Two UWSP students create a refugee dictionary to help with communication - WSAW - Dictionary

STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAW) - Communication between Ukrainian refugees and their host families just got easier thanks to the help of two University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point students.

The students created a refugee dictionary to help people who don’t speak the same language communicate. The dictionary consists of a collection of 124 everyday words and pictures to make it easier to communicate.

“So it’s English, Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Ukrainian,” said Pamela Terrell, a communication sciences and disorders professor at UWSP.

The idea came from Professor Terrell’s Facebook group. Terrell said she met a German linguist online who wanted to create a way to talk to the refugees she was helping.

“And I said you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There’s already software that we use in communication disorders for people who can’t communicate, that we could use to go along with this project,” said Terrell.

The linguist gave the speech-language pathology students and their professor a list of everyday words used by refugees.

“The language communication board is a file that has 6 different languages, with common words and phrases. As well as pictures for people that speak different languages to communicate with one another,” said Breanna Wolter, a UWSP graduate student.

Breanna Wolter and her peer Morgan Knutson used the ‘Boardmaker’ program to create the dictionary.

“We took the excel document and then took the English word and then put it into ‘Boardmaker’ so that we could get the picture of the word,” said Wolter.

The dictionary has a variety of words to choose from.

“The refugee dictionary has a bunch of different categories of food, clothing, words related to babies, and transportation,” said Wolter.

Wolter says being able to help is the most rewarding part.

“Just to be able to help them communicate because it is such a necessity and really helps them feel connected and included,” said Wolter.

The students and professor said they’re thankful to be a part of the project and help refugees in their time of need.

Copyright 2022 WSAW. All rights reserved.

Adblock test (Why?)

UWSP graduate students create dictionary for refugees - WXOW.com - Dictionary

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

UWSP graduate students create dictionary for refugees  WXOW.com

Essence Translations Unveils New Site and Services, Backed by ATC Language Industry Awards - Slator - Translation

Over the past decade, Essence Translations has cemented their reputation for human-centered service and impeccable quality. Now, in 2022, the Argentinian agency is entering a new era with upgraded technology and a wider linguistic reach.

Essence Translations was founded by Cecilia Poratti in 2010, and she has steadily expanded the team across continents. Her core team of translators, editors, linguists, and project managers is based in Argentina, and Cecilia is passionate about turning her local market into a respected hub for English-Spanish translation.

Cecilia earned her degrees in Translation and Spanish Linguistics, and stepped into her career as a freelance translator and in-house localization specialist at Lionbridge. This experience was invaluable, but she wanted to create a boutique agency that put client relationships first. Her translation company took shape organically, and Essence Translations’ expansion has been driven by upward quality processes, rather than top-down growth targets.

Of course, cultural and country-specific translations pose unique challenges. Essence Translations knew that in order to grow, the team needed to offer language services in all markets, including Latin American, US, and European Spanish.

Hiring skilled, independent employees is challenging enough in a single office; Essence Translations has managed to build a cross-continental team that collaborates with a unified focus. When hiring, Cecilia considers more than just a linguist’s certification, experience, and credentials. Human factors matter too. Cecilia has a clear vision for her team, believing that:

– genuine relationships matter

– elite quality is non-negotiable

– personal experiences add value

– leaders never stop learning

By connecting international audiences and diverse team members in both Spain and Argentina, she has achieved that goal.

What’s next? Lots of new growth, goals, and accomplishments worth sharing:

New Growth and Awards

So much has changed at Essence Translations over the past year and a half. The pandemic flipped their industry on its head and unlocked a new translation niche in life sciences, virtually overnight. Despite pandemic-related setbacks and challenges, Essence Translations achieved 30% growth with organic expansion in several new markets.

Global demand for life sciences translation was a driving factor for Essence Translations’ growth, but that wasn’t the only reason. Cecilia has strategically pivoted the agency to meet client needs and anticipate new translation trends. They became the go-to linguists for vaccine-related content at a time when the world needed highly accurate, culturally responsive translation.

Last year, one of Essence Translations’ British clients recommended the UK’s Association of Translation Companies (ATC) for networking and member benefits. This organic suggestion and local recommendation led to so many opportunities!

