The Boyue P3 is a new digital pen that is designed for looking words up in the dictionary, by scanning text on an e-reader or print book. It also offers word search translation, voice translation, text translation, AI assistant, vocabulary book, textbook learning, text excerpting, listening practice, digital recording, history record and system settings. This device is currently only available in China and for Chinese text, but later this year it will support a multitude of new languages, including English.
On the front of the P3 is a 2.98-inch high-definition display and a button to engage the scanning feature. There is also 2 other buttons designed for volume and turning the device off. volume. There is a speaker on the back of it, so this is where everything will be read aloud. It has WIFI internet access and charging the device will be done via the USB-C port and there is a small 1050mAh battery for three weeks of use.
According to the only review posted for this, “For word search and translation, OCR text recognition technology is used, which can recognize 80 words in one minute, and the recognition rate is as high as 99%, which is 20 times faster than the query speed of paper dictionaries. In terms of the scanning speed, it was also fast, almost all scanning, the results were obtained immediately, and the performance was still excellent.”
The P3 should be released in the Fall, price is unknown.
Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
It is a fairly well accepted norm that the charge of treason applies in times of declared war. Our clever Congressional party clones rely on media and misdirection to avoid taking the blame for trying to destroy America in recent political wars.
An undeclared political war was in operation in the United States from the 2015 Republican Convention until Jan. 20, 2021.
This was a war where words were bullets, false accusations were mortars, lies were bombs and impeachments were battles. During this war General Schiff lead the Democratic Party and liberal fodder to the objective of removal of a duly elected sitting President of the United States. No verified evidence was ever presented and all battles were lost by the Democrats. This, in essence was an attempted coup! All those involved should have been jailed and the Democratic Congressional leaders punished for treason!
Their allies in this war was the national media networks. They supplied enormous amounts of propaganda and supported every lie while at the same time demonizing the President.
Another liberal lead insurrection took place during the summer of 2020 all over the United States. Radical minorities burned and looted cities across the country in the name of a criminal drug addict. The underlying reason was police injustice. A criminal was murdered by a policeman. Burning and looting one’s own city hardly seems a useful tool to oppose police injustice. Evidently this is how liberals conduct retribution. They cut their noses off to spite their face! War is hell. This “insurrection” was covered up with the term “peaceful protest.” It was misrepresented without recognizing the burning, looting and murder of 25 people. Propaganda is a tool of war and it was at the front of this insurrection! Democrat leaders in the affected cities stood by and not only allowed but in some cases supported this criminal activity to run rampant.
NOW! Entertain the comparison of the liberal supported situations above to the conservative incident of Jan. 6.
Anyone who cannot see the parallels between both conservative and liberal “mistakes” in being associated with their misguided fringe members, needs to rethink the American value of compromise between political parties!
Radical liberal changes to the definition of our history, voting, biology, police and judicial system is not compromise! It is a menu that gags traditional values! Defense of those values has only seen escalating opposition from both sides.
A return to the base principles of our political parties is required to return to normal politics. Just like in real wars the ultimate goal is power. This is the source of these wars. Joe Biden’s empty promises of unity needs to be acted on and supported in order to obtain a ceasefire and return to normal political operations.
South Korea has published a new glossary of industry-specific terminology that could help North Korean defectors acclimate to South Korean workplaces, the Ministry of Unification (MOU) said on Tuesday.
The book has explanations of workplace terminology in 22 different types of jobs under eight industries: caretaking, beauty, skincare, production, culinary, baking, sales and sewing.
Many professional terms used in modern South Korean workplaces are wholly foreign to North Korean ears. The new book includes North Korean and South Korean equivalents, as well as English and traditional Chinese.
After decades of division and limited contact
South Korea has published a new glossary of industry-specific terminology that could help North Korean defectors acclimate to South Korean workplaces, the Ministry of Unification (MOU) said on Tuesday.
The book has explanations of workplace terminology in 22 different types of jobs under eight industries: caretaking, beauty, skincare, production, culinary, baking, sales and sewing.
Reddit kicked off the first phase last week of translating its platform on Android, desktop and iOS into French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
A couple of months into the pandemic, Marleny De La Cruz lost her job as an office cleaner. Shortly after, her husband lost his supermarket job near their East Harlem home. She told herself there would be a silver lining: She could spend more time helping their 10-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter navigate remote learning through the tail end of the 2019-2020 school year.
