Rotary clubs deliver dictionaries to schools - Lincoln Journal Star - Dictionary

From left: Gina Cotton (Rotary 14), Sue Schuerman (Lincoln East Rotary), Sara Reyes (Giving Spirits Evening Rotary), Clay Ehlers (Lincoln South Rotary and assistant district governor), Dave Dietz (Lincoln South Rotary president) and Srini Ampavati (Lincoln South Rotary) prepare boxes of dictionaries at Green’s Plumbing April 28 for every elementary school in Lincoln. Club members delivered the boxes to Lincoln’s private and parochial schools, and the remaining boxes for LPS were taken by truck to the LPS distribution center.

COURTESY PHOTO

BY RANDY BRETZ for the Neighborhood Extra

The dreaded COVID-19 pandemic created delays, and business changes meant that decisions had to be made, yet the determination of Lincoln’s Rotary clubs finally delivered thousands of dictionaries to each and every fourth-grade student in the city.

Each fall for nearly 20 years, members of Lincoln’s Rotary clubs have walked into every fourth-grade classroom in the city and personally handed out the dictionaries. Not only did the children appreciate receiving their very own book, it was a real joy for club members to go into each and every elementary school and interact with the students. However, in the fall of 2020, the schools were dealing with the COVID pandemic and outside visitors weren’t allowed in the classrooms.

“We realized that we couldn’t have Rotary members in our schools,” noted Mindy Burbach of Lincoln Public Schools. “Yet we knew that the dictionaries were good for the children to have as a learning tool and reference book.”

Early last fall, Rotary was notified that the project had to be delayed.

“In March this year, we reevaluated the project and worked with representatives of the clubs to come up with an alternative,” Burbach added. “We decided to have the books delivered to each school by LPS personnel, and for the teachers to play a video describing the dictionaries and letting the children know they were from Rotary.”

Then, there were business decisions that impacted the project.

“Every year we’ve done this project, the preparation and boxing of all the dictionaries was done at Green’s Plumbing and Heating on North 48th Street,” noted Gina Cotton, a Downtown Rotary member and chair of this year’s effort. However, the company had been sold and the building was put up for sale.

“When I contacted the new owner, Jeremy Roebke, he was so impressed with what we were doing he offered to let us use his new warehouse,” Cotton said. “That says a great deal about people in Lincoln.”

And yet another business decision impacted the project. Each year, there’s a chairperson for the project and a co-chairperson. They work together to coordinate this effort to mobilize dozens of Rotary members, box up thousands of dictionaries and communicate with the schools. This year, the person who was supposed to help Cotton took a job in another city.

“Everything was up in the air,” lamented Cotton. “Jeff (Hebb) was gone, Green’s had been sold and I felt overwhelmed.”

But as the project began to unwind, she kept moving ahead. Talk about determination.

Oh, and one more business decision caused an issue. For years, Downtown Rotary Club member Shannon Harner had her real estate office print special labels to place in each dictionary. Harner took a new job, but the folks at Home Realty said they would do the project anyway. Phew, one more distraction taken care of!

Cotton and representatives from Lincoln South Rotary, Lincoln East Rotary and Giving Spirits Rotary finally had their green light from Lincoln Public Schools, so Cotton jumped on the phone to Mary French, who runs The Dictionary Project, the people who print and ship a million dictionaries for Rotary to distribute.

“I was thrilled to get the call from Gina,” said French. “And we were able to arrange shipping right away from our operation in South Carolina.” French started The Dictionary Project nonprofit organization in 1995, and each year she produces and distributes them to Rotary, other service clubs and organizations around the United States.

There’s one more interesting part to this story. On April 30, the boxed dictionaries were delivered to the Lincoln Public Schools Distribution Center, where they needed to sit for about 70 hours in quarantine. Then, the boxes containing more than 4,000 dictionaries were distributed to all of Lincoln’s elementary schools.

In those schools, students are watching a video produced by Downtown Rotary’s President Eric Drumheller. He shares about the value of having a printed dictionary, how Rotary serves our community and beyond, and what the word “service” means. Rotary’s motto is “Service above Self.” Maybe the students should also look up the word “determination,” because that’s what drove Gina Cotton and a small contingent of volunteers from Lincoln’s clubs to complete the project.

