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Third graders receive dictionaries in Mercer County WVNS-TVTuesday, November 16, 2021
Cambridge Dictionary reveals its word of the year for 2021 - Yahoo Eurosport UK - Dictionary
The Cambridge Dictionary has revealed its word of the year for 2021 as “perseverance”, with editors crediting global interest in Nasa’s mission to Mars.
Look-ups for the word spiked after the Perseverance Rover made its final descent to the red planet on February 18, with 30,487 searches for “perseverance” between February 19 and February 25 this year.
It has been looked up on the Cambridge Dictionary website more than 243,000 times globally during 2021.
Perseverance is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as “continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time”.
Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary publishing manager, said it “made sense” that look-ups for the word spiked after the descent of Nasa’s Mars Rover.
“Cambridge Dictionary is the top website in the world for learners of English, and perseverance is not a common word for students of English to have in their vocabulary,” she said.
“We often see spikes in look-ups of words associated with current events when those words are less familiar.”
She said editors felt it an appropriate word, given the challenges of 2021.
“Just as it takes perseverance to land a rover on Mars, it takes perseverance to face the challenges and disruption to our lives from Covid-19, climate disasters, political instability and conflict,” said Ms Nichols.
“We appreciated that connection, and we think Cambridge Dictionary users do, too.”
In January of this year, searches on Cambridge Dictionary’s website spiked for “insurrection”, “impeachment”, “inauguration” and “acquit”, as the US presidential election had the world’s attention.
Editors said this provides further evidence that words looked up on Cambridge Dictionary often reflect current world events.
World's oldest guide to brewing sake receives first English translation | The University of Kansas - KU Today - Translation
LAWRENCE — In Japan, the proverb “sake wa honshin o arawasu” translates to “sake reveals the true heart.”
But that’s one of the few things translated when it comes to the country’s signature alcoholic beverage.
“So in my translation and in a book that I’m writing, I want to give readers an understanding of sake’s evolution and cultural significance.”
His new article, “Sake Journal (Goshu no nikki): Japan’s Oldest Guide to Brewing,” provides the first English translation of the earliest Japanese manual for brewing sake. It appears in the winter issue of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies.
“Sake is sometimes translated as ‘rice wine,’ and that’s a mistake since it’s made more like beer than wine,” he said.
That’s not the only thing Westerners tend to misunderstand about the fermented drink.
The original “Goshu no nikki” was a secret manuscript that was strictly safeguarded, its information kept primarily through oral tradition. It represented the earliest guide to brewing sake and one of the most significant sources for understanding its history in medieval Japan (1192-1600). Rath’s article includes several translated recipes for sake, along with the directions for pasteurization.
“Back in the 14th century, brewers relied on ambient yeasts, and they had not yet perfected the best ways to ferment sake and maintain the alcohol content. They also used brown rice, which with the wild yeasts would have given it a gamier taste, far from the premium sake today that uses highly polished specialty rice and tends to be lighter, finely grained and leans toward having a melon bouquet,” he said.
A curious amount of folklore surrounds the origins and processes around the beverage. One story asserts it began with the custom of virginal women chewing grains and using their saliva to render the sugars in the starch. Rath notes how modern sake brand names include words such as “maiden,” “daughter” and “beauty,” which can be construed as intentionally sexualizing the drink.
“Similar types of (chewed) sake were produced in Okinawa until very recently,” he said. “At some point, though, this type of sake came to be associated with young women in Japan, perhaps because when the story was retold, the idea of virgin girls chewing and spitting was more appealing to older male sake drinkers.”
Rath’s first taste of sake came in high school, when he and some friends realized they could be served alcohol at Japanese restaurants in his hometown of Chicago.
“I recall having sake one of the times we went out for sushi. I remember that the taste was like warm rubber cement, the type of clear glue that’s sold with the brush inside the lid. I was never a fan until I went to Japan and discovered there was a lot more variety to sake than the two brands I was familiar with in the U.S.,” he said.
Rath recently published “Oishii: The History of Sushi” (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2021), the first comprehensive chronicle of sushi written in English. He is also the author of the books “Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity,” “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” and “Japanese Foodways, Past and Present” (with Stephanie Assmann).
A 22-year veteran of KU, Rath teaches a course on the history of sushi.
The professor has even brewed some of the recipes in “Sake Journal” himself.
