissen. “She’s impatiently watching her husband make kiddush before the Shabbat meal.”
“Kum tsu mir” by Rokhl Kafrissen — Yiddish adaptation of Jimmy Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw”
S’iz shabes do
It’s shabes here
Oy s’iz gut
It sure is good
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Dayn kol klingt mole-kheyn
Your voice is full of charm
Kidesh makhste vunderlekh
The way you make kiddush is wonderful
Un dayn ponim
And your face is
Likhtik sheyn
Shine so bright
Nu, ketsl
So, baby
Nokh a glezl
One more glass
Mashke, vayn, tsi bir
Whisky, wine or beer
Ober loz oys di [ha]moytsi
But let’s skip the motsi [blessing on the challah]
Kum tsu mir
Come to me
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Loz oys di [ha]moytsi, kum tsu mir
Let’s skip the motsi, come to me
Ikh hob zikh
I just went
Haynt getoyvlt
And ritually cleansed myself
In der mikve nor far dir
In the mivke just for you
Me ruft dikh a min tsadik
They say you’re really saintly
Oyneg-shabes on a shir
It’s shabes pleasure, without end
Ketsl loz oys di [ha]moytsi, kum tsu mir
So baby let’s skip the motsi, come to me
Loz oys di [ha]moytsi, kum tsu mir
Let’s skip the motsi, come to me
Ikh hob zikh
I just went
Ayngetunken
And dipped myself
In der mikve nor far dir
In the mivke just for you
Me ruft dikh a min tsadik
They say you’re really saintly
Oyneg-shabes on a shir
It’s shabes pleasure, without end
Ketsl, loz oys di hamoytsi kum tsu mir
So baby let’s skip the motsi, come to me
This is in response to the letter from Linda Schaeffer’s Aug. 11 letter to the editor, “Americans must work together.”
The beginning of your letter gave me hope that here was someone advocating that Americans work together to make a better country.
Then you ran off the rails by condemning socialism.
Democratic socialism is what gives you Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That is not communism. It is for the people — all people who need it. It does not supersede capitalism.
It goes hand in hand with capitalism with a conscience.
Socialism is not what we have to worry about. What’s bringing our country down is capitalism without a conscience and rampant fascism disguised as patriotism (i.e. white supremacy).
If you don’t know what fascism is, I implore you to look it up in your dictionary, read an accurate account of the rise of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, and think again about what the cancer is in our beautiful United States of America.
While you are in the dictionary, look up oligarchy. It is very similar to fascism except a select few may rule rather that just one tyrant.
A fellow American, and proud of it.
Patty Lavallee
Ocean Shores
Simple solution to homelessness
While driving through the Harbor it is nearly impossible to not see at least one person experiencing homelessness.
The cost of living in our county and generally in the state is shooting sky high, you cannot find a place to live for under $1,000 a month, while the average income is $43,346 before taxes. Applying a tax rate of 22%, that is $2,817.49 a month.People are spending at least half of their monthly income on rent, let alone any other expenses like food or utilities.
What I am recommending to help our community is simple: increase the number of good jobs, expand economic democracy, rent control, and help with required expenses. These simple ideas are used across the world to create working economies, and lift people out of poverty. These solutions will not only lift people from poverty, but they will allow the state government to expand these and other local and state programs with the extra tax dollars they collect.
These programs are simple initiatives that could simply be done, so why haven’t they been done? It’s quite simple, nobody in government local, state or federal wants to do it because they are scared of angering their donors.
And this isn’t a new issue. When Huey P. Long of Louisiana did this a hundred years ago, he was impeached, then they attempted to remove him from the Senate, and finally he was murdered by a doctor in 1935 after announcing his run for president.
People who try to improve the material conditions of the average citizen have done three things; succeed, been popular, and experienced major pushback from those currently in government.
You may be asking how you can help. It’s simple. When it comes time to vote, do research and ask yourself “will this person support attempts at improving my material conditions?”
If the answer is yes, vote for them, and finally do your best to participate in mutual aid programs while we live in our current situation. The best we can do is have the people who have more than enough help those who do not have enough.
Chelsea Johnson
Hoquiam
While driving through the Harbor it is nearly impossible to not see at least one person experiencing homelessness.
The cost of living in our county and generally in the state is shooting sky high, you cannot find a place to live for under $1,000 a month, while the average income is $43,346 before taxes. Applying a tax rate of 22%, that is $2,817.49 a month.People are spending at least half of their monthly income on rent, let alone any other expenses like food or utilities.
What I am recommending to help our community is simple: increase the number of good jobs, expand economic democracy, rent control, and help with required expenses. These simple ideas are used across the world to create working economies, and lift people out of poverty. These solutions will not only lift people from poverty, but they will allow the state government to expand these and other local and state programs with the extra tax dollars they collect.
These programs are simple initiatives that could simply be done, so why haven’t they been done? It’s quite simple, nobody in government local, state or federal wants to do it because they are scared of angering their donors.
And this isn’t a new issue. When Huey P. Long of Louisiana did this a hundred years ago, he was impeached, then they attempted to remove him from the Senate, and finally he was murdered by a doctor in 1935 after announcing his run for president.
People who try to improve the material conditions of the average citizen have done three things; succeed, been popular, and experienced major pushback from those currently in government.
You may be asking how you can help. It’s simple. When it comes time to vote, do research and ask yourself “will this person support attempts at improving my material conditions?”
If the answer is yes, vote for them, and finally do your best to participate in mutual aid programs while we live in our current situation. The best we can do is have the people who have more than enough help those who do not have enough.
Chelsea Johnson
Hoquiam
Time to fund the museum
Why are we willing to spend so much on the Gateway Center when the Aberdeen Museum of History has not yet been replaced three years after the fire?
It makes sense to use the $22 million armory fire insurance settlement replacing what we lost — our Aberdeen Museum — perhaps building on the location of the former armory, or perhaps building on the location of the former Pourhouse, where the Gateway Center is proposed.
Apparently, the city has already committed $7 million of the insurance funds to build the Gateway Center, even though its purpose is rather fuzzy.
Travelers hurry through Aberdeen on their way to somewhere else, but we could provide reasons for them to stop here by building a new museum/welcome station near the Wishkah Bridge. We already have a parking lot/electric charging station there. We already have a park with picnic benches there. Travelers look for clean bathrooms with running water, which we definitely need to provide if we want tourists!
If tourists stop for those reasons, they might check out the museum and perhaps the Chamber of Commerce for information about our history and our attractions. They might decide to visit businesses we already have downtown, and they might make Aberdeen a regular stop on their way to the beaches or the mountains.
We know we will always have tourists passing though town, but we do not know if corporations will want to rent space here from the city.
Do we choose to spend insurance money attracting unknown corporations (Gateway), or do we choose to spend it enhancing travelers’ experiences here while we preserve our history (Museum)?
(RNS) — It’s a Bible verse familiar to many Christians — and even to many non-Christians who have seen John 3:16 on billboards and T-shirts or scrawled across eye black under football players’ helmets.
