Cowlitz Language Being Brought Back With Online Dictionary, Weekend Classes - Centralia Chronicle - Dictionary

By Brennen Kauffman / The Daily News

It’s been nearly 50 years since the Cowlitz Coast Salish language went extinct. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe is working to revive it and so far, they’re seeing success.

The tribe debuted the first major set of results from a three-year partnership with The Language Conservancy at a Feb. 12 event. The tribe announced an alphabet book and two picture books to introduce the language to Cowlitz children and an online and mobile dictionary with more than 3,000 words. Weekend lessons for adults interested in the language have been running for several months.

The new uses are all the more impressive considering how far the language had fallen out of use. Language Conservancy experts had to rely on recorded interviews from the 1960s to get a sense of what Cowlitz was meant to sound like. It was the first time the Language Conservancy had to fully reconstruct a language without the benefit of a fluent living speaker.

Snippets of those original recordings live on in the online dictionary as the example pronunciations for people to listen to.

“You can click on a word and hear how to pronounce it from our late elder’s voices. That’s so amazing and really brings out the ability to bring the language back to life,” said Rita Asgeirsson, cultural resource director for the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

The Language Conservancy is a nonprofit working to revitalize the use of Indigenous languages that are extinct or at risk of going extinct. The conservancy works with dozens of tribes in the United States, Canada and Australia to preserve traditional ways of speaking.

Conservancy president Wil Meya said all the work that’s been done so far hopefully will lay the groundwork to produce new proficient speakers in younger generations.

“As people learn that this language is learnable and doable, they’ll get more experienced and become more advanced and put more effort in. But of course, the resources have to be there first,” Meya said.

The loss of Cowlitz Coast Salish

Cowlitz Coast Salish is far from the only Native American language that has withered or died off.

Only half of the languages spoken in the United States before Europeans arrived still exist, according to the Endangered Languages Project. Many of the ones still around are in danger of disappearing.

The last major work done to preserve the Cowlitz Coast Salish was done by M. Dale Kinkade, a University of Kansas linguist who was born in Washington and specialized in the study of Salish languages. In the 1960s, Kinkade interviewed two of the remaining Cowlitz Tribe members who were fluent in the language, Emma Mesplie and Lucy James.

Asgeirsson said after the tribe earned federal recognition and established the reservation in Clark County, they started looking for the next set of priorities.

“The language came out as one of those all-important aspects of our history that impact all aspects of Cowlitz culture,” Asgeirsson said.

Those recordings formed the basis of the “Cowlitz Dictionary and Grammatical Sketch” Kinkade published in 2004 and the work done by the Language Conservancy. An article in the International Journal of American Linguistics about Kinkade’s dictionary said his work “represents the sum total of our knowledge of Cowlitz.”

Meya said the experts went through nearly 100 hours of tape to build the current dictionary and books and preserved audio clips for around 2,000 individual words and a range of phrases and sentences.

The Salish group of Native American languages can be notoriously hard to learn. The Cowlitz alphabet has 42 letters, several of which Asgeirsson said take “a lot of motion in the mouth and throat.” Cowlitz has different pronunciations for the letters c (sounds like the ‘ts’ in cats, according to the Cowlitz online dictionary) and c’ (the same sound but with a sharp pop).

Tribe leaders also face the issue of adapting the language to 2022. Meya said creating new words or adapting now-common English terms was an evolution that was especially tough for languages that have not been actively used for generations.

“There are tens of thousands of new words that need to be coined for the things you want to talk about in a modern context,” Meya said.

Helping tribe members become ‘culturally cohesive’

The Cowlitz Indian tribe is taking multiple approaches to getting Cowlitz Coast Salish back into use.

The alphabet books and early reader books are part of the program focused on raising Cowlitz children with a familiarity of the language. In addition to the two current books, Asgeirsson said the tribe plans to eventually build a library of 100 children’s books that will be provided at the tribe’s child care centers and Head Start programs.

“Language provides the cultural instruction, the morals, the ethics, the values,” Asgeirsson said. “So the sooner you start with kids, the more culturally cohesive a person can be brought up.”

For older members, the Cowlitz tribe has been holding a series of virtual language learning weekends for the last two months. They work Saturdays and Sundays to practice speaking in Cowlitz Coast Salish, using the Language Conservancy work as a baseline.

