Siblings discover "orbisculate" was a word their dad made up. After his passing, are now campaigning to get in the dictionary.
A brother and sister are honoring their dad in a way he would have really gotten a kick out of. You know the squirt in the eye you get when digging into an orange or grapefruit? Their dad would describe it as the fruit orbisculating. They thought it was a word. It wasn’t until their college years did they discover it wasn’t a real word. In fact, it was a word their dad made up for a class he took in college, then started saying it in their home. It then became a running joke. When their dad passed recently, the siblings began a campaign to get the word orbisculate in the dictionary. That process requires a list of 50 things such as it has to be in crossword puzzle, book, song, and even on TV. They are well on their way. So remember when you dig into that grapefruit and it squirts you in the eye. That will soon be called orbisculate, originally coined by their dad Neil Kreger.
Nearly 17,000 Afghan interpreters who risked their lives working for the US military are trying to leave the war-torn country ahead of President Biden’s September 11th deadline to withdraw remaining US forces from Afghanistan, but some may get left behind.
Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said those interpreters have a bulls-eye on their backs, and that if we do not help them there could be scenes at the US Embassy like those when the last US helicopters flew out of Saigon.
"We have a duty and a moral responsibility to protect them from the Taliban and al-Qaida, if we do not give them special immigrant visas, they will be left behind and be slaughtered by the enemy."
McCaul and Ryan Crocker, President Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan wrote in the New York Times: "The Taliban view them as traitors: Since 2014, there have been at least 300 targeted killings of people who worked with us. Many more will die if the administration doesn’t take immediate steps to speed up the process to get them out safely."
Congress is getting impatient. "They're being hunted down right now as we speak, they are reaching out to me, these interpreters, in a panic," said Cong Mike Waltz (R-FL), a former Green Beret, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan.
US REPORT: TALIBAN WILL LIKELY CURTAIL AFGHAN WOMEN'S RIGHTS
Ismail Khan served for 7 years alongside US Special Forces translating for US troops in Eastern Afghanistan. His story was immortalized in the book, "American Spartan" about his boss, the legendary Green Beret Major Jim Gant, whom General David Petraeus once called "Lawrence of Afghanistan."
He now lives in Seattle but knows what is likely to happen to the 17,000 translators and their families who are waiting for Special Immigrant Visas to the US and has this warning for the Biden administration.
"Their lives are in extreme danger," Khan told Fox News. "They will go after every single translator."
The Taliban went after Khan’s family in Kunar province because he worked with the US military.
"One of my nephews was kidnapped. He was about 10 years old," said Khan, who recalled how the Green Berets called him and the other translators their GPS on dangerous missions.
"Americans are nothing without the translator. We are their mouth, their ears, their eyes. If they leave them behind, they are going to die. Most of them are going to die.
MICROWAVE WEAPONS ARE TARGETING US OFFICIALS AT HOME AND ABROAD
Chase Millsap served 3 tours in Iraq as a Marine Captain and spent 5 years trying to bring his Iraqi counterpart, who faced death threats from ISIS, to the US on a Special Immigrant Visa. He’s still waiting.
"As a Marine, you live by the word Semper Fidelis, which means always faithful. And that's not just something we put it on an email or say to each other, we do really mean it," said Millsap, author of "We are the Mighty." He is currently the head writer for the CBS sitcom, "The United States of Al," which is the story of a Marine who helps bring his Afghan translator to live with him in Ohio.
"When you work with the Americans, you put on our uniform. That's a mark for you and your life gets exponentially dangerous."
Millsap worries about the guilt US troops will feel if the State Department abandons these translators.
"I bet you that there are veterans out there right now who are terrified and really nervous about whether or not their interpreters are going to make it out and what can be done to save them," Millsap told Fox.
The Pentagon says Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wants to help, but so far there is no plan for an evacuation.
"[The Secretary] is very supportive of the president's desire and the State Department's efforts to expand and to accelerate the special immigrant visa program so that we can we can do right by these individuals," Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters.