0 comments

Get local news delivered to your inbox!

Urdu Dictionary Board struggles to operate - The Express Tribune - Dictionary

---

KARACHI:

In a turn of events that highlights the government’s disregard towards the national language, it appears the Urdu Dictionary Board, which provided Pakistan with its first official 22-volume dictionary, has been left to operate without an administrative head for more than a year.

Whereas, more than 90 percent of the department’s editorial staff has retired, leaving a single research officer to do much of all that needs to be done.

Although following the passage of some 1.5 years, the long headless dictionary board’s administrative charge was additionally handed over to National Language Promotion Department Director-General Dr Rauf Parikh, his oversight has remained limited to operating from the capital city of Islamabad.

The board’s last permanent head, Aqeel Abbas Jaffery, was appointed editor under the federal government of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in 2016, for a three-year term. His appointment was recommended by the National History and Literary Heritage Advisor Irfan Siddiqui and it was under his tenure that the board successfully digitized the Urdu dictionary. It was then for the first time that Pakistanis had access to a mobile application featuring every word and its pronunciation from the original 22-volume dictionary.

However, much of such feats are recounted today as tales from the department’s bygone glory days. On the other hand, for the past year and a half, owing to the severe shortage of editorial staff and the unavailability of funds, the department is said to have been sitting on a pile of projects either pushed to the twelfth of never or forsaken completely.

Per details obtained by The Express Tribune, one such notable project approved in the past was the launch of a children’s Urdu dictionary, which now appears to have been cast aside.

“It is due to the lack of interest of the federal government and the dearth or researchers that the project had to be quietly booted. Out of 55 sanctioned posts of the Urdu Dictionary Board, only 18 posts are now available while the remaining 37 employees of varying grades have all retired,” informed a source privy to the development.

The department’s core limitation is that the posts of its Editor-in-Chief, Editor, Deputy Editor, Research Officer and Assistant Scholars are no longer occupied, leaving a single Grade-16 Research Officer to run the affairs of the entire wing. Whereas, all others left under him are lower grade, non-editorial employees.

Explaining the details of his tenure, former editor-in-chief Aqeel Abbas Jaffery said that lack of funds has been the primary obstacle keeping the department from working on various projects, like the now-booted children’s dictionary.

Whereas, according to Tariqbin Azad, the department’s sole in-service research officer, work on various new projects, including revision of an existing dictionary and development of a new dictionary, has been reinitiated following the visit of the board’s acting head.

Speaking in this regard, Urdu Dictionary Board Acting Head Dr Rauf Parikh said that he has started work on reprinting two volumes of the dictionary, while efforts are underway to improve conditions of the board.

“The issue of unavailability of editorial staff has been discussed with the concerned ministry and details regarding appointments have been sought. We are sending them in writing. It is likely that appointments will be made by including it in the budget for the next financial year,” he told The Express Tribune.

Response to “the lost in translation problem” | Opinion | grandrapidsmn.com - Herald Review - Translation

Some of the aspects that Terry (Mejdrich - science columnist) brings forth are certainly true, especially concerning dialects and meanings with cultural and metaphors and as we are presently experiencing the prejudices of authors affects how they write and interpret and the words that are used to convey their bias, we all have that and do that to try to prove our point. However, what Terry is saying, is that the same thing has happened in Bible translation. I would like to strongly disagree with that on the basis of history and the Biblical account and record. 

First, the monks which copied the Bible during the Middle Ages; if they made a mistake in the copying of a letter or a comma the monastery would throw out the whole work of a certain monk. Hence, because of such close scrutiny and an atmosphere of perfection, there were very few errors that were ever recorded in a manuscript or Bible. Each monk would go over their work numerous times to verify it was accurate even the punctuation needed to be totally accurate. They realized they were handling God’s Word, not some work of man. Christian believers know that the Bible is without error in its original version, and that it was written by men under the inspiration of God which makes it totally accurate and without error in its message and historically accurate. Hundreds of times, archaeologists have confirmed the accuracy of the Bible as to cities, locations and artifacts presented which confirm the Biblical record (as in the location of the Egyptian chariot wheels being in the Gulf of Aquaba and Mount Sinai being in present day Saudi Arabia or that Jericho existed. 