But Terry Wildman hopes the new translation published Tuesday (Aug. 31) by InterVarsity Press, “First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament,” will help Christians and Indigenous peoples read it again in a fresh way.
“The Great Spirit loves this world of human beings so deeply he gave us his Son — the only Son who fully represents him. All who trust in him and his way will not come to a bad end, but will have the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony,” reads the First Nations Version of the verse.
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This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.
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In the First Nations Version, “eternal life,” a concept unfamiliar in Native American cultures, becomes “the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony.” The Greek word “cosmos,” usually translated in English as “the world,” had to be reconsidered, too: It doesn’t mean the planet Earth but how the world works and how creation lives and functions together, said Wildman, the lead translator and project manager of the First Nations Version.
They’re phrases that resonated with Wildman, changing the way he read the Bible even as he translated it for Native American readers.
“We believe it’s a gift not only to our Native people, (but) from our Native people to the dominant culture. We believe that there’s a fresh way that people can experience the story again from a Native perspective,” he said.
The idea for an Indigenous Bible translation first came to Wildman nearly 20 years ago in the storeroom of the church he pastored on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.
Wildman, who is Ojibwe and Yaqui, was excited to find a Hopi translation of the New Testament in storage. He wanted to hear how that beloved Scripture sounded in Hopi, how it translated back into English.
But, he said, while many Hopi elders still speak their native language and children now are learning it in schools, he couldn’t find anyone able to read it. That is true for many Native American nations, he added, noting that at the same time Christian missionaries were translating the Bible into Native languages, they were also working with the boarding schools in the United States and Canada that punished students for speaking those languages.
It occurred to the pastor that “since 90-plus percent of our Native people are not speaking their tribal language or reading their tribal language, we felt there needed to be a translation in English worded for Native people,” he said.
Wildman, a licensed local pastor in the United Methodist Church, has been working on translating the Bible into words and concepts familiar to many Native Americans ever since.
He first began experimenting by rewording Scripture passages he was using in a prison ministry, giving them more of a “Native traditional sound,” he said — a sound he’d learned by being around Native elders and reading books written in a more traditional style of English by Native Americans like Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk.
He and his wife, Darlene, who have a music ministry called RainSong, also recorded readings of those passages over music in an album called “The Great Story from the Sacred Book.” It won a Native American Music Award in 2008 for best spoken-word album.
Wildman was encouraged by the reactions he received as he shared his rewordings across the country at tribal centers, Native American-led churches and powwows.
“They just loved listening to it because it didn’t have the church language. It didn’t have the colonial language. It had more of a Native feel to it — as much as possible that you can put in English,” he said.
Many Native people asked what Bible he was reading from.
Young people have told him it sounds like one of their elders telling them a story. Elders have said it resonates with how they heard traditional stories from their parents and grandparents.
As others encouraged him to turn his rewordings into a full translation of the Bible, Wildman published a children’s book retelling the Christmas story, “Birth of the Chosen One,” and a harmonization of the four Gospels called “When the Great Spirit Walked among Us.”
Then, on April Fool’s Day 2015, he heard from the CEO of OneBook Canada, who suggested the Bible translation organization fund his work. The offer wasn’t a prank, he said, it was “confirmation from Creator that this was something he wanted.”
“Everybody hears English a little differently,” Wildman said.
“We have all of these translations for that purpose to reach another generation, to reach a particular people group. But we had never had one for our Native people that has actually been translated into English.”
Wildman began by forming a translation council to guide the process, gathering men and women, young and old, from different Native cultures and church backgrounds. They started with a list of nearly 200 keywords Wycliffe Bible Translators said must be translated properly to get a good translation of Scripture.
With that foundation, Wildman got to work, sending drafts to the council for feedback. He looked up the original Greek text of the New Testament. He checked to see how other English translations rendered tricky passages. He consulted Dave Ohlson, a former Wycliffe translator who helped found OneBook Canada, part of the Wycliffe Global Alliance.
The Indigenous translation uses names for God common in many Native cultures, including “Great Spirit” or “Creator.” Names of biblical figures echo their original meanings in Greek and Hebrew: Jesus becomes “Creator Sets Free” and Abraham, “Father of Many Nations.”
“We believe it’s very important that the Gospel be kind of decolonized and told in a Native way, but being accurate to the meaning of the original language and understanding that it’s a different culture,” Wildman said.
Over the years, he and his council have published editions of the Gospel of Luke and Ephesians and a book called “Walking the Good Road” that included the four Gospels alongside Acts and Ephesians.
A number of ministries already have started using those translations, including Foursquare Native Ministries, Lutheran Indian Ministries, Montana Indian Ministries, Cru Nations and Native InterVarsity, he said.
Native InterVarsity, where Wildman serves as director of spiritual growth and leadership, has distributed earlier editions of the First Nations Version at conferences and used the Indigenous translation in its Bible studies for Native college students for several years.
Megan Murdock Krischke, national director of Native InterVarsity, said students have been more engaged with the translation, hearing the Bible in a way they’re used to stories being told.
“Even though it’s still English, it feels like it’s made by us for us. This is a version of Scripture that is for Native people, and it’s indigenized. You’re not having to kind of sort through the ways other cultures talk about faith and spirituality,” said Krischke, who is Wyandotte and Cherokee.
“It’s one less barrier between Native people and being able to follow Jesus.”
Earlier this month, The Jesus Film Project also released a collection of short animated films called “Retelling the Good Story,” bringing to life the stories of Jesus, or Creator Sets Free, feeding the 5,000 and walking on water from the First Nations Version.
Wildman said the response from Native peoples and ministries to the First Nations Version has exceeded any expectations he had when he first began rewording Bible passages.
He hopes it can help break down barriers between Native and non-Native peoples, too. He pointed out the suspicion and misinformation many white Christians have passed down for generations, believing Native Americans worship the devil and their cultures are evil when they share a belief in a Creator, he said.
“We hope that this will help non-Native people be more interested in our Native people — maybe the history, understanding the need for further reconciliation and things like that,” Wildman said.
“We hope that this will be part of creating a conversation that will help that process.”
Terry M. Wildman first had the idea of translating the New Testament over 20 years ago. Wildman was living on the Hopi Indian Reservation and serving as a pastor on Second Mesa when he found a Hopi translation of the New Testament in a church basement. “I couldn’t find anyone who could read from it,” he says. “And it wasn’t until much later that I discovered this was true across North America—very few Native people can read in their Native languages.”
Terry M. Wildman is the editor of the First Nations Version and director of spiritual growth and leadership development for Native InterVarsity.
At the same time, Wildman, who was also involved with jail ministry and small group ministry as well as with the church he was pastoring, struggled to teach using existing English translations of scripture, which didn’t speak to Native people or to their cultural context. “I began to experiment by rewording portions of scripture and using that in small groups,” he says. “And the response was surprising. The men and women began to interact more, to ask meaningful questions, and to relate more to what we were reading.”