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The State Department runs the special immigrant visa program, or SIVs. The head of U.S. forces in the Middle East says he's ready to help but is awaiting orders. "From a Central Command perspective and the perspective of the U.S. military, if directed to do something like that, we could certainly do it," Gen Kenneth McKenzie said at a recent Pentagon briefing.
The National Security Council recently held a deputies meeting on the issue, but no decisions have been made as of yet how to protect these translators and their families after the US withdrawal is complete and US troops leave Afghanistan.
Editor's note: No One Left Behindis a veterans group that helps Afghan translators settle in the US
It was 29 B.C., two years into the reign of the emperor Augustus, when the Roman poet Vergil began writing his great epic, the Aeneid. Unlike the Odyssey and the Iliad, Vergilʼs response to the Homeric epics is not just that of an individual hero. Itʼs also a national origin story, said Prof. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer—“and that makes it a different kind of poem.”
In the poem, Aeneas leads his followers west from Troy, which the Greeks have sacked, in search of somewhere to start a new city. Along the way, the gods—especially Juno and Aeneasʼs mother, Venus—throw both obstacles and aids in his path. Finally, the Trojans land in Italy and found a city where Rome will later stand.
Many readers have seen Aeneas as a positive figure and one who would please Romeʼs leaders. Linked with the not-so-exciting virtue of piety, the hero is set up as an excellent ancestor for the emperor Augustus, who wanted to be seen as having similar virtues. “Heʼs not out for personal glory” like an Odysseus or Achilles, said Bartsch-Zimmer, and the Aeneidʼs newest translator.
The Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the Program in Gender Studies, Bartsch-Zimmer—who publishes as Shadi Bartsch—spent four years working on her translation of the epic. Before it was released in the United States this February by Random House, it was already warmly embraced by readers in the United Kingdom, where it was first published last fall and named a best book of 2020 by the Guardian.
Thereʼs no shortage of excellent English translations of the poem, Bartsch-Zimmer acknowledged. But, as a leading scholar and teacher of ancient Rome and its literature, she felt the absence of a translation that was closely faithful to Vergil. Her understanding of the poem, of its authorʼs intentions, and of why it continues to captivate readers two millennia after its writing also make meaningful departures from past scholarship.
Translating Vergil ‘literally’
Why a new Aeneid now? Many of the existing translations, Bartsch-Zimmer said, “are hailed as poems in their own right—thatʼs seen as the highest praise one can bestow.” She finds many of them valuable and beautiful, but she set out in the opposite direction: to make “an accurate translation of Vergil, because Vergil is powerful enough to supply the poetry. I can just be the medium through which Vergil flows.”
Of course the translator can never be fully invisible. “Thereʼs always an element of the personality and the angle of the translator embedded into the translation,” said Bartsch-Zimmer, “but I wanted to do my best to translate Vergil literally.” What that meant, for one thing, was staying true to how the poem sounds: to Vergilʼs distinctively quick pace and his everyday Latin.
Vergilʼs use of dactylic hexameter—a meter with six feet per line containing two or three syllables each—makes the Aeneid “very fast-moving, dense, exciting,” Bartsch-Zimmer explained. Itʼs a world apart from the authors sheʼd previously translated, such as Seneca, whose verse is stately and ornate.
But Vergil “is, bam, just pure Latin, and never-ending movement”—and his is a dense language to begin with. Latin, she writes in the translatorʼs note, “can say much in few words” compared to English. This poses a challenge that past translators have solved either by using more words and beats per line, or by using additional lines, to catch all the meaning. Both approaches create poetry that feels nothing like the Aeneid in Latin. And the latter, throwing off the line numbers between original and translation, hinders study of the poem in its original Latin.
So Bartsch-Zimmer set out to write her translation in no more than six feet per line, like Vergil, without adding lines or leaving any meaning out. “That was really, really, hard,” she said, “like boiling down the English into compact nuggets.” The result, however, offers “a radically different reading experience” than what has been available to English speakers, she writes in her translatorʼs note.