“The medieval recipes are close to homemade ‘doburoku,’ a bootleg sake that’s illegal in Japan to make but relatively easy to create. Doburoku follows similar steps as sake-making but is a much shorter process that can rely on ambient yeasts instead of purchased sake yeasts,” he said.
But Rath hasn’t attempted every method.
“I have not tried chewing and spitting rice to make sake,” he said. “Besides the obvious yuck factor, it would be hard work to chew raw rice.”
Top photo: Sake bottles and mushrooms at a standing bar in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima prefecture, in 2018. Photo by Eric Rath.
Volunteer group meets, makes annual dictionary delivery to school - The Advocate - Dictionary
Members of Wednesday Volunteers for Family and Community gathered recently at the Hammond home of Donna Bouterie for its October luncheon meeting.
Several topics were discussed at the meeting including the club’s annual dictionary program.
Literacy and Family Life co-chairperson Pam Villagran updated everyone on this year’s plans to donate dictionaries to all third graders at Eastside Elementary School and to their classroom teachers. Villagran said the school had requested 142 dictionaries for this year and she had already ordered the books. When the books arrived, she and co-chairperson Donna Bouterie delivered them to the school.
Also discussed was the Tangipahoa Volunteers for Family and Community’s annual international project, Operation Christmas Child through by Samaritan’s Purse. WVFC Secretary Gloria Messenger is the International chairperson for WVFC and TVFC. She informed members that they would be filling the shoe boxes at the club’s next meeting, which would be at her house.
WVFC president Jean Hebert, who is the scholarship chairperson for TVFC, reminded members to turn in ticket sales money for this year’s quilt raffle. The raffle is the main fundraiser for the Scholarship Program. The club awards a $1,000 college scholarship each year to one Tangipahoa Parish high school senior selected from all applicants.
Anyone interested in buying raffle tickets for the handmade full-size quilt can contact Hebert at (504) 259-1412.
After the meeting, attendees had a meal prepared by the host.
WVFC is an all-volunteer arm of the LSU Agriculture Extension Services. There are two groups in the parish: Wednesday Volunteers for Family and Community and Sunshine Ladies Volunteers for Family and Community. Contact Bouterie at (985) 415-5676 for information on the groups.
Monday, November 15, 2021
Major French dictionary adds non-binary pronouns for the first time - LGBTQ Nation - Dictionary
One of the best-known dictionaries in France has added an entry for the non-binary third-person pronouns iel (singular) and iels (plural) last month.
An entry for iel and iels was added to the dictionary Le Robert that says: “Third person subject personal pronoun – singular and plural – used to refer to a person of any gender.” It mentions alternative spellings ielle and ielles.
Related: What does ambisextrous mean? These 12 queer terms are in the dictionary now.
Prior to the past decade, French didn’t have gender-neutral pronouns. Il (he) and elle (she) – and their plurals – are both gendered and are also used to refer to objects where the word “it” would be used in English, since every noun in French has a grammatical gender as well.
Wiktionary has an entry for iel that says that the term was created in 2013 and it notes that the word came from LGBTQ communities. Iel is a portmanteau of il and elle.
“We looked at statistics showing that many people were looking up the word ‘iel,’ so we thought it made sense to give them an answer,” Le Robert editorial director Marie-Hélène Drivaud told the French LGBTQ magazine TETU.
When asked about other forms of iel, like the object pronoun ellui, but Drivaud said that their usage hasn’t “stabilized.”
“The intention is there, notably for other words like ‘celleux’ [for demonstrative pronouns], but it’s still in progress and iel seemed much more frequent than the others,” she said.
Other words added by Le Robert this year focused on the pandemic, like vaccinodrome (vaccination site), antivax, and pass sanitaire (COVID passport). Last year, the dictionary added the word transphobie and updated the definitions for genre (gender) and transition.
Other major French dictionaries like LaRousse and the Dictionary of l’Académie française not yet added iel.
Nascent polypeptides stabilize ribosomes for uninterrupted translation - Science Daily - Translation
Proteins are the key players that regulate cellular structure and function. DNA, which functions as the blueprint for protein synthesis, is first transcribed into a messenger RNA (mRNA), which is further read and translated into a polypeptide chain (a "new-born" protein) by macromolecular machines called ribosomes. Here, the ribosome essentially functions as a tunnel through which the train of mRNA passes and within which amino acids are assembled in a sequential manner depending on the mRNA sequences to form a polypeptide.