Being home full-time, however, didn’t solve the biggest hurdle for De La Cruz, who only speaks Spanish. Communicating with her children’s schools remained exceedingly difficult.
It wasn’t until this spring — nearly a year later — that her daughter’s high school in Queens set up De La Cruz with a translator during teacher phone calls, she said.
“It was really frustrating this year, and I’m still really unsure about what they did and what they didn’t learn,” De La Cruz said in Spanish through a translator. “I, as a mother, felt that I should have done more, and it was really upsetting and depressing to try to go to a meeting where you’re not going to understand anything about your son or daughter.”
Throughout the pandemic, communities with large immigrant populations were among the hardest hit, with disproportionately high infection rates. Many working-class immigrants like De La Cruz and her husband lost their jobs. On top of that, remote schooling presented a huge challenge for families who speak languages other than English to untangle problems with technology and questions about their children’s progress.
Now, ahead of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to bring every child back into classrooms, advocates, families and educators say immigrant families and the 140,000 students learning English as a new language need extra communication, more one-on-one academic support and more socio-emotional services as they reacclimate to classrooms — as well as to regain any lost trust.
De Blasio’s proposed budget, expected to be finalized this week, allocates billions of federal COVID relief dollars toward education, including a $500 million initiative targeted at helping students catch up. But officials have not outlined a specific plan for how they’ll support English language learners.
Advocates find that problematic, especially because these students continue to have the highest dropout rate among student subgroups, and may need extra support following a year marred by spotty internet access, communication barriers with schools, and more responsibilities for students — such as work or babysitting younger siblings — that may have disrupted their focus on school.
“We will provide opportunities to accelerate learning and evaluate the needs of all students, including ELLs, as we recover from the impacts of the pandemic, and we’re investing in targeted summer supports for these students to meet their unique needs,” wrote Sarah Casasnovas, a spokesperson for the education department, in a statement.
Improving communication
Schools have long struggled to communicate with families who don’t speak English as their primary language, but the language barrier was especially daunting this year as pandemic-related guidance and schedules shifted often. Some of the spaces where schools shared this information and provided a forum for families to ask questions, such as Parent Teacher Association meetings, were not accessible to families who speak little English.
Many families didn’t even have the information about the city’s special summer school program, open to all students, said Vanessa Luna, co-founder of Imms Schools, which holds family workshops and provides professional development for educators on supporting immigrant students. At New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, where nearly 20% of students are English language learners, teacher Nathan Floro had to print out and deliver COVID testing consent forms to families who were not native English speakers and couldn’t navigate the form online.
Communication problems appear to have persisted throughout the pandemic. A survey conducted by the New York Immigration Coalition in summer 2020 found that one-third of 100 parent respondents had not received information or assignments from their child’s school in the language they speak at home. Nearly 30% of families said at the time that their schools had not shared plans for the 2020-2021 school year.
The education department says that over-the-phone interpretation services are available 24/7 in 350 languages for schools staff to communicate with families, but advocates have found many instances like De La Cruz’s, where those services aren’t used.
“Currently we hear these cases every day — that they weren’t given an interpreter,” said Andrea Ortiz, education policy manager at the New York Immigration Coalition. “That right there means it hasn’t been implemented.”
The Education Collaborative, a coalition of advocacy organizations that support immigrant New Yorkers, are pushing for $45 million in the city’s budget for next fiscal year, which begins July 1, to improve school communication with families. This includes putting more school communication on paper, doing more outreach through telephone calls and on WhatsApp and WeChat, and marketing campaigns that place school information in places immigrants frequent, such as houses of worship. They also want every school to have interpretation equipment for town halls or PTA meetings, money for community-based organizations to do outreach, a language telephone line for uncommon, indigenous languages, and a program in community schools that pays parents and students to help communicate with people at the school.
A spokesperson for the education department said officials have tried to close the “communication gap” by translating letters sent to families — as well as their web page and social media posts — into 10 languages. They’ve also turned to “multilingual” media outlets to share updates about devices or remote learning, and also held live workshops for families in languages other than English in partnership with community organizations and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
But advocates argue that immigrant families who don’t use email, especially those speaking less common languages or dialects, are often unaware of those efforts.