Asgeirsson said after the first run of classes, there were around 25 people who had shown significant affinity for Coast Salish and who had the time to dedicate to learning it. Those learners were placed on an advanced track to move toward being the first set of proficient Cowlitz speakers. The initial cohort of speakers will help teach the language to other members of the tribe and help create video lessons and new recordings for the dictionary.

The written and spoken language may also enter classrooms across Southwest Washington. The state’s “Since Time Immemorial” curriculum requires lessons about the history of Washington’s Native American tribes with significant input from the tribes in the area. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe is working with 24 school districts to teach local tribal history, including their original names and descriptions for features of the land.

“Something really important is making sure we norm seeing the written language, seeing the imagery and the history of the tribe,” Asgeirsson said.

Adblock test (Why?)

AMERICAN THEATRE | In Translations, a Canon for All - American Theatre - Translation

In the past year, many theatres have been challenged to wrestle more than ever with the systemic racism and white supremacy within their institutions and on their stages. So-called classical theatre in particular can be a sore spot, as for years we’ve been taught that it is defined by the work of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, and other white men. What can be done? Many classical theatres attempt to balance their track record by opting for new work, new adaptations or spin-offs, or directors with a “bold” take on Shakespeare and other Western writers. But continuing to adapt plays from the received canon, excellent though they are, continues to center the white male perspective, and only allows us to grow so far. 

With Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre’s Expand the Canon project, we are actively advocating for a solution: We’ve designed a resource to make it easier to produce relevant classic plays by a diverse group of women and non-binary playwrights from history. (Though there’s much debate among us about how old must be to be a “classic,” we general define it as an excellent play that resonates widely and has stood a test of time.) Each year Expand the Canon highlights nine plays by women writers that resonate as relevant for the American theatre. But this project has one limitation, unrelated to gender: Almost all of the hundreds of plays we read each year are in English. And while there are thousands of English-language titles written by women before 1975, if we want to truly advocate for a diverse theatre, we need to expand our view beyond the English-speaking sphere.

To guide our thoughts on this, we talked to translators and folks producing translations to find out what they need and what works best for them. While there are scholarly translations of many non-English-language plays, these don’t always work onstage. Likewise, there’s a misinformed perception that theatrical translators are more akin to human Google translators than theatremakers in their own right. The way to move beyond both of these obstacles is collaboration. 

While scholarly translations are often very faithful to the original text, and give more direct or literal interpretations of each line, true theatrical translations are something else altogether. As Freyda Thomas (she/her), who has created popular versions of Molière’s plays, told us, “It is a true art to take the skeleton of a classical play and turn it into something today’s audience will enjoy.”

Scholarly translations can be an excellent starting point for both producers and theatrical translators to reference and guide their selection. The scholarship around these translations—including the context of the play, word choices, and explanations of obscure references—creates the depth of meaning we need and expect from classics. But it’s the collaboration between a language scholar and a theatre artist that can transform a literal translation into one that is powerfully actable, and contains the depth and nuance of language we crave onstage. 

One method we’ve seen work effectively is to pair scholarly translators with directors. Ayako Kano (she/her), a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, translated two short plays by Fumiko Enchi. Kano found joy in working with director Chari Arespacochaga (she/they) on her translation of A Hell of Her Own during the Expand the Canon Festival at Hedgepig Ensemble in 2020.

“I was initially inspired to translate Enchi Fumiko’s work in graduate school, because I could not find any plays written by women in the Japanese canon,” Kano said. “Chari was amazingly insightful—I understood aspects of the [play] much better after each conversation with her.”

At UCLA, the Diversifying the Classics team has been collaborating for years to create translations of plays from the Spanish Golden Age (roughly between 1590 and 1681), employing dozens of artists and scholars to tackle every play. Carla Della Gatta (she/her), assistant professor at Florida State University, has been a part of these translation teams in the past, and speaks highly of their model. “They work collaboratively with graduate students across disciplines, and each play gets workshopped and has a staged reading with the theatre department’s MFA actors,” Della Gata said. This approach ensures not only a level of academic rigor but also a physical life for the play, so that translations are not only created but engaged with and performed.