Over two decades later, this small project that began in a church basement became the First Nations Version, an English retelling of the New Testament that seeks to connect scripture with the lived out reality of Native people around North America. As the introduction to the book says, the book “is not a word-for-word translation, but rather a thought-for-thought translation.” It is the New Testament retold in language that echoes oral storytelling: “This way of speaking, with its simple yet profound beauty and rich cultural idioms, still resonates in the hearts of Native people,” the book’s translation council writes.
What inspired this project?
I guess you could say that it started while my wife and I were living on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona, on Second Mesa. I was pastoring a small church there and wanted to have a contextual approach to sharing the gospel, or the good story as we call it.
We did a lot of jail ministry on the Hopi Rez. When I brought the New International Version (NIV) Bible we used to the jail—we used to jokingly call the NIV the “New Indian Version”—I watched how the Native people I met with responded to this version. I felt like there was something missing, a gap between the scripture and people’s experiences.
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I began to search for translations that were more relevant to Native people, but I didn’t find anything. I found a Hopi Bible translation of the New Testament in the church storage room that wasn’t being used. In the five years I lived on the Hopi Rez I couldn’t even find anyone who could read it.
This is why it was really important to me to offer a Native translation of scripture in English. Ninety-five percent of Native people don’t speak their language. Of the ones who do, very few can actually read it. This is because of missionary efforts: While they were translating the Bible into our Native languages, they were also taking these languages away from us.
God blesses our Native people, who have been historically outcast, even within Christianity.
I eventually found a Native American–led organization that had done an introduction to the New Testament. In it they use different kinds of wording. They call God the “Great Spirit,” for example, and use other terminology that resonates in the hearts of Native people. I thought to myself, “Well, we need something like this.”
At first I wasn’t even thinking of a new translation. I simply wanted a new way to present the gospel. My wife and I are musicians, so we decided to create a CD, The Great Story from the Sacred Book, that included the story from creation to Christ condensed into about 15 minutes. Well, that CD became very sought after by Native people. It was our bestseller online and even won the Native American Music Award in 2009 for best spoken word production.
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At this point, I felt like we were on the right track. We were expressing the story of Jesus in a Native-friendly way. From there I began to reword some of my favorite parts of the New Testament and use these rewordings in small meetings. And, again, I got really good feedback: Afterward, people would ask a lot of questions about the scripture, which had never happened before. They would say, “Oh, I understand this better now!”
But even after this, I didn’t think of doing a complete translation. It took years and years of using these small portions of scripture and getting feedback to finally convince me to work on this book, even though I felt like, “Who am I, who’s Terry Wildman, to do a translation of the New Testament?”
It was a long process. In 2002 we started getting the seeds of this idea, but it wasn’t until around 2012 that I actually committed to the process.
Often we hear that to understand scripture you need to understand the original context. But what you’re doing is the opposite: placing scripture within a unique cultural context.
Absolutely. A lot of people don’t think about this, but the New Testament is a translation from the beginning. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, so any time manuscripts have him speaking in anything but Aramaic, that’s a translation. The first time the gospel is preached it’s on Pentecost by Jewish people who are all speaking in different languages. When the apostles publicly preach the gospels after the resurrection, they don’t speak it in Hebrew but in the languages of the people to whom they are speaking. All of these are signs that God wants the good news to be spoken in other languages, because God knows how meaningful it is to hear scripture in your own language.
With the First Nations Version, it’s not actually in our native language but worded in a way that resonates with us. As one Native elder told me, “You say the words in English the way we think them in our language.” That was our goal, and it’s been so wonderful to feel like we’re reaching this goal.
What was the translation process like?
When I started working on this with OneBook Canada and Wycliffe Associates, both of which are Bible translation organizations, they encouraged me to put together a translation council.
So I started contacting people I had met from my many years of traveling all over Turtle Island, as we call North America. I was looking for Native men and women, young and old people to participate. Eventually I had gathered 12 people, and we determined how to proceed together.
There are about 185 keywords that Bible translators say you need to get right in any translation. We started with these keywords. We wanted to find words that were not from the Euro-American background of most Bible translations. We wanted them to be words that are relevant to Native people and that connect to our culture. So we translated Lord as “chief,” hell as “the Valley of Smoldering Fire,” and Jerusalem as “Village of Peace.”
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After we did the initial rewording, we had teams of reviewers offer feedback using Google Docs. Everything was virtual: Yet I look back and we didn’t even have Zoom for most of the time.
Do you have a book or story that was your favorite to work on?
I was raised theologically on Paul, and I’m repentant to say that Jesus was sort of secondary to Paul in my theology: I would interpret Jesus from Paul instead of the other way around. But during this whole process I became so familiar and immersed in the story of Jesus, in what he said and how he said it, that the gospels became my favorite part of the Bible.
I loved translating the Sermon on the Mount. It’s kind of the best of Jesus, who we call “Creator Sets Free” in our translation. It’s basically the meaning of his name with a little bit of Native spin—instead of “God saves,” “Creator Sets Free.”
You say the words in English the way we think them in our language.
A Native elder, commenting on the First Nations Version
I think what Matthew was trying to get across in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Beatitudes was God’s blessing. In our translation we decided that instead of saying, “Blessed are the poor,” for example, we’d say, “Creator’s blessing rests on the poor.” In other words, this is who God blesses: the poor and the outcast. God blesses our Native people, who have historically been poor and somewhat outcast, even within Christianity. A couple verses later, in Matthew 5:5, the NIV reads, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” We translated this as, “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk softly and in a humble manner. The earth, land, and sky will welcome them and always be their home.”
Through the process of rewording these passages, the scripture really started to come alive in a new way, both to myself and to our reviewers. It was so easy to relate to these passages in a way that it hadn’t been previously.
Where did the translation of Mary, “Bitter Tears,” come from?
Mary’s name was a challenge. The Hebrew name can have many different roots. We were drawn to the story in Luke where Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple and Simon tells her, “A sword will pierce your own soul too” (2:35, NIV). We thought about how Mary is affected by what happens to Jesus. So we went back to the Hebrew root of mara, which means “bitter.” As we continued to research this word’s roots, there was also a sense of salt water connected to the word.
“Bitter Tears” for the mother of Jesus worked out really well. It captures the bitter heartbreak she would feel and how she stands out from every other Bible character as specially chosen.
But then there are so many Marys in the New Testament. We decided to give each one the same basic name but change it a little bit to designate which Mary is being spoken of. Mary Magdalene becomes “Strong Tears,” Mary the sister of Martha becomes “Healing Tears,” etc.
Were there any passages that were especially difficult to translate?
The narrative portions of the New Testament were easier to translate because of the storytelling. When we got into Paul’s theological books, it got a little more difficult. I think both I and the other reviewers had an especially difficult time with 1 and 2 Corinthians. Some of it was Paul’s paragraph-long sentences: He just never stopped. And that’s not how our Native people speak. When we tried to cut down the passages into smaller sentences, there was only so much we could do without getting too redundant.