Essence Translations joined ATC and applied for two prize categories; both applications paid off. Cecilia had never entered a competition category like this before, but the timing felt right. The agency won ATC’s New Member of the Year award, citing the success of new life sciences localization services, industry-leading quality assurance processes, and global market growth.

Essence Translations was also recently recognized as ATC’s Member of the Month in February 2022, and project manager Federico Bones was commended as ATC’s runner-up Project Manager of the Year.

New Brazilian Markets

EN-ES is built into the Essence Translations name, but that’s no longer the agency’s sole focus.

Cecilia and her team are proud to offer full-service translation in both Spanish and Portuguese. Just like the original suite of translation, editing, and localization services, these English-Portuguese projects are all completed by native speakers.

The ATC-winning agency promises to help eliminate barriers with cultural precision. Now, they’re expanding that standard to better serve wider audiences.

New Branding and Website 

Essence Translations will continue to deliver award-winning outcomes with fresh new branding.

The previous website, established in 2010 along with the agency, was long overdue for an upgrade. In conversations with clients, Essence Translations learned that their professional image didn’t align with internal standards. The agency had evolved, and it was time for their brand to follow suit.

The Argentinian agency recently revealed their new website with streamlined navigation and a more meaningful story. Cecilia partnered with creative service providers around the world to ensure that the website functioned just as well as it looked.

After a year of thoughtful planning, Essence Translations’ new site finally highlights their human approach.

Clients can now read team member biographies, explore translation services in more detail, request custom project quotes, and learn more about Cecilia’s unique mission. Updated site images also provide a peek inside the office, welcoming clients close to home and far away.

— Visit https://ift.tt/m7pnIQG see this award-winning agency in action.

By Carrie French is a freelance copywriter with nearly a decade of experience shaping the stories of exceptional brands – from fashion and technology to lifestyle and linguistics.

Adblock test (Why?)

Students, professor help create translation guide for refugee families - wausaupilotandreview.com - Translation

STEVENS POINT – Communication between Ukrainian refugees, their host families and agencies in European countries such as the Netherlands has been helped by an unlikely source – the Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Two graduate students in speech language pathology and a professor helped create a Refugee Dictionary. It is a compilation of 124 common words, each depicted with an image and the word translated into English, Dutch, German, French, Russian and Ukrainian.

“Our job was to connect pictures with words and coordinate it,” said Pam Terrell, professor in communication sciences and disorders. “The students did the work and all of the problem-solving for this project.”

The students are Morgan Knutson of Kenosha and Breanna Wolter of Appleton.

The dictionary stemmed from what Terrell called a “funny happenstance” within a Facebook group. Among her online friends was a German woman living in the Netherlands who was working with Ukrainian refugees. She was a linguist who mentioned she was trying to develop a refugee dictionary.

Two University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point graduate students in speech language pathology and a professor helped create a Refugee Dictionary. Photo courtesy University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

“I said I knew of a computer software program that might help,” Terrell said. She was referring to Boardmaker, a tool often used in communicative sciences and disorders for those unable to speak. It uses images to depict words for non-speakers – images that have been researched and developed specifically to depict objects, actions, documents, locations and more. Non-speakers can use the software to point to the object and communicate.

Terrell brought the idea to Julia Fischer, head of the CSD program, who thought it would make a great project for their graduate assistants in the clinic.

“I was really interested and intrigued in using Boardmaker that way,” said Wolter, whose primary work was in the Augmentative and Alternative Communication Lab, or AAC. “I never thought I’d be using AAC software for that kind of project, so seeing it used more broadly was exciting.”

The German linguist provided the team with words that were needed – those pertaining to families, young children, pregnant women, health, food and other necessities – translated into the six languages. The students entered each word into an Excel sheet and worked with Boardmaker to insert the words into charts with the images.

Knutson and Wolter soon realized that they would need to update the software to recognize Cyrillic characters used in the Ukrainian and Russian languages.

Once completed, the dictionary was sent to Terrell’s online contact and shared with refugee agencies in The Netherlands.

“Whether it helps 500 or 5,000 people, we are spreading awareness of the different ways we can communicate with each other,” Terrell said. “We discovered that we can use these tools for people who have communication barriers unrelated to disabilities, as well as for literacy education.”

Wolter and Knutson agreed that this project will benefit their careers as it taught them problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.

“While I didn’t have any experience in augmentative communication before, I can see now how I can use it in my career,” said Knutson, who also works in the clinic’s media center. “It was a great experience to help people communicate.”