Alternatively, and perhaps most simply, playwrights can look to public domain translations and work from there. Melody Brooks, artistic director of New York City’s New Perspectives Theatre Company, often works with playwright Lynn Marie Macy, a French speaker, and Brooks believes their approach is quite effective. To translate and adapt George Sands’s Gabriel, a five-hour novella/play hybrid that investigates a gender-fluid experience in the mid-1800s, Macy consulted an academic translation as well as the original French script to make extensive cuts. “This is a good example of a combination translation/adaptation of a script that, in its original form, would not be appealing or comprehensible to a modern audience,” Brooks said, adding that it is “a work that is extremely deserving of attention and production.”

It’s easy to worry that a translation of a classic, especially a play in verse, might lose meaning or quality when processed through a modern third party. During a virtual PlayCo panel, playwright and translator Jeremy Tiang (he/they) described how a production is usually better for the translation: “There’s an opportunity [for] deeper collaboration that takes place when you bring a text from another language into English, and Anglophone actors and a director work on it and produce something that is hybrid—that has the essence of both places and both cultures in it,” he said. The result is “richer because it is more collaborative, because it has something from both places that fuses to produce a third thing.” In a time when theatre is being challenged to honor and represent fresh perspectives, we continue to hear the fear of not “connecting to the audience.” New translations, created with and for the ear of contemporary audiences, can serve that need and quell that concern. Thomas builds on this idea. “The value of seeing another culture’s view of a particular issue or problem, tweaked into our culture, can be inspiring,” she said.

If we begin to frame performance translations as a deepening of the material, and acknowledge the value that world classics can add to our English-language canon, supporting translations is a no-brainer. Our task, then, is to make this work a priority by creating space for translators in the world of playwriting residencies; commissioning translations of world classics; creating cross-departmental programs at universities; and honoring translators as co-owners of a work in contracts, using the Authors Guild’s model rather than the Dramatists Guild’s.

As we expand the canon to include world classics, we need to be thoughtful about bypassing or confronting the gatekeepers around translations, be they funders, producers, or even academics. As playwright and translator Catherine Boyle (she/her) noted, “In translating Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, I had to ignore the orthodoxy that her plays are unperformable,” referring to the received wisdom about the work of the Spanish Golden Age poet and playwright. Far from being unstageable, Boyle said, working on Caro’s plays “taught me about how she subverted form and how she constructed a dramatic language of her own that both used and undermined the dominant forms” of her time. Of course, Caro’s Amor, Agravio y Mujer is a performable and beautiful play: You can find versions of it on our Expand the Canon list.

Brooks seconded Boyle’s call for risk-taking with this caution: “It would be very distressing if newly found plays are only translated if they have been deemed ‘worthy’ by the same forces that have kept women’s work under wraps for centuries!”

Overthrowing white supremacy and patriarchal dominance in the canon will take time, investment, and collaboration. But this moment of reflection and adaptation is the right time to do that work. Theatrical translators must be honored as creative artists. Classical theatres need not focus solely on new work to become inclusive, nor do programs with commitments to inclusivity need to only look to new works. To celebrate a work as a classic gives legitimacy and honor to the writer and the culture she came from. As Marta Albalá Pelegrín (she/her), a member of the Diversifying the Classics team, once wrote, “I would like to imagine a world in which the classics would not only speak to but include everyone from every culture, a world in which each community would have a classic past.” We can only make that wonderful possibility a reality if we are willing to take action in the present.

Mary Candler (she/her) is a producer, actor, teaching artist, and founder of Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre and the Expand the Canon project. Emily Lyon (she/her) is a social impact storyteller, director, dramaturg, and artistic director of Hedgepig and Expand the Canon.

This piece originally misattributed the authorship of the play Los empeños de una casa, written by Sor Juana de la Cruz, to Ana Caro Mallén de Soto.

Support American Theatre: a just and thriving theatre ecology begins with information for all. Please join us in this mission by making a donation to our publisher, Theatre Communications Group. When you support American Theatre magazine and TCG, you support a long legacy of quality nonprofit arts journalism. Click here to make your fully tax-deductible donation today!

Adblock test (Why?)

Volunteers sought to tutor English language learners, provide translation services [United Way column] - LNP | LancasterOnline - Translation

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Volunteers sought to tutor English language learners, provide translation services [United Way column]  LNP | LancasterOnline

Cowlitz language being brought back with online dictionary, weekend classes - Longview Daily News - Dictionary

Brennen Kauffman

It’s been nearly 50 years since the Cowlitz Coast Salish language went extinct. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe is working to revive it and so far, they’re seeing success.