Even though this is a translation, maybe the first one made by Native people and primarily for Natives, it’s also a gift from Native people to the dominant culture.
There were also some cultural challenges with 1 and 2 Corinthians: women having their heads covered and things like that. We imagined how within our own Native cultures we have different ways of doing things. In the eastern part of the United States, for example, women never sit on the big drum; they stand behind the men. Women in the powwow wear a blanket or something over their shoulders, and it is considered inappropriate for them not to have one while dancing in the circle. So in that passage we put an explanation in italics to give some context to what Paul might have been talking about—maybe it was a cultural practice. It was something that was specific to his particular location: Like one of our Native practices, it wasn’t something that is true for all people in all times and for all tribes.
Who do you hope will use this translation?
I think the book speaks to people in many different ways. Even though this is a translation, maybe the first one made by Native people and primarily for Natives, it’s also a gift from Native people to the dominant culture. I’ve spoken to theologians, Greek scholars, and everyday people who tell me it really speaks to them. I’ve had people who are on all ends of the theological spectrum, from progressive to conservative, tell me that it brings a fresh approach to the scripture.
I was told that two young Native women from the Soboba Indian Reservation in California got an early copy of the book and cried. They said, “Someone really cares about us Native people to do a translation like this.” Just the fact that someone had bothered to do this was so meaningful to them.
We are working on an audio book of the First Nations Version, which will make this content accessible in another way to even more people. We’ve also worked with the Jesus Film Project to create a film based on our translation. It’s an animated version of Matthew 14, of Jesus feeding the 5,000 and Peter walking on the water. We tried to blend Native aspects of the story with its original context, so we’re hoping this version will introduce people to the First Nations Version to help them see Jesus in a different cultural context.
This article also appears in the September 2021 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 86, No. 9, pages 22-25). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
ALSO READ: 'Trilingual Kaaps dictionary gives legitimacy to way people speak'
It’s been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO Heal the Hood Project. The dictionary – in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans – holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, is involved in the project and tells us more.
WHAT IS KAAPS AND WHO USES THE LANGUAGE?
Kaaps or Afrikaaps is a language created in settler colonial South Africa, developed by the 1500s. It took shape as a language during encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people. It could be argued that Kaaps predates the emergence of an early form of Kaaps-Hollands (the South African variety of Dutch that would help shape Afrikaans). Traders and sailors would have passed through this region well before formal colonisation commenced. Also consider migration and movement on the African continent itself. Every intercultural engagement would have created an opportunity for linguistic exchange and the negotiation of new meaning.
Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by largely working class speakers on the Cape Flats, an area in Cape Town where many disenfranchised people were forcibly moved by the apartheid government. It’s used across all online and offline contexts of socialisation, learning, commerce, politics and religion. And, because of language contact and the temporary and seasonal migration of speakers from the Western Cape, it is written and spoken across South Africa and beyond its borders.
It is important to acknowledge the agency of people from the global South in developing Kaaps – for example, the language was first taught in madrassahs (Islamic schools) and was written in Arabic script. This acknowledgement is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in later years.
For a great discussion of Kaaps and explanation of examples of words and phrases from this language, listen to this conversation between academic Quentin Williams and journalist Lester Kiewit.
HOW DID THE DICTIONARY COME ABOUT?
The dictionary project, which is still in its launch phase, is the result of ongoing collaborative work between a few key people. You might say it’s one outcome of our interest in hip hop art, activism and education. We are drawn to hip hop’s desire to validate black modes of speech. In a sense, this is what a dictionary will do for Kaaps.
Quentin Williams, a sociolinguist, leads the project. Emile Jansen, Tanswell Jansen and Shaquile Southgate serve on the editorial board on behalf of Heal the Hood Project, which is an NGO that employs hip hop education in youth development initiatives. Emile also worked with hip hop and theatre practitioners on a production called Afrikaaps, which affirmed Kaaps and narrated some of its history. Anthropologist H. Samy Alim is the founding director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Language at Stanford University and has assisted in funding the dictionary, with the Western Cape’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport.
We’re in the process of training the core editorial board in the scientific area of lexicography, translation and transcription. This includes the archiving of the initial, structured corpus for the dictionary. We will write down definitions and determine meanings of old and new Kaaps words. This process will be subjected to a rigorous review and editing and stylistic process of the Kaaps words we will enter in the dictionary. The entries will include their history of origin, use and uptake. There will also be a translation from standard Afrikaans and English.
WHO WILL USE THE DICTIONARY?
It will be a resource for its speakers and valuable to educators, students and researchers. It will impact the ways in which institutions, as loci of power, engage speakers of Kaaps. It would also be useful to journalists, publishers and editors keen to learn more about how to engage Kaaps speakers.
A Kaaps dictionary will validate it as a language in its own right. And it will validate the identities of the people who speak it. It will also assist in making visible the diverse cultural, linguistic, geographical and historical tributaries that contributed to the evolution of this language.
KAAPS WAS RELEGATED TO A SLANG STATUS OF AFRIKAANS?
Acknowledgement of Kaaps is imperative, especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in order to create the dominant version of the language in the form of Afrikaans. A ‘suiwer’ or ‘pure’ version, claiming a strong Dutch influence, Afrikaans was formally recognised as an official language of South Africa in 1925. This was part of the efforts to construct white Afrikaner identity, which shaped apartheid based on a belief in white supremacy.
For example, think about the Kaaps tradition of koesiesters – fried dough confectionery – which was appropriated (taken without acknowledgement) and the treats were named koeksisters by white Afrikaners. They were claimed as a white Afrikaner tradition. The appropriation of Kaaps reveals a great deal about the extent to which race is socially and politically constructed. As I have said elsewhere, cultural appropriation is both an expression of unequal relations of power and is enabled by them.
When people think about Kaaps, they often think about it as ‘mixed’ or ‘impure’ (‘onsuiwer’). This relates to the ways in which they think about ‘racial’ identity. They often think about coloured identity as ‘mixed’, which implies that black and white identities are ‘pure’ and bounded; that they only become ‘mixed’ in ‘inter-racial’ sexual encounters. This mode of thinking is biologically essentialist.
Of course, geneticists now know that there is not sufficient genetic variation between the ‘races’ to justify biologically essentialist understandings. Enter cultural racism to reinforce the concept of ‘race’. It polices culture and insists on standard language varieties by denigrating often black modes of speech as ‘slang’ or marginal dialects.
CAN A DICTIONARY HELP OVERTURN STEREOTYPES?
Visibility and the politics of representation are key challenges for speakers of Kaaps – be it in the media, which has done a great job of lampooning and stereotyping speakers of Kaaps – or in these speakers’ engagement with governmental and educational institutions. If Kaaps is not recognised as a bona fide language, you will continue to see classroom scenarios where schoolkids are told explicitly that the way in which they speak is not ‘respectable’ and will not guarantee them success in their pursuit of careers.