Read side by side with previous translations, the difference is clear. Take one popular and acclaimed translation, published by Robert Fagles in 2006. Fagles gives the epicʼs opening this way, making three lines into four:
Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate, he was the first to flee the coast of Troy, destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil, yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above
In contrast, Bartschʼs translation tracks with the lines of the original, and reads with a decided punch:
My song is of war and a man: a refugee by fate, the first from Troy to Italyʼs Lavinian shores, battered much on land and sea by blows from gods
For readers without Latin, this is as close as we can get to reading the original. (Bartsch-Zimmer estimated two years of language classes as the minimum requirement to even haltingly read the original Aeneid.) For those with a little Latin, her translation will make it easier to move between the Latin and the English. And overall, Bartsch-Zimmerʼs painstaking work to compress the English, packing each line with meaning while approximating Vergilʼs rhythm—“the beating heart of the poem,” she calls it in her translatorʼs note—makes for an approachable and gripping work. (Read an excerpt of the translation.)
Issued by a major commercial publishing house, the book’s accessibility has potential to put the Aeneid on nonscholarsʼ reading lists. A broad new audience for the epic would be a welcome turn of events, as it was with Emily Wilsonʼs translation of the Odyssey, published by W. W. Norton in 2017.
An enduring classic
TheAeneidhas spoken in distinct ways to each era and culture for which it has had meaning. “A classic is a work that seems to echo the values of every society that needs it,” Bartsch-Zimmer said. “Thatʼs why it stays classic.”
For Vergilʼs fellow Romans, the epic praised Augustus and the empire, and provided an origin story. Christian readers in the Middle Ages took it to be an allegory of Christʼs life. Nineteenth-century Americans found the account of Aeneasʼs westward voyage and conquering of native peoples resonant with manifest destiny, while Americans of the Vietnam War era saw in the epic a dramatization of the costs of empire. Mussolini commandeered the Aeneid to buttress a vision of his Italy as “the true fulfillment of the great Rome,” Bartsch-Zimmer said.
Her own reading is embedded in its time and place and culture too. “Now Iʼm reading it as a sort of propaganda that lets you see it as such, that points to itself and says, you can accept me, maybe Iʼll be useful for you in making the nation cohere better by giving it a foundation story. But every foundation story also has a cost.”
From our 21st-century perch, weʼre well placed to see what that cost entails: “Weeding out things that donʼt fit in the foundation story, whether itʼs womenʼs voices, or indigenous voices, or the voices of the people who resist it. Other voices have to be silenced for this voice to exist.”
Bartsch-Zimmer sums up the poemʼs contemporary political resonance in her introduction. “In an age of refugees seeking to escape their war-torn homelands,” she writes, “an age of rising nationalism across the globe; an age in which many in Europe and the United States are suspicious of ‘the Eastʼ and its religious differences—in our age, that is—the Aeneid has more to say to us than ever, especially about the costs (and to be fair, benefits) of national ideologies and the way that myths of origins and heroes are created.”
Now, she looks back on the project with a certain wistfulness, and a sense of her life having changed. Four years in such close quarters with a great work of art have left their mark. “No matter what happens to me on a daily basis, now I see it through the lens of the language of the epic,” she said. “Itʼs a very strange feeling when lines will bubble up that seem to express the situation perfectly.”
Bartsch-Zimmer leaves her mark on the classic in turn, giving an account of Vergilʼs purposes and his poemʼs meanings that is new and powerful—and a brisk-reading translation that shortens the distance between his language and ours. “I feel like after 2,000 years,” she said, “Iʼm helping people read the poem differently—not as pro-empire or against empire, but as a story about how political literature comes to be.”
—This story was excerpted and adapted from the University of Chicago Magazine. Visit their website to read more aboutBartsch-Zimmer’s analysis of Vergil, or to read anexcerpt from her translation.