Certain intrinsic sequences in the polypeptide can, however, trigger premature termination of translation. As protein synthesis is an essential cellular process, this event can pose a great risk, resulting in protein dysfunction or synthesis of incomplete proteins. In nascent (newly synthesized) polypeptides, this interrupting sequence, which is rich in negatively charged amino acid residues, is known as an "intrinsic ribosome destabilization" (IRD) sequence. With such sequences scattered across the genome, how do cells avoid such a premature termination and ensure uninterrupted translation?
A team of researchers from the Tokyo Tech, led by Professor Hideki Taguchi have now answered this key question in their recently published The EMBO Journal article. "The need for a tunnel structure is not clear, given that the primary function of the ribosome is simply to polymerize amino acids into a polypeptide. The tunnel architecture, which spans 30 to 40 nascent polypeptides in length, may have evolved to balance the stabilization and obstacles of translation elongation." explains Prof. Taguchi.
The researchers began by analyzing the proteome wide profile of the bacterial model system, Escherichia coli, and identified IRD sequences across various proteins. By constructing sequences of varying lengths preceding the IRD motifs, they were able to show that the peptide sequences that span the ribosomal tunnel can counteract destabilization by the IRD sequence in a length-dependent but sequence-independent manner. They further noted that longer sequences were associated with better IRD lowering efficiency.
Next, they went on to investigate how properties of amino acid residues in the nascent polypeptide and their distribution across the proteome influence IRD. Using various amino acid substitutions preceding the IRD sequence, they found that residues with bulkier side chains were able to prevent IRD more effectively than did smaller ones. Further, they observed a bias in the sequence of amino acids across the proteome. Interestingly, open reading frames that code for proteins were enriched in bulkier amino acid residues towards the N-terminal regions that are translated first. The researchers speculate that these bulky residues occupy the entry of the ribosomal exit site, thereby stabilizing the translating machinery by bridging the small and large ribosomal subunits. Further, on abrogating specific proteins in the ribosomal exit tunnel they found an increase in IRD, suggesting that interactions between the nascent peptide and ribosomal proteins contribute to translation continuity.
Together, these findings indicate an intrinsic regulatory mechanism wherein the nascent peptide in collaboration with the ribosomal tunnel helps maintain ribosomal stability and continuity in translation elongation.
Prof. Taguchi concludes by saying, "Our findings highlight a positive feedback system wherein the ribosomal tunnel is occupied by its own product for uninterrupted translation. We report on the role of nascent peptide chains within the ribosomal exit tunnel in ensuring efficient protein synthesis."
The quest for stability seems to have deep sub-cellular roots.
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Materials provided by Tokyo Institute of Technology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Translation for Freedom - UMass News and Media Relations - Translation
Palencia (above right) worked with Maria Camilla Vera Arias (above left), a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese program on the literature track focused on Translation Studies and Latin American literature. “As an international student, it means a lot to me to see the museum and the university acknowledge that this is a diverse community where not everybody speaks the same language,” says Vera Arias, who is a poet, journalist, and educator. “Translating the contents of an art exhibition allows me to explore different realms of writing, creating, and working with languages. I just love the way I get to play with language when I translate.”
“Maria and Camilla were my dream team,” says Regina Galasso, associate professor, Spanish and Portuguese studies, and director of the Translation Center. “There’s a widespread misconception that all bilinguals can translate well. And for many, technology has made it seem that translation is fast, easy, and if not free, cheap. However, a quality translation requires creativity, experience, knowledge, a variety of skills, planning, and time. This collaboration is a great example of the incredible resources and people at UMass Amherst.”
Translating the contents of an art exhibition allows me to explore different realms of writing, creating, and working with languages. I just love the way I get to play with language when I translate.
Maria Camilla Vera Arias
As the translation team researched word choice, debated meaning, and iterated on their translations of the Spanish labels and interpretive text, Palencia was inspired by the powerful content of the art. While working on the project, she says, “I was able to help amplify expressions of frustration, calls to action, and celebrations of the history of communities around me during a year of utter social isolation.”
We Are For Freedoms will be exhibited at UMCA until the end of the fall semester. See samples of the artwork below, or view the exhibition website and the Spanish text.
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