This dictionary project, much like ones for other South African languages like isiXhosa, isiZulu or Sesotho, can be a great democratic resource for developing understanding in a country that continues to be racially divided and unequal.
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The three prisoners were to be charged for the first time, 18 years after their capture. Translation problems mean they wait one more day.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Translation and interpretation problems on Monday delayed by one day military efforts to formally charge three Southeast Asian men — held by the United States for 18 years — with conspiring in deadly terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003.
Prosecutors accuse the three prisoners — Encep Nurjaman, who is known as Hambali; Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep; and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin — of murder, terrorism and conspiracy in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people, and the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta, which killed at least 11 people and wounded at least 80.
Defense lawyers have called them torture victims who spent about three years in the secret C.I.A. prison network where agents used waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, painful shackling and other now outlawed “enhanced interrogation” techniques to extract information from their captives.
In 2003, a C.I.A. interrogator told Mr. Hambali that he would never go to court, because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you,” according to a study of the C.I.A. program that was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014.
Monday’s formal charging was meant to be a crossroads of sorts, the start of proceedings in a case that was approved by a Trump administration appointee on Jan. 21, the first full day of President Biden’s administration — and postponed by six months by pandemic restrictions.
The proceedings ended up being the latest example of the delays that have plagued Guantánamo’s justice system nearly 20 years after it was chosen to hold detainees captured after the Sept. 11 attacks and in the global effort to track down terrorists.
At least five CIA detainees were subjected to "rectal rehydration" or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity. The CIA placed detainees in ice water "baths." The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to one detainee that he would only leave in a coffin-shaped box. One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because "we can never let the world know what I have done to you."
The prisoner known as Hambali made his first court appearance at Guantanamo on Monday, despite a vow by a C.I.A. interrogator back in 2003 that he would never be allowed to do so.
Read the full document
All three men have been in the custody of the United States since 2003, and have been held at Guantánamo as members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian extremist group. Mr. Hambali, who is Indonesian, is accused of allying himself with Osama bin Laden’s global jihad, and sending Mr. Bin Amin and Mr. Bin Lep, former architecture students who met in college in Malaysia, to train in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
Translation and technical issues were evident at the outset. One lawyer pointed out that a prisoner had mentioned “Google” in a remark in Malay for the judge, but the court interpreter did not mention the search engine in an English translation. The Indonesian translator turned “legal training” in English into “training legal” in Bahasa Indonesian.
Defense lawyers said with alarm that all three defendants recognized a “Mr. Singh,” a translator with whom they each had confidential conversations as they prepared to seek release through a review board hearing, sitting beside the lead prosecutor in court on Monday, now working for the prosecution.
Lawyers for the three prisoners also told the judge that the court’s official Indonesian translator had in 2020 offered the opinion that “the government is wasting money on these terrorists; they should have been killed a long time ago,” and added that they had a sworn affidavit from a witness who heard the remark. Prosecutors are seeking life sentences in the case.
Mr. Bin Lep’s lawyer, Brian Bouffard, declared the Indonesian American contract translator “irretrievably biased.” Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyer, Christine Funk, questioned why the prosecutors needed an interpreter at the arraignment hearing in the first place: “Are they spying on us? I don’t know.”
Brian Bouffard, a lawyer for Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, with Christine Funk, a lawyer for Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, on Monday at Guantánamo Bay. Alex Brandon/Associated Press
The trial judge, Navy Cmdr. Hayes C. Larsen, tried to mend the problems. He gave the official court translation team 10-minute breaks every 20 minutes. He told defense lawyers to file legal motions if they believed there were interpretation problems that required remedies. And he postponed until Tuesday the reading of the charges, which was the reason for Monday’s hearing.
Defense lawyers, both civilian and military, and all paid by the Pentagon, described the case as still in its infancy. Prosecutors, they said, had provided perhaps 2 percent of the pretrial documents that could be used in the case, including accounts of interrogations the F.B.I. did in 2007 with the prisoners soon after their transfer to military custody from the C.I.A. Prosecutors declined to comment.
Mr. Hambali’s lawyer, James R. Hodes, called the case “absurd,” in part because of the length of his client’s detention and the nearly two-decade delay in bringing charges against him. He told reporters before the hearing that Mr. Hambali had been “brutalized” and spent at least half of his detention in solitary confinement. He said the prisoner was owed “an apology” and repatriation, “not to be held in a cage in a Caribbean island.”
Hearings at Guantánamo have been mostly held between English and Arabic, but have also suffered translation problems. In 2015, one of the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks blurted out the name of a translator in court — and disclosed that the linguist had previously worked for the C.I.A. at a black site, exposing his identity and derailing a week of hearings.
Finding U.S. translators with top-secret security clearances who speak Southeast Asian languages has apparently proved even more of a challenge. The Senate study of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program cited a January 2004 cable from a secret detention site that reported that Mr. Bin Lep’s “English is very poor, and we do not have a Malay linguist.”
Khartoum — Sudanese translator, copy writer, Adil Babikir, has received the Africa institute Global Africa Translation Fellowship, among a group of translators from around the continent in recognition of his creative effort to acquaint the World with treasures of Sudanese literature.
A statement published on the occasion has read: The Africa Institute is pleased to announce the recipients of its inaugural Global Africa Translation Fellowship launched as part of its African Languages and Translation Program.
It said Mr. Adil Babikir was awarded the fellowship for his translation of Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin's book Samahani from Arabic into English.
It said grants in the range of $1000 to $5,000 are offered annually to support the completion of translations of original works from the African continent and its diaspora, into Arabic and/or English. Selected works may be retranslations of old, classic texts, or previously untranslated works, collections of poetry, novel, prose, or critical theory.
In addition to Mr. Babikir the fellowship winners were Ms. Reem Abou-El-Fadl, for translation and editing of the Arabic-language memoir of Egyptian intellectual and activist Helmi Sharawy, Sira Misriyya Ifriqiya (An Egyptian African Story), which was first published in 2019 by independent Cairo press Dar Al-Ain, Claretta Holsey, for the translation of four scholarly essays from René Ménil's Tracées: Identité, Négritude, Esthétique aux Antilles from French into English. David Shook, for the translation of Francisco José Tenreiro's collected poems from Portuguese into English, including his seminal 1942 debut Ilha de Nome Santo (Island with a Holy Name).
Congratulations to ArabLit contributing translator Adil Babikir, to translator and scholar Reem Abou-El-Fadl, and to all the awardees of the 2021 Global Africa Translation Fellowships, which were announced today, said the Institute.
Mr. Babikir's achievement was received with high acclaim at home here from some of the country's renowned writers.