The tribe debuted the first major set of results from a three-year partnership with The Language Conservancy at a Feb. 12 event. The tribe announced an alphabet book and two picture books to introduce the language to Cowlitz children and an online and mobile dictionary with more than 3,000 words. Weekend lessons for adults interested in the language have been running for several months.

The new uses are all the more impressive considering how far the language had fallen out of use. Language Conservancy experts had to rely on recorded interviews from the 1960s to get a sense of what Cowlitz was meant to sound like. It was the first time the Language Conservancy had to fully reconstruct a language without the benefit of a fluent living speaker.

Snippets of those original recordings live on in the online dictionary as the example pronunciations for people to listen to.

People are also reading…

“You can click on a word and hear how to pronounce it from our late elder’s voices. That’s so amazing and really brings out the ability to bring the language back to life,” said Rita Asgeirsson, cultural resource director for the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

The Language Conservancy is a nonprofit working to revitalize the use of Indigenous languages that are extinct or at risk of going extinct. The conservancy works with dozens of tribes in the United States, Canada and Australia to preserve traditional ways of speaking.

Conservancy president Wil Meya said all the work that’s been done so far hopefully will lay the groundwork to produce new proficient speakers in younger generations.

“As people learn that this language is learnable and doable, they’ll get more experienced and become more advanced and put more effort in. But of course, the resources have to be there first,” Meya said.

The loss of Cowlitz Coast Salish

Cowlitz Coast Salish is far from the only Native American language that has withered or died off.

Only half of the languages spoken in the United States before Europeans arrived still exist, according to the Endangered Languages Project. Many of the ones still around are in danger of disappearing.

The last major work done to preserve the Cowlitz Coast Salish was done by M. Dale Kinkade, a University of Kansas linguist who was born in Washington and specialized in the study of Salish languages. In the 1960s, Kinkade interviewed two of the remaining Cowlitz Tribe members who were fluent in the language, Emma Mesplie and Lucy James.

Asgeirsson said after the tribe earned federal recognition and established the reservation in Clark County, they started looking for the next set of priorities.

“The language came out as one of those all-important aspects of our history that impact all aspects of Cowlitz culture,” Asgeirsson said.

Those recordings formed the basis of the “Cowlitz Dictionary and Grammatical Sketch” Kinkade published in 2004 and the work done by the Language Conservancy. An article in the International Journal of American Linguistics about Kinkade’s dictionary said his work “represents the sum total of our knowledge of Cowlitz.”

Meya said the experts went through nearly 100 hours of tape to build the current dictionary and books and preserved audio clips for around 2,000 individual words and a range of phrases and sentences.

The Salish group of Native American languages can be notoriously hard to learn. The Cowlitz alphabet has 42 letters, several of which Asgeirsson said take “a lot of motion in the mouth and throat.” Cowlitz has different pronunciations for the letters c (sounds like the ‘ts’ in cats, according to the Cowlitz online dictionary) and c’ (the same sound but with a sharp pop).

Tribe leaders also face the issue of adapting the language to 2022. Meya said creating new words or adapting now-common English terms was an evolution that was especially tough for languages that have not been actively used for generations.

“There are tens of thousands of new words that need to be coined for the things you want to talk about in a modern context,” Meya said.

Helping tribe members become ‘culturally cohesive’

The Cowlitz Indian tribe is taking multiple approaches to getting Cowlitz Coast Salish back into use.

The alphabet books and early reader books are part of the program focused on raising Cowlitz children with a familiarity of the language. In addition to the two current books, Asgeirsson said the tribe plans to eventually build a library of 100 children’s books that will be provided at the tribe’s child care centers and Head Start programs.

“Language provides the cultural instruction, the morals, the ethics, the values,” Asgeirsson said. “So the sooner you start with kids, the more culturally cohesive a person can be brought up.”

For older members, the Cowlitz tribe has been holding a series of virtual language learning weekends for the last two months. They work Saturdays and Sundays to practice speaking in Cowlitz Coast Salish, using the Language Conservancy work as a baseline.