Terry is wrong that the new translations are based or going off of the old translations, that is basically not true. The translations go back to the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts almost exclusively. The newer translations mostly use the Alexandrian family of manuscripts which were found most recently but seem to be older than the Textus Receptus which is the Byzantine Family which was used in the older translations the KJV, the Latin Vulgate, Martin Luther Bible, and Tyndale. A few “Bibles” are paraphrases as Terry is trying to explain. Also, Terry states “there was conscious editing of the early transcripts selecting only those that fit the desired narrative”. That is totally false, the monks had to be meticulous. Another error that Terry states is that “ what is read in the translations of the translations of the translations from one language and culture … to another” is a false depiction of Bible translations and translators. To the unlearned, Terry seems accurate and understandable because that is how the natural biased person would act. Monks and translators realize they are handling “God’s Word” and with the fear of God want it to be correct and without errors. The translations are derived from the oldest and closest to the original manuscripts as possible with few exceptions. 

Marlon Sias

Viceroy taps TransPerfect for translation help - Hotel Management - Translation

Viceroy Hotels & Resorts has selected language technology company TransPerfect to provide translation management technology to the Viceroy Kopaonik Serbia property. Viceroy Kopaonik will use TransPerfect’s GlobalLink OneLink software to manage website localization, starting with its website.

Viceroy Hotels chose TransPerfect’s GlobalLink OneLink translation management system for its functionality, automation capabilities and its ability to support and manage booking engines. GlobalLink OneLink will let Viceroy’s hotels to focus all resources on the source language website while TransPerfect handles the sites in other languages from beginning to end.

GlobalLink is specifically designed to manage the demands of creating, deploying and maintaining multilingual content, reducing the time and effort required throughout the localization process. More than 5,000 organizations currently use GlobalLink solutions to reach audiences in multiple languages and drive maximum return on investment in markets abroad. Of particular interest to Viceroy was the GlobalLink OneLink on-page editor tool that lets Viceroy Hotels’ in-country reviewers assess and update translated content in its final web context.

“As a global hotel brand that caters to luxury travelers, we needed to find a translations partner with strong capabilities and who shared our focus on providing customers with the best experience possible—and TransPerfect was the natural choice for us,” said Eve Tronson, VP of digital strategy & loyalty marketing at Viceroy Hotels & Resorts.

“Viceroy’s brand reputation is strong, and with that comes an even greater responsibility to make sure their message conveys properly in any language,” said TransPerfect President and CEO Phil Shawe. “We’re pleased that they have chosen GlobalLink OneLink for their website localization needs and look forward to helping them reach international customers more effectively.”

Read more on

'Lost in Translation' | MSUToday | Michigan State University - MSUToday - Translation

Jennifer Chinchilla Perez is a third-year medical student at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine Flint Campus. She is planning to pursue family medicine as her specialty.

In my undergraduate studies at San Francisco State University, I remember my colleagues speaking about their studies on the neurophysical connections of the Manduca sexta (tobacco hornworm) or the susceptibility of anaxyrus baxteri (Wyoming toad). I admired their dedication, but even as a biology major I never developed the desire to pursue scientific research. Instead, I put my efforts into community service work and explored public health. I learned about the impact of social determinants of health and health disparities.

This new well of information pushed me to reflect on my own upbringing. As the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, I grew up interpreting school, immigration, and medical information for my parents. I remember one incident that took place in the emergency department. My mother was being treated and the staff looked to me and explained her health to me in English, assuming I would convey the message back to her in Spanish. This had always been our normal, but upon reflecting, I realized these language barriers could lead to decreased health outcomes. Once in medical school, I used my personal experiences to drive the research and community work I participated in. This led to my involvement in Lost in Translation: An OSCE-Based Workshop for Helping Learners Navigate a Limited English Proficiency Patient Encounter.

Our project was led by Dr. Jan Fune, a pediatric fellow at Spectrum Health Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital. The team included medical students from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and individuals from the following Spectrum Health Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital departments: quality improvement, language services and the pediatric residency program. Based on our initial discussions, we learned that pediatric residents had deficiencies when using language services, but had the desire to improve them. We used the deficiencies found and, as a team, developed our workshop.