Wrote writer, advocate and former chairman of the Sudanese writers union, Mr. Kamal Aljizouli, who formerly wrote the foreword of Sakin's thriller "The Jungo -Stakes of the Earth, a novel depicting the tiresome life of daily farm workers in Sudan, which was published in the USA:
Adil Babikir was bent throughout the previous years on the translation of much of the fruit of Sudanese literature, prose and poetry, to the English language and vice versa. In addition to Sakin's Samahani and the Jungo Stakes of the Earth, he also translated the book Mansi, written by international Sudanese Novelist Tayeb Salih, which is a sort of biography written in narrative form. He also translated a collections from a selection of Sudanese poets he entitled "Modern Sudanese Poetry". He also translated some of the works of Southern Sudanese writers. In this derive he also translated a selection of narrative writings from Sudanese and Southern Sudanese writers, entitled "Literary Sudans, fore-worded by Professor Taban Lo Liyong.
Also wrote Poet Fedaily Jamma'a:
A piece of cultural news carried by the news agencies and the social media in different languages says some of the African translators who conveyed African literature into some of the most widely spoken languages of the World were awarded the Global Africa Fellowship for 2021, including the skillful Sudanese writer and translator Adil Babikir, for his translation of Sudanese writer Baraka Sakin's novel Samahani.
Mr. Adil Babikir has taken it all upon himself to do the huge institutionalized translation of several works of verse and fiction by Sudanese writers.
This spectacular success of one of our creative writers was carried by the news agencies and praised by Africa's cultural institutions. We congratulate translator Babikir for this deserved award and we also congratulate our country that brought his like of talented persons.
NEBRASKA CITY – The Dream Switch concert at Nebraska City this weekend was the first to include a Spanish-language interpretation.
The dual-language lyrics depict a narrative of a young person leaving the state before learning she could achieve her honorable goals right in her hometown.
The Nebraska City Community Foundation Fund asked Andrea Hincapie of the Heartland Workers Center at Nebraska City to participate and translate the message.
Hincpapie: “The Dream Switch wants to grow out the community so we come together with the Latino community so the Latino community can understand the concert today.”
Doug Friedli of the Nebraska City Community Foundation Fund said the Heartland Workers Center is a great partner for the community.
Friedli: “We’re so anxious and happy to be able to work with them and be an entire community and communicate.”
Jeff Yost, president of the Nebraska Community Foundation, said The Dream Switch is a tool for economic development.
Yost: “The Dream Switch is an opportunity to help us change the narrative about where young people’s honorable futures exist.”
Yost: “The only people who can build a community are the people who live and work in it, so our role is really to support people and initiate conversations about what is possible.”
The Dream Switch was held at Ord and Auburn before the pandemic and playwright Becky Boesen of Blixt Locally Grown said Nebraska City is a great setting for the new season.
Boesen: “I think Nebraska City continually, in spirit, offers this invitation that anything is possible. The pride of place, the way you see innovative buildings popping up, the tourism here, the ability to feel like you’re at home on main street or at an exotic vacation out at Lied Lodge. There’s just a little bit of everything that makes Nebraska City special and unique.”
Returner Denise Davis said a positive community discussion followed and the Latino residents in attendance felt welcomed.
LAST week, the controversial Manila Bay beach was in the news again after President Rodrigo "Come and sit on Daddy's lap" Duterte testily defended the project during another one of his late-night bull sessions.
The beach has been roundly criticized for its P389-million (and counting) price tag, an expense not unreasonably considered unnecessary in the midst of a pandemic, along with several environmental issues connected with the mine in Cebu that supplies the material as well as its unnatural introduction to the location fronting the Manila Baywalk. Duterte dismissed these concerns, opining the aesthetic improvement to the bay shore was reason enough to pursue the project.
Unfortunately, he could not help but undermine that otherwise viable point of view by putting it in the sort of skeevy terms his adolescent support base finds charming and the adult world finds cringe-inducing.
"Tingnan mo ngayon ang Boracay. Noon, maraming mga magagandang babae na naliligo. Noong pinaganda, mas lalong pinakamagandang babae sa buong mundo, nandiyan na. Ayaw mo pa 'yan? (Look at Boracay. Many beautiful women used to bathe [there]. After it [the Manila Bay shore] was rehabilitated, all of the most beautiful women in the world are now here. Don't you want that?)" he said.
"What is beautiful is beautiful. Period. Dolomite is beautiful to the eyes. Period," he added.
I would be willing to bet real money no one else would cite, "it will attract pretty girls" as a reason to install a beach in downtown Manila, and upon hearing or reading Randy Rod's comments, thousands of Filipino women reflexively crossed their arms over their chests and checked to make sure no one was standing behind them.
One of the most annoying things about Duterte is his penchant for reducing everything to absurdity; even if his comments aren't crude or creepy, he never fails to emphasize the lowest common denominator. It is seriously off-putting, because despite what Duterte apparently believes, only mentally defective people are enervated by being spoken down to. More importantly, however, it can warp the way issues are reported and discussed, because it preemptively deflects more substantial inquiry about government policy and actions.
The dolomite beach issue is a good example. Duterte's ultimately vacuous comment on the matter was the focus of most news reports following his latest midnight matinee, but the substance of what that comment was offered in response to, a self-congratulatory update on the ongoing Manila Bay rehabilitation program by Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu, was almost entirely missed. Apart from the Philippine News Agency, I could find only one media outlet that reported on Cimatu's short briefing to the president, and then it was seriously misinterpreted.
Cimatu highlighted the overall wonderfulness of the dolomite beach, as he would be expected to do as it was his department's blue-sky idea in the first place, but the main point of his briefing was the progress in reducing fecal coliform bacteria levels in the bay since the rehabilitation project began. The bay water's concentration of the bacteria, which is not the only pollutant the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) needs to be concerned about, but is probably the most serious health risk, has been reduced from several million parts per 100 milliliters to about 7,000. In the area of the dolomite beach, the concentration is down to about 140, close to the 100 parts per 100 milliliters considered safe for swimming.
The news story about Cimatu's comments drew a connection between "beach nourishment" and "cleaning the water," and attributed it to the DENR secretary. The implication was the crushed dolomite is somehow acting as a filter, removing the harmful bacteria and thus "nourishing" the bay.
My initial reaction was, "Ha, what an idiot. That's not at all what 'beach nourishment' means." Beach nourishment is the addition of sand (or fake sand, as the case may be) to a shoreline to create or maintain a beach. It has nothing to do with cleaning the water; if anything, it creates additional turbidity. Upon further review, however, it turns out Cimatu did not actually say the dolomite was cleaning the water, and in fact, didn't say anything that could be construed that way. The reduction in harmful bacteria, he explained, is attributable to the new treatment facilities to which the water from the Abad, Padre Faura, and Remedios outfalls is being diverted, as well as the overall cleanup effort ongoing elsewhere in the bay and its tributaries.
Thus, on one hand, the story was grossly misreported; but on the other, Duterte encouraged that by seizing on the least important aspect of Cimatu's report. Again, whether he did this because it amuses him to be a troll or because his management communication skills are actually a lot worse than most people assume is still an unanswered question. It would have cast the Manila Bay rehabilitation effort in a far more positive light if the largely unseen work that has had practical, substantial results had been highlighted instead.