When U.S. troops first arrived in Afghanistan, 20 years ago, they enjoyed broad support among ordinary Afghans. But over time, the view of the American military as a welcomed ally was successfully manipulated by the Taliban, who were able to tell a story of the Americans as an uncaring occupying force.
Now, as troops prepare to leave, we update you on the story of two people tasked with the job of trying to communicate in a way that Afghans would trust and believe.
First aired in 2018, reporter Quil Lawrence brings us this story about Taliban poetry, an Afghan cooking show, and the echoes of war.
It's the perfect prelude to a new series we have in the works, also with Quil Lawrence, called Home/Front. It's about overcoming a divide that many of us don't even realize is there: between civilians and veterans.
Send us an email at roughtranslation@npr.org.
Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.
MISSION — The Umatilla language is now accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection.
In a press release, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation announced that the Umatilla Language Dictionary is now online.
A collaboration between the CTUIR Language Program and Amazon Web Services, the tribes intent was to educate tribal members on their language and raise awareness about the tongue.
The prevalence of the Umatilla language has diminished over the years as many of its fluent speakers have died. The CTUIR established a language program in 1996 to preserve the language by recording elders and teaching the language to tribal youth and adults.
“This is a gift to the youth,” Noel Rude, the dictionary’s author and a former tribal linguist at the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, said in a statement. “No matter where they find themselves, they will have access to the beautiful words of their elders. May this kindle their curiosity! And may their elders’ legacy never fade.”
MISSION, Ore. (AP) — The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have released an online dictionary of their language to preserve it and help new learners pick up the dying tongue.
The project is a collaboration between the confederated tribes' language program and Amazon Web Services, an Amazon subsidiary that provides cloud-based platforms on a pay-as-you-go basis, the East Oregonian reported Wednesday.
The prevalence of the Umatilla language has diminished over the years as many of its fluent speakers have died.
The tribe established a language program in 1996 to preserve Umatilla by recording elders and teaching the language to tribal youth and adults. The reservation in northeast Oregon is home to a union of three area tribes, the Cayuse, the Umatilla, and the Walla Walla.
In a statement, the tribe credited tribal member Twáway, also known as Inez Spino-Reves, with working with linguists and providing key details about the languages' grammer and vocabulary.
Members of other Pacific Northwest tribes, including the Nez Perce and the Yakima, also played important roles, as well as biologists and historians who helped with plant and animal identifications and
Don't Miss
The online dictionary, which includes a Umatilla keyboard, is available for free here: https://ift.tt/3h3fZMU.
Due to our dependence on the internet for digital transformation, most people suffer from the risks of cyberattacks. It is an even greater concern this year due to the trend of remote working and international business expansions. According to IBM, the cost of cyber hacks in 2020 is about $3.86 million. Thus, understanding how cybersecurity and data privacy plays a priority role in organizations, especially in a multilingual setting.
But, what is the relationship of languages in data privacy, and how can a reliable translation help prevent cyber-attacks?
The Connection of Translation Company to Data Privacy
A lot of people will ask about the clear connection between translations and cybersecurity. In data privacy, conveying important information through effective communications is important. However, with language barriers and complicated jargon in the IT industry, only IT professionals can understand their messages. It is also especially difficult for multilingual people who only know basic translations of the contents.
Oftentimes, a cyber attack or cyber hack happens when people don’t know what’s happening in their gadgets. Malware developers have different ways of attacking their victims, and they make their attempts as difficult to identify as they can. Some of them use spam which is in the form of unsolicited and inappropriate messages. According to the Message Anti-Abuse Working Group, about 88–92% of total email messages in 2010 are spam.
Aside from that, phishing is also a known way of attempting to get sensitive information from users through a webpage that looks the same as a trustworthy entity. Due to the uncanny similarity of the sites, the unsuspecting visitors tend to put their bank, credit card, and identity details willingly.