Bolstering academic support
Many older immigrant students had to work to support their families, sometimes becoming the sole breadwinners after parents lost jobs, meaning sometimes they couldn’t show up to class. Officials with New York Immigration Coalition and Advocates for Children New York said schools have “admitted” to them that they have not been providing all of the hours of extra language support that English learners are entitled to receive because they didn’t have enough staff during hybrid learning, which required teachers for both in-person and remote schooling.
One analysis found that in January of this year, English language learners in high school had attendance rates that were eight percentage points on average lower than their native English-speaking peers. (Attendance meant anything from showing up on Zoom to answering a teacher’s phone call.)
George Badia, principal at Elmhurst’s Pan American High School, which exclusively serves new immigrant students in a community that was one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus, recently held a town hall with parents to remind them of social services and food benefits available to families so children feel less pressure to work and not show up to class in the fall.
Many of Badia’s 386 students have said that they need more English literacy support and help with math. The school has already started paying teachers overtime for one-on-one tutoring and has hired peer mentors to encourage students to show up to class, he said. Next year, they plan to use a bump in school funding for Saturday classes and other tutoring supports, as well as more advisory sessions for students.
With a funding increase across most schools, many may be able to hire more teachers or pay for extra services for students. But advocates want to see more targeted support. The Education Collaborative wants $78 million to go toward a suite of academic help, including one-on-one and small group literacy development for this summer, and after-school and weekend classes during the school year for both English learners and students with parents who don’t speak English. They also want to establish mentorship and peer tutoring for newcomer English learners.
Some educators want a key part of next year to focus on socializing because it is an important part of practicing a new language. This will be key for newer immigrants who haven’t had a chance to get to know their schools and their neighborhoods because of the pandemic, they said.
Teachers said they will assign more group work in the fall, focus more on oral assignments so that students can practice speaking, and will take students on field trips to explore their school’s neighborhood more and so they can use the language outside of a classroom.
“We need to provide not just test prep, but really provide room for authentic socialization and just individualized attention,” said Eleni Filippatos, an elementary English as a new language teacher in Washington Heights. “Every kid is different, every kid has been through something different during this.”
Over the summer, the department has promised to provide English as a new language curriculum for English learners at Summer Rising sites across the city and will hire more teachers who are trained to support these students. They also pointed to their plan to partner with community organizations, who will be charged with creating enrichment activities for students, including English learners.
In the fall, department officials said they plan to ensure multilingual learners are on track to graduate and have “equitable access” to college and career pathways, and plan on “strengthening partnerships” with immigrant families and communities – but a spokesperson didn’t specify how they’ll achieve these things.
Leaning on community-based organizations
Education Collaborative also wants the city to earmark an additional $20 million in grants for community-based organizations, to help provide extra academic support next year, since many filled in that gap over the past two school years.
At a rally outside of the education department, advocates, families, and students pushed for more money in the city’s budget to go toward services for English language learners and immigrant families.Reema Amin/Chalkbeat
High school junior Kelitha Nazaire, an English language learner, said it was tough to get extra support from her teachers in a remote environment, especially because some only speak English. So she turned to Flanbwayan, a community-based organization where she is a youth member. It supports older immigrant students which started also providing extra support to younger students in response to the pandemic.
“I had to get to Flanbwayan every day to do my work [but] not everyone has a safe place to go,” Nazaire said during a recent rally for immigrant students.
The Brooklyn-based Arab-American Family Support Center, which provides academic support to largely immigrant families, saw such an “incredible uptick” in people asking for help with school that they created a wait list. They helped English learners with homework, figuring out college applications, translate conversations between teachers and families who spoke little English, and created peer support groups for those who were feeling isolated.
“They were turning to organizations like ours to help fill in that gap,” said Kerry Sesil, the center’s senior director of resource development.
Supporting social emotional needs
At Pan American in Elmhurst, principal Badia can list from memory the 15 students who have reported losing relatives, including parents to COVID. Early on the school surveyed every student about their stress levels and developed a counseling plan for each student, if needed.
“We are seeing an increase in students and families looking for services,” Badia said.