In brief, our three-hour workshop consisted of a panel discussion, a best practices presentation led by the language services department and a video demonstration. Ten pediatric residents participated in pre- and post-workshop objective structured clinical exams (OSCEs). Our OSCE’s included a standardized patient with limited English proficiency playing the role of the child’s parent and an actor portraying a friend, both fluent in English and the parent’s native language. Both OSCEs were observed and scored using a 16-item yes/no checklist to measure the impact of the workshop. In our pre-workshop findings, seven out of 10 residents attempted to use the actor portraying the friend to convey the message to the parent before asking for a professional interpreter, just as I had experienced with my mother. In our post-workshop findings, all 10 residents requested an interpreter instead of asking the friend to facilitate. This was just one of the positive outcomes of our workshop.

Now that our workshop is published in MedEdPORTAL, residency programs, health systems and health professionals can begin to use it as a tool to improve the relationship between their interpreters and health care providers. Further, this workshop has the potential to improve the quality of care provided to patients with limited English proficiency. I hope that my story can encourage other students to use their life experiences and passions to drive their academic work

Banner image: (left to right) Chineze Mbanugo, Jennifer Chinchilla Perez, Jan Fune and Allison Hoppe. Photo taken Oct. 13, 2019, pre-pandemic.

Students find important pandemic information lost in translation - UNM Newsroom - Translation

When Damián Wilson, an associate professor in The University of New Mexico Department of Spanish and Portuguese, first saw Spanish-language highways signs at the start of the COVID pandemic shutdown, he was happy to see the state reaching out to its many Spanish-speaking residents. An estimated 29 percent of the state’s population over age 5 speaks Spanish at home, according to Census Bureau statistics.

But soon after, Wilson and members of his sociolinguistics class, Spanish of the Southwest, found that there were differences in pandemic messaging from the state that potentially left Spanish speakers at a disadvantage. The class went to work to find a solution.

Wilson's initial satisfaction at seeing the Spanish-language signs at the start of the pandemic turned to disappointment as the signage waned. 

“As a sociolinguist, I am always paying attention to the way that languages are portrayed in a variety of settings including media, government agencies, and the linguistic landscape. I was comforted by the fact that freeway billboards in New Mexico displayed messaging in Spanish and English at the beginning of the pandemic,” Wilson said. “Bilingual signage and messaging do more than just communicate a message. They also give the impression that the message’s intended audience is important, be they Spanish speakers or English speakers, and promote a sense of inclusivity and a common goal.”

Students in the project

• Victoria Peña-Parr - a graduate student pursuing a master's degree in Spanish with a concentration in Hispanic Southwest Studies;
• Kory Apodaca Cordova - a graduate student pursuing a master's degree in Spanish with a concentration in Hispanic Linguistics; 
• Fátima Dutra - pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish with a concentration in Hispanic Linguistics;
• Rachael Newsom - a graduate student pursuing a master's degree in Spanish with a concentration in Hispanic Southwest Studies;​
• Alonso Arana - a graduate student is pursuing a master's degree in Hispanic Southwest Studies.

“Our project initially came to light through the use of the Dynamic Messaging Signs over the interstate," said Victoria Peña-Parr, a student involved with the project. "When the State of New Mexico first shut down, we started to see information regarding COVID in both Spanish and English being disseminated over these boards. We initially thought, ‘Yes, this is a win.’ Unfortunately, within a few weeks, the Spanish translations were nowhere to be found."

The differences between the two languages in disseminating COVID messaging struck again when student Kory Apodaca Cordova tried to register her parents for vaccinations on the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) COVID website, which gave her the option to register in Spanish.

“As I was going through the demographic information, I noticed Eddy County, where my parents live, was not listed. I was confused, so I chose Chavez County, which is the next closest county instead,” said Cordova, who also worked on the project. “Later, I went back into my parents’ account in the English website and found Eddy County.”