And as for the polarizing dolomite beach? In a general sense, it is not a bad thing; the city has a critical lack of green and open spaces, and creating one as a purely aesthetic improvement is a worthy enough objective. The timing, cost and environmental impact from mining the dolomite in Cebu province are all debatable, but the job having been done, that ship has already sailed, so to speak; the serious question now is whether it would do more harm than good to stop maintaining it.
Backed with $5.5 million in seed funding, Sanas' accent-matching solution makes it easier for people to understand each other in customer care centers, remote tech support, education, telemedicine and more
PALO ALTO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / August 30, 2021 / A major challenge and frustration in global communications, even when people are speaking in the same language, is understanding an unfamiliar accent. This accent mismatch situation can become a major inefficiency in business and risks serious misunderstandings. To foster seamless communication in all areas of business, education, telemedicine, entertainment and more, Sanas will officially roll out the world's first real-time speech accent translation technology. Their solution will be used by seven BPOs (Business Process Outsourcers) globally starting in the fall of this year. Today, the company is also announcing its $5.5 million seed round of funding.
With no noticeable lag and edge deployment, the patent-pending Sanas software intercepts audio and converts accents through a speech-to-speech approach, building a virtual bridge between the audio device and the computer, and then sending the new signal to whichever communication app (Zoom, Hangouts, etc.) is in use. Almost instantly, the accent of a customer care representative, for example, will be matched to the accent of an incoming caller.
Top venture funds investing in the company's $5.5 million seed round include Human Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, and DN Capital. Speech industry veterans joining Sanas' Board of Advisors include Wendell Brown (Co-founder, Liveops, Teleo, eVoice) and Steven G. Chambers (former President of Nuance). The funds will be used to expand the engineering team and to introduce the software in more global markets.
"The world has shrunk, and people are doing business globally, while at the same time they have real difficulty understanding each other. Even getting Google Home or Alexa to understand accents accurately is extremely important," said Sanas' CEO, Maxim Serebryakov. "Digital communication is critical for our daily lives. Sanas is striving to make communication easy and free from friction, so people can speak confidently and understand each other, wherever they are and whoever they are trying to communicate with."
Sanas was created by a team of Stanford student engineers and top speech machine learning experts. The first application for the technology is in customer care centers, an industry where accent issues can be particularly problematic.
"As an immigrant from Turkey, I've always felt that getting rid of the accent barrier was a critical next step for a more fair and prosperous world," said Baris Akis, president and co-founder, Human Capital. "It's been amazing to partner with a team that's so mission driven and pushing the edge of speech technology to make that a reality."
Research by external sources revealed that by eliminating this accent barrier, companies enjoy increased customer satisfaction, sales, communication efficiency. Further, internal studies from Sanas showed increased foreign language learner fluency, as well as decreased word error rate (15% on industry-leading automatic speech recognition devices or ASRs).
The idea for Sanas was inspired by the experience of three international friends from Russia, China, and Venezuela, all of whom have very different accents. They witnessed firsthand the communication struggle due to accents, and saw a mutual friend quit his job because of this challenge. They realized that there had to be a better way to communicate.
"We plan to introduce the accent-matching technology to a range of industries and environments far beyond customer care and technical support, which are two very obvious use cases," said Serebryakov. "There are also creative use cases such as those in entertainment and media where producers can make their films and programs understandable in different parts of the world by matching accents to localities. We are also exploring how machines can better interpret what people are saying. We've only begun to explore the possibilities."
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About Sanas
Sanas was established by three Stanford students coming out of the renowned Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) with the aim of helping the world understand and be understood, and an end goal of unlocking potential through increased understanding and efficacy of communication in digital conversations. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Sanas' members and advisors include some of the top speech machine learning scientists in the world. For more information, visit sanas.ai.
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On August 16, 2021, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a translation contract worth up to USD 59m to TechTrans International (TTI).
The contract, Russian Language and Logistics Services 2 (RLLS2), covers translation, interpreting, language training, and international logistics to support space station operations in Russia and Kazakhstan.
CEO Beth Williams founded the company in 1993 specifically to provide services to NASA for the International Space Station (ISS). The language service provider (LSP) is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in Russia, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Colombia.
In addition to ISO 9001:2015 certification and NASA-relevant specializations, including aerospace, defense, and global security, TTI offers one decidedly unusual service: the “Train Like a Cosmonaut” Experience in Star City, Russia.
Guided by TTI staff, clients stay at the Russian Space Agency’s primary training center, near Moscow. Participants meet Russian and US astronauts, tour the Yuri Gagarin Museum, and try their hand at wilderness survival, spacesuit training, and negotiating a space station mockup.
Slator 2021 Language Industry Market Report
Data and Research, Slator reports
80-pages. Market Size by Vertical, Geo, Intention. Expert-in-Loop Model. M&A. Frontier Tech. Hybrid Future. Outlook 2021-2025.
According to USAspending.gov, which tracks contracts awarded by federal agencies, TTI’s business with NASA stretches back more than 20 years. The first contract, also for Russian language and logistics services, ran from October 1999 to December 2003 for USD 45.7m.
In 2010, TTI scooped up three more contracts, one for a security overseas seminar (USD 13,390) and two for Japanese language tutorials (USD 37,750 combined). The largest to date, worth USD 89.5m, is a nine-year contract related to Russian language and logistics services that ends September 30, 2021.
The phase-in period for RLLS2 begins September 1, 2021, followed by a two-year base period beginning October 1, 2021, at which point NASA will have the option of extending the contract by three months, nine months, or one year.
To say that we have a colorful and rich vocabulary in Maine is an understatement. Maine is one of those states where people 'from away" can visit and not understand most of what we are talking about at any given time (see: Dooryard). But with Maine becoming one of the hottest destinations in the country, we think it might be helpful to share some Maine words and phrases so that you newbies to our state can get in the Maine groove.
We polled Mainers and asked them what words they would want to be added as an official word to the English language. Here are the top 45 choices:
45 Maine Words That Should Be Added To The Dictionary
Here are 45 Maine slang words that we think should be added to Merriam-Webster, Funk & Wagnalls, or any legit dictionary of your choice.
Things People Say That Make Mainers Roll Their Eyes
TOP SPOTS IN MAINE WITH AMAZING CUSTOMER SERVICE
In Maine, it's not hard to find businesses, restaurants, and shops with great customer service. It could be we are that way because of the many tourists that visit us. Or it just might be our stubborn Yankee roots that we like to treat people the way we want to be treated.
20 Of the Best Places in Maine to People Watch
We asked Maineers where they go to people watch. Here were the Top 20 responses.
TEHRAN – British-Cypriot author Alex Michaelides’s novel “The Maidens” has been published in Persian two months after the publication of its original English edition.
Maryam Hosseinnejad has translated the book published by Sang in Tehran.
The book illustrates that Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike, particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens.
Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge.
Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister. And she becomes convinced that, despite his alibi, Edward Fosca is guilty of the murder. But why would the professor target one of his students? And why does he keep returning to the rites of Persephone, the maiden, and her journey to the underworld?