The mayor has proposed spending $93 million to ensure every student can be screened for social-emotional needs at the start of the school year, as well as placing a full-time social worker in every school without one or without access to a school-based mental health clinic.
But advocates, students and families believe that social workers and guidance counselors must be able to communicate with students and understand the cultural perspectives they’re coming from.
As this school year wore on, Sarah Factor, a middle school English as a new language teacher in Manhattan’s District 2, could see how physically exhausted her students looked. Her newcomer immigrant students had not had a chance to meet their peers or get acclimated to school, and some students’ relatives had died from COVID.
How, she thought, could schools expect these students to be motivated to learn a new language?
“If we’re all back in the fall, kids who haven’t been inside a school building for a year and half are gonna have vastly different needs,” Factor said. “It’s gonna be a culture shock situation.”
Nazaire, who came to New York City from Haiti five years ago, said she and her peers have found it tough to confide in guidance counselors because they don’t speak their language.
Some schools do an “incredible job” with social-emotional support, said Luna, from Imms schools. But Luna is also in touch with a family who has reported that their child’s school “never shared there are counselors available, never shared there are translators available.”
A spokesperson for the education department said there are roughly 300 bilingual guidance counselors employed in city schools — about 10% of all guidance counselors.
De La Cruz, the parent from East Harlem, said her 17-year-old daughter has been talking to a counselor at her Queens high school, but there were times the counselor would delay or cancel on her. The school finally provided an interpreter for De La Cruz this spring because her daughter was falling behind with school work, she said. Previously, she relied on her eldest son, a 25-year-old juggling his own work and college, to interpret during teacher meetings and would sometimes need to cancel if he wasn’t available.
Even with the interpretation service, De La Cruz found it hard to ask many questions about her daughter’s progress, feeling rushed on the “quick call with a translator.”
“This year was really tough for her, and I don’t think she feels good in that school,” De La Cruz said. “Maybe I can engage better if she’s closer in the neighborhood, and if I’m able to translate better.”
I enjoyed Patrick Jenkins’ Lunch with Edward Bonham Carter (June 26), although I was surprised to read that the restaurant chosen, Kiku, means “ask or listen” in Japanese. This is certainly one meaning of the word, phonetically. It can also mean chrysanthemum, as the character on the restaurant sign indicates. In fact, as the chrysanthemum in Japan represents longevity, rejuvenation and nobility, it’s an even more apt symbol for an interview with this youthful city veteran and scion of the aristocracy.
For over two thousand years, translation has been an indispensable part of the history and transmission of Buddhism. When Buddhism first came to China from India, one of the most important tasks was the translation of the Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into Chinese.
After two successful pilot programs, the two-semester Graduate Certificate Program in Buddhist Translation at Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) in Talmage —the only one of its kind in the U.S.— is fully underway.
The one-year program offers students the opportunity to immerse themselves in ancient Eastern languages at the graduate level with a curriculum that integrates translation of Buddhist texts with study, practice and service in a monastic setting. Similar to DRBU’s Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Master of Arts in Buddhist Classics, this program is centered around reading and discussion of classical primary texts with an emphasis on self-transformation.
The program consists of five courses: an introduction to translation theory and practice past and present; methods and theories of interpretation; a seminar focusing on appreciation of Buddhist, Chinese, and Western classics; a Buddhist Chinese course; and a hands-on translation workshop.
With a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from UCLA, Bhikshuni Heng Yi Shi entered the monastic order at the City of 10,000 Buddhas in 1993 and became a fully ordained nun in 1995.
Xuan Ooi recently completed the pilot program of the two-semester Graduate Certificate Program in Buddhist Translation at Dharma Realm Buddhist University. (Photo by Karen Rifkin)
A founding director of Dharma Realm Buddhist Association (DRBA), following the vision of her late teacher Venerable Master Hua who vowed to bring the Buddhadharma to the West and translate the Buddhist canon into the languages of the world, she is the program director for the Graduate Certificate Program in Buddhist Translation.
She explains that in addition to the spiritual exercises incorporated into the program, there is a large component of laboratory work where students research and translate the material from source languages—Pali, a sacred language of TheravÄda Buddhism native to the Indian subcontinent; Sanskrit, the primary sacred language of Hinduism; and Chinese—to target languages determined by the native languages that are spoken by students enrolled in the program.