Peña-Parr did some investigating and found that a software program called GTranslate had been used to convert the website into Spanish, rendering the county names into literal interpretations of the English language words including:

County dropdown options

• Eddy was converted to Remolino, Spanish for “windstorm” or “swirl.”
• Grant became Conceder, the Spanish word for “grant,” as in to “give” or “award.”
• Lea translated to Pasto, which means pasture or a grassy area, the definition of “lea,” in English.
• Quay, which means a “dock” or “pier” in English, translated to Muelle, meaning “quay” or “dock” in Spanish.

Grant, Lea, Quay, and Eddy counties are actually all surnames of historical figures: the U.S. president, the first mayor of Roswell, a Pennsylvania senator who supported statehood for New Mexico, and a New Mexico cattle rancher.

“What we have seen is that some English words translated directly to Spanish do not carry the same meaning; therefore, any translation should be done very carefully to avoid misunderstandings,” noted Fátima Dutra, who also worked on the project. “Another way to evade potential mistranslations is to avoid translation altogether. That is, information in Spanish does not necessarily need to be a translation of the English version. Organizations such as NMDOH could utilize local Spanish speakers or bilinguals who are capable of preparing the content in Spanish.”

As soon as the group discovered the county menu issue, they contacted the NM COVID Hotline, spending many hours on the phone with a variety of different numbers associated with NMDOH. After seeing no changes after a week, the students called local officials in the affected communities. The county names were corrected after the City of Carlsbad advocated for language corrections at the state level shortly thereafter.

“We heard from the students and implemented a fix to manually override the automatic translations that our system was performing," said NMDOH spokesperson Matt Bieber. "In automatic translations, this happens a lot with proper names like Grant that also have non-proper meanings.” 

The students continue to work to get the highway signs reinstated.

“Before our project, it was almost impossible for Spanish-speakers in Eddy, Lea, Grant, and Quay County to register online for the COVID-19 vaccine due to mistranslations of the county names in Spanish,” Peña-Parr said. “Now this is possible and ensures there are fewer hurdles for these Spanish-speakers to overcome when registering for the vaccine. Once our project is published, we are hoping the state can utilize our work to bring more language equity to New Mexico and provide equal access to public health resources to all of its residents.”

Peter Hammill - In Translation review - Louder - Translation

As tour dates fade further away into a still uncertain future, Peter Hammill, like other artists whose live work has been put on hold, has busied himself in the studio. Recorded between March and December 2020, In Translation is unusual for a PH record in that its material is written by other composers. 

Hammill took up these cover versions partly as a means of maintaining some artistic equilibrium in the face of the pandemic overwhelming the outside world. However, this isn’t simply the Van der Graaf Generator linchpin knocking out a few old faves like a latter-day Bryan Ferry. A fair portion of the material looks to the darker corners of Italian pop as well as other off-piste paths including Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla, Faure, and even some lieder from Mahler. These Foolish Things this ain’t. 

Even when tackling the Great American Songbook, Hammill eschews the neon for the noir. Though gently evoking Nelson Riddle’s wistful arrangement for Peggy Lee’s The Folks Who Live On The Hill, he injects something darker that curls the smooth edges of the lyric’s picture-perfect idyll. Just how dark he goes is immediately indicated by the spikier contours of Fabrizio de Andre’s Hotel Supramonte, containing the memorable line, ‘If you stay at Hotel Supramonte take a look at the sky, there’s a woman going up in flames and a man stands aside.’ On Piazzolla’s Oblivion and Ballad For My Death, jittery synths, glowering keyboards, brittle strings, and shards of hallucinatory guitar shimmer, articulating the melancholic ache seeping out of slow tango melodies that stalk off in unexpected directions. 

Faure’s After A Dream stirs with driving piano and turbulent energy, while a lattice of topsy-turvy guitar and plaintive strings etch opaque shapes against his fervent vocals on Mahler’s Lost To The World. The very unfamiliarity of these choices effectively makes the experience not unlike listening to new or previously undiscovered selections from Hammill’s famously prolific output. Covers they may be but the sonic ground he maps out means this record couldn’t possibly belong to anyone else. 

Ultimately, what could have been a disparate collection is held together by the unifying passion and intensity of a vivid artistic voice. Frank Sinatra, who built a career on interpreting and making anew the writing of others, once observed, “When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.” When Hammill gets close to the mic and sings, that kind of honesty and integrity comes through loud and clear, making the rest of us true believers too.

Buy from Amazon.