When another body is found, Mariana’s obsession with proving Fosca’s guilt spirals out of control, threatening to destroy her credibility as well as her closest relationships. But Mariana is determined to stop this killer, even if it costs her everything—including her own life.
Michaelides was born and raised in Cyprus. He has an M.A. in English literature from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and an M.A. in screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
“The Silent Patient” was his first novel and was the biggest-selling debut in the world in 2019. It spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and sold in a record-breaking forty-nine countries.
Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Alex Michaelides’s novel “The Maidens”.
It’s been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO Heal the Hood. The dictionary – in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans – holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, is involved in the project and tells us more.
What is Kaaps and who uses the language?
Kaaps or Afrikaaps is a language created in settler colonial South Africa, developed by the 1500s. It took shape as a language during encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people. It could be argued that Kaaps predates the emergence of an early form of Kaaps-Hollands (the South African variety of Dutch that would help shape Afrikaans). Traders and sailors would have passed through this region well before formal colonisation commenced. Also consider migration and movement on the African continent itself. Every intercultural engagement would have created an opportunity for linguistic exchange and the negotiation of new meaning.
Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by largely working class speakers on the Cape Flats, an area in Cape Town where many disenfranchised people were forcibly moved by the apartheid government. It’s used across all online and offline contexts of socialisation, learning, commerce, politics and religion. And, because of language contact and the temporary and seasonal migration of speakers from the Western Cape, it is written and spoken across South Africa and beyond its borders.
It is important to acknowledge the agency of people from the global South in developing Kaaps – for example, the language was first taught in madrassahs (Islamic schools) and was written in Arabic script. This acknowledgement is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in later years.
For a great discussion of Kaaps and explanation of examples of words and phrases from this language, listen to this conversation between academic Quentin Williams and journalist Lester Kiewit.
How did the dictionary come about?
The dictionary project, which is still in its launch phase, is the result of ongoing collaborative work between a few key people. You might say it’s one outcome of our interest in hip hop art, activism and education. We are drawn to hip hop’s desire to validate black modes of speech. In a sense, this is what a dictionary will do for Kaaps.
Quentin Williams, a sociolinguist, leads the project. Emile and Tanswell Jansen serve on the editorial board on behalf of Heal the Hood, which is an NGO that employs hip hop education in youth development initiatives. Emile also worked with hip hop and theatre practitioners on a production called Afrikaaps, which affirmed Kaaps and narrated some of its history. Anthropologist H. Samy Alim is the founding director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Language at Stanford University and has assisted in funding the dictionary, with the Western Cape’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport.
CD art from the musical Afrikaaps.Courtesy of Afrikaaps/Dylan Valley
We’re in the process of training the core editorial board in the scientific area of lexicography, translation and transcription. This includes the archiving of the initial, structured corpus for the dictionary. We will write down definitions and determine meanings of old and new Kaaps words. This process will be subjected to a rigorous review and editing and stylistic process of the Kaaps words we will enter in the dictionary. The entries will include their history of origin, use and uptake. There will also be a translation from standard Afrikaans and English.
Who will use the dictionary?
It will be a resource for its speakers and valuable to educators, students and researchers. It will impact the ways in which institutions, as loci of power, engage speakers of Kaaps. It would also be useful to journalists, publishers and editors keen to learn more about how to engage Kaaps speakers.
A Kaaps dictionary will validate it as a language in its own right. And it will validate the identities of the people who speak it. It will also assist in making visible the diverse cultural, linguistic, geographical and historical tributaries that contributed to the evolution of this language.
Kaaps was relegated to a slang status of Afrikaans?
Acknowledgement of Kaaps is imperative especially because Afrikaner nationalists appropriated Kaaps in order to create the dominant version of the language in the form of Afrikaans. A ‘suiwer’ or ‘pure’ version, claiming a strong Dutch influence, Afrikaans was formally recognised as an official language of South Africa in 1925. This was part of the efforts to construct white Afrikaner identity, which shaped apartheid based on a belief in white supremacy.
Read more: Afrikaner identity in post-apartheid South Africa remains stuck in whiteness
For example, think about the Kaaps tradition of koesiesters – fried dough confectionery – which was appropriated (taken without acknowledgement) and the treats were named koeksisters by white Afrikaners. They were claimed as a white Afrikaner tradition. The appropriation of Kaaps reveals a great deal about the extent to which race is socially and politically constructed. As I have said elsewhere, cultural appropriation is both an expression of unequal relations of power and is enabled by them.
When people think about Kaaps, they often think about it as ‘mixed’ or ‘impure’ (‘onsuiwer’). This relates to the ways in which they think about ‘racial’ identity. They often think about coloured identity as ‘mixed’, which implies that black and white identities are ‘pure’ and bounded; that they only become ‘mixed’ in ‘inter-racial’ sexual encounters. This mode of thinking is biologically essentialist.
Read more: How Cape Town's "Gayle" has endured -- and been adopted by straight people
Of course, geneticists now know that there is not sufficient genetic variation between the ‘races’ to justify biologically essentialist understandings. Enter cultural racism to reinforce the concept of ‘race’. It polices culture and insists on standard language varieties by denigrating often black modes of speech as ‘slang’ or marginal dialects.
Can a dictionary help overturn stereotypes?
Visibility and the politics of representation are key challenges for speakers of Kaaps – be it in the media, which has done a great job of lampooning and stereotyping speakers of Kaaps – or in these speakers’ engagement with governmental and educational institutions. If Kaaps is not recognised as a bona fide language, you will continue to see classroom scenarios where schoolkids are told explicitly that the way in which they speak is not ‘respectable’ and will not guarantee them success in their pursuit of careers.
This dictionary project, much like ones for other South African languages like isiXhosa, isiZulu or Sesotho, can be a great democratic resource for developing understanding in a country that continues to be racially divided and unequal.
To say that we have a colorful and rich vocabulary in Maine is an understatement. Maine is one of those states where people 'from away" can visit and not understand most of what we are talking about at any given time (see: Dooryard). But with Maine becoming one of the hottest destinations in the country, we think it might be helpful to share some Maine words and phrases so that you newbies to our state can get in the Maine groove.
We polled Mainers and asked them what words they would want to be added as an official word to the English language. Here are the top 45 choices:
45 Maine Words That Should Be Added To The Dictionary
Here are 45 Maine slang words that we think should be added to Merriam-Webster, Funk & Wagnalls, or any legit dictionary of your choice.
Things People Say That Make Mainers Roll Their Eyes
TOP SPOTS IN MAINE WITH AMAZING CUSTOMER SERVICE
In Maine, it's not hard to find businesses, restaurants, and shops with great customer service. It could be we are that way because of the many tourists that visit us. Or it just might be our stubborn Yankee roots that we like to treat people the way we want to be treated.
20 Of the Best Places in Maine to People Watch
We asked Maineers where they go to people watch. Here were the Top 20 responses.