“This inquiry gives us very rich information as we look at the Tibetan, Chinese and Indic concepts through different angles. The more research information the students know, the more exposure they have to the materials, the better they can cater to a wide range of readers.”
In the Hermeneutics of Self Class, students study biographical stories and personal translation experiences—through dialogue and diary reading—of those who have inspired them to become translators.
“Additionally, through close study of primary sutra text, students progress towards transformation of the self,” she adds.
An Introduction to Translation Theory and Practice Past and Present introduces students to a variety of translation theories, Western and Buddhist, using similar skills and principles that are applied in Bible and Chinese translation theory.
“We like students to have exposure to many different texts to train their brains; you never know what kind of translation will be presented to you.”
In their reading seminar class, students are trained to enhance their translation skills through close reading of texts that cover Western, Chinese and Buddhist classics.
“The program is designed in a way for us to supplement each other. For example, Xuan Ooi, a recent graduate of the program, is close to being a Native English speaker; her Chinese needs support. For Xiajuan Shu, another recent graduate of the program, her mother language, like me, is Chinese and both of us need support in English. If we’re doing Sanskrit translation into English then we support each other. That’s how the group translation works,” she says.
Xuan Ooi lives in south Florida in her family home and has been attending the Translation Program online for the past year.
She received her M.A. at DRBU and stayed on to become a member of the seven-student cohort that piloted the second year of the program. Although Chinese is her first language, she has lived in the U.S for over 20 years, has an undergraduate degree in English and is fluent in English.
With her educational background, her focus is on the English side while she relies heavily on other members of the group in studying Chinese translations.
“We want people to be able to read and understand the texts we have translated, to know that a lot of the information comes from different traditions. How do we match the reader to all of this cultural and historical information? To make it legible and understandable in English?” She says.
“While I was studying for my M.A., I learned a lot about how to process my self—how to break down my issues, say, for example, of loneliness. With the help of Buddhist texts, I was able to write about the experience of how to open up and unfold.
“I enrolled in the translation program because I wanted to immerse myself, to continue to be kept accountable and maintain and cultivate my own spiritual practice.
“The M.A. Program is intellectual and cerebral and in the Translation Program, I was able to bring the intellectual and cerebral down into the body and face my own personal challenges.”
Xiajuan Shu, born and raised in China, enrolled in the same M.A and Translation Programs as Xuan Ooi, and was able to complete her studies while on campus at the City of 10,000 Buddhas.
While growing up in China, she was focused on American culture but, “coming here I realized how much I missed out on my own culture. Because of the Cultural Revolution, my generation was completely cut off from our traditional values; being in the U.S. has given me a precious opportunity to look back and really appreciate them,” she says.
“My dream was to express myself through writing and speaking but it was cut off because the Chinese educational system is so very science and grade oriented. Studying here has given me not only a deeper meaning of life but also reconnected me to the roots of Chinese culture and my love, my passion, for the language.
“DRBU has been a hidden jewel for me; the two years in the M.A. program brought me to a deep place, intellectually and spiritually. I just had a taste of something so wonderful and staying on to be part of the Translation Program, in a sense, saved me. I could buy one more year to think about what I really want to do with my life.”
Because of her language background, in studying the Dharma, the Buddhist texts, Xiajuan Shu works primarily on translating classical Chinese into English.
“With dual translation, I find a very intimate connection with the text. As a translator, I need to not only understand what the text means but I have to come up with a way to express it in the target language for others to understand.
“Sometimes translators understand it themselves but don’t know how to express it or they may be able to express it in one language but not in another. It’s yet another layer where many things can get lost—so many things have to be adapted for the target language and culture.
“I enjoy the challenge of the program and the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the text. I have to go deep, read it many, many times; it depends on the context—sometimes we spend two or three hours parsing one sentence or one word.
“In order to be a good translator, we have to be good cultivators and that requires us to expand our hearts and minds to understand all that this source material encompasses.
“In the group dynamic, I get to see myself so much more clearly. Sometimes I am too attached to my ideas; sometimes I am too timid to voice what’s true in me. I constantly dance between the two extremes—translation that emphasizes the middle way is a constant reminder for me to be a good cultivator.”
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