Asgeirsson said after the first run of classes, there were around 25 people who had shown significant affinity for Coast Salish and who had the time to dedicate to learning it. Those learners were placed on an advanced track to move toward being the first set of proficient Cowlitz speakers. The initial cohort of speakers will help teach the language to other members of the tribe and help create video lessons and new recordings for the dictionary.

The written and spoken language may also enter classrooms across Southwest Washington. The state’s “Since Time Immemorial” curriculum requires lessons about the history of Washington’s Native American tribes with significant input from the tribes in the area. The Cowlitz Indian Tribe is working with 24 school districts to teach local tribal history, including their original names and descriptions for features of the land.

“Something really important is making sure we norm seeing the written language, seeing the imagery and the history of the tribe,” Asgeirsson said.

Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter.

Adblock test (Why?)

Cowlitz language being brought back with online dictionary, weekend classes - KPVI News 6 - Dictionary

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Cowlitz language being brought back with online dictionary, weekend classes  KPVI News 6

Found in translation: Tips for removing military jargon from your resume - VAntage Point - VAntage Point Blog - Translation

Whether you are a Veteran who has served for four years or 40, your time in the military will have taught you many things, not the least of which is a lot of jargon. The acronyms and lingo you learn in the military quickly become second nature.

Unfortunately, not everyone speaks this language. But there are tips and resources available to help translate what you know into something that makes more sense in the civilian job market.

Lose the lingo

When it comes time to convert what you learned in the military to civilian life, you might find yourself grasping for the words to translate the shorthand you used in your daily work in the service. That can make it hard to explain what your job duties were in the military, especially when you’re dealing with civilian recruiters.

“Steer away from acronyms,” offered Kendra Wilson-Hudson, a physician recruitment consultant with the VA National Recruitment Service, during a recent “Talk About It Tuesday” broadcast. “The people who are reviewing your resume may not have served. They may be civilians, and they won’t know what those acronyms mean.”

As a best practice, Wilson-Hudson recommended spelling out what you’re trying to say and shortening it with the acronym in parentheses after.

Tools of the trade

Another place where you might get tripped up on your resume is explaining the duties of your military profession. Like a civilian, you become so used to just doing the work that you may not know how to best explain it to others. As a Veteran, you have the added challenge of translating your expertise in terms a civilian can understand.

Thankfully, there are tools to help polish your resume, including military skills translators that allow you to input your military occupational specialty (MOS) – remember what we said above about using acronyms? – or your service equivalent career. In return, you’ll get a civilian description of your skills.

Perhaps you were an 0111 Administrative Specialist in the U.S. Marine Corps. You and your peers already know what the job involves, but a civilian might not know you tackled accounts payable processes, auditing, customer service, data entry, typing, payroll and more.

Some other examples of translating military professions to civilian skills:

• 92Y Unit Supply Specialist, U.S. Army – Cargo handling, firearms handling and maintenance, inventory management and distribution, logistics support and loss prevention techniques
• 92G Culinary Specialist, U.S. Army – Beverage preparation, food and beverage services, food preparation and presentation, food safety procedures, inventory management and menu development
• 1169 Utilities Chief, U.S. Marine Corps – Advanced first aid, blueprints and technical diagrams, industrial control systems, industrial equipment operation, logistics support, project management, safety and occupational health programs, skills with hand tools and power tools, and technical writing

USAJobs has its own resume building tool that helps fill some of these gaps, as well as a helpful list of hints and tips to help you provide what the job announcement is seeking.

Go with what you know

When in doubt, take the time to describe not just the duties related to your job, but what you did in that role specifically.

Explain how you approached your job and the duties you assumed each day. Doing so will help you stand out as a candidate, especially to a civilian recruiter.

“When you start to talk about the duties and responsibilities that you held in your job, talk about it from your perspective, what you did, so that way the person knows that you know what you’re doing,” Wilson-Hudson encouraged. “Talk about the different steps it took to get to an outcome in a position. You have to take the time to sell yourself.”

Work at VA

If you’re looking to make the jump from your military career to a civilian one, taking the time to translate your skills and abilities will help you showcase yourself as a qualified candidate.

Adblock test (Why?)

Third-graders benefit from 'Dictionary Project' | Community | nogalesinternational.com - Nogales International - Dictionary

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Third-graders benefit from 'Dictionary Project' | Community | nogalesinternational.com  Nogales International