For clarity and convenience, it is essential to have accurate translations for guidelines, procedures, and warnings to bridge communication gaps in cybersecurity. However, you must find an experienced translation company with specialists in diverse technologies and masters the terminologies in the IT industry. It is best to avoid free translation software that is more prone to data piracy and cyberattacks.
Cyberattack Cases Worldwide
To understand the severity of cyber hacking, here are some of the widely known cyberattacks in different parts of the world:
Japan
Even with its title as one of the leading countries with high technology, Japan still wasn’t able to escape cybercrimes. Last 2016, Japan experienced a series of cyberattacks on different companies that led to the leaking of over 12.6 million confidential corporate information. There was also another ransomware named WannaCry that attacked over 500 companies at that time. They even caused great damage to large brands like Honda Motors, which had to shut their operations down for some time.
Denmark
Last 2015, there were some cyberattacks on the staff members of the Danish defence and foreign minister. It was followed by the ransomware that paralyzed the operations of Maersk, Denmark’s transport and logistics giant brand. The multiple threats of cyber attacks in their country also affected their hospitals and energy infrastructures. Due to that, the request for their languages for cybersecurity is continuously increasing up to this year.
Russia
Some people think that Russia is one of the major perpetrators of cyber-attacks around the world. However, they are vulnerable to cybercrimes themselves and have already experienced previous attacks. Some of the targeted organizations in Russia were Rosnet, their largest oil producer, airports, and banks. Wannacry was also able to infiltrate Russia’s Interior Ministry, which was a great threat to their government.
How Translators Help Prevent Cyber Attacks
As mentioned, translators are of great help in preventing cyber attacks. But, how is it possible? Here are some of the best ways to avoid data privacy invasion and malware installations through accurate translations:
Translating User Interface
The user interface is the screen that lets users and computers interact with each other. If the users cannot understand what they’re seeing, it will be difficult for them to identify suspicious ads and pop-ups. Thus, it is ideal to translate the user interface to different languages to cater to the needs of their multilingual users.
For example, if the users entered a website trying to install malicious software to a computer, they should be able to identify what they can click and not. However, most websites and user interfaces (UI) are in English, and not everyone around the world speaks this language. This is why most people tend to click the wrong buttons and accidentally permit the installation of virus-infected files.
This is also the same case when it comes to using mobile applications. Most cyber hackers are using ads and pop-ups to attack users. To confuse people, malware developers don’t only rely on standard keys such as “x” that confuses people on what they should click. They make finding the exit difficult to find to force the users to make a mistake.
In these cases, translating the UI of the website, software, and application to other languages is the ideal solution.
Bridging Communication Gaps between Cybersecurity Experts
Cybersecurity staff may understand the jargon in the IT industry, but it is a different case when they speak different languages. There are numerous cybersecurity centres all around the world and they don’t always understand English. The language barrier interferes with their ability to convey important information about cybersecurity. Due to this, most companies are hiring reliable translators to let the professionals speak confidently about important matters.
Securing Accurate Translations of Important Texts
Most websites post warnings and precautions to help their users avoid malware attacks. However, if they are in a different language, most people will just ignore these warnings. Even if they try to translate the texts through free automated translations, the result could be inaccurate and may cause misunderstandings to users.
A professional translation of these warnings, labels, and precautions can ensure that the website’s messages are properly conveyed to the users. It is especially useful for large entities, organizations, and government institutions.
Protecting Critical Information
Most small to medium enterprises choose translation software because they are relatively cheaper than hiring professional translators. However, the sad truth about that is they’re putting their companies at risk for cyber attacks. This software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning that stores your information as you translate documents. They are free to use the acquired details however they want, and you can’t do anything with it.
Thus, for critical documents, emails, and company and health information, it is ideal to hire a trusted translation company to secure your details. They also use technology with tight security and privacy for the translated contents.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from IT Security Expert Blog authored by SecurityExpert. Read the original post at: https://ift.tt/3eYzDXB