“I hope to look into doing more specialized work with augmentative and alternate communication in the future,” Wolter said. “I like knowing we can expand its uses to a greater population.”

Source: UW-Stevens Point

Adblock test (Why?)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Leads Efforts for Black English Dictionary - The Washington Informer - Dictionary

In the next several years, a new African-American English Dictionary will make its way to the press.

Oxford University Press and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research announced the launch of the three-year research project in June with the goal of compiling the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE). It will be compiled by a team of researchers and editors and spearheaded by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Center and Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard. 

Funded partly by grants from the Mellon and Wagner Foundations, upon its completion it will represent the first comprehensive source of African-American English that has significantly influenced the development of English vocabulary, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

With its roots in African languages and creoles, it has long contributed total categories of words and phrases that have profoundly impacted the way English is used in the U.S. and worldwide, the groups said in a statement.

Alongside meaning, pronunciation, spelling, usage, and history, each entry will be illustrated by quotations taken from real examples of language in use. 

Researchers said this would serve to acknowledge the contributions of African-American writers, thinkers, and artists, as well as everyday African Americans, to the evolution of the English lexicon.

Additional research will be gathered from diverse sources such as novels, academic research papers, newspapers and magazines, song lyrics, recipes, social media and more.

“Every speaker of American English borrows heavily from words invented by African Americans, whether they know it or not,” Gates, Jr. said. “Words with African origins such as ‘goober,’ ‘gumbo’ and ‘okra’ survived the Middle Passage along with our African ancestors. And words that we take for granted today, such as ‘cool’ and ‘crib,’ ‘hokum’ and ‘diss,’ ‘hip’ and ‘hep,’ ‘bad,’ meaning ‘good’ and ‘dig,’ meaning ‘to understand’—these are just a tiny fraction of the words that have come into American English from African-American speakers. These neologisms emerged out of the Black Experience in this country, over the last few hundred years.”

Gates said the project represents a dream that began decades ago when he first studied the pages of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

“This massive project draws upon decades of scholarship from the most sophisticated linguists, especially those colleagues who have graciously joined this project as members of our editorial board, as well as the vast academic resources at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and the crowd-sourced contributions of speakers of African American English as well,” he said. 

“African-American English is the most interesting dialect of American English on all levels, and yet remains misunderstood by the public,” said Dr. John McWhorter, professor of linguistics, Columbia University and a member of the project’s advisory board. “Even specialists in it have a fascinating mountain of material still to examine. I would feel incomplete to not participate in this project.”

The first version of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English is projected for release in 2025.

Adblock test (Why?)

Is the Lord's Prayer Aramaic Translation on Facebook Legitimate? - Snopes.com - Translation

Archaeologists discovered scrolls in 1892, which led to the discovery that the Lord’s Prayer, when translated from Aramaic to English, begins with the words, “O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration.”

Context

We have just begun our research and will update this article when we have more to share. Our “Research In Progress” rating does not indicate that a rumor might be true or false. Rather, it’s simply an early heads-up to our readers that we’ve started looking into the matter.

In early August 2022, readers asked us via email to look into Facebook posts that made a very striking claim about what’s known as the Lord’s Prayer in the Christian religion. The posts claimed that “archaeologists discovered scrolls in 1892” that showed the Lord’s Prayer, when translated directly from Aramaic to English, began not with the common version of, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Instead, the posts claimed that the purported original translation began as,

“O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration, soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide.”

As mentioned above, we have just begun our research and will update this article when we have more to share. Our “Research In Progress” rating does not indicate that a rumor might be true or false. Rather, it’s simply an early heads-up to our readers that we’ve started looking into the matter.

In our initial research, we found that a search showed that the “O cosmic birther” translation wasn’t printed in any literature catalogued by Google Books before the year 2000. The translation doesn’t appear in any results for newspaper archives on Newspapers.com. The oldest online mention of these words that we could find was from thenazareneway.com, which was first archived in 2003.

We contacted two people who appeared to be key figures tied to this subject and are giving both parties time to respond by email before publishing a more complete story.

The full text of the Lord’s Prayer post that’s being shared on Facebook went like this:

This is The Lord’s Prayer…translated from Aramaic directly into English (rather than from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English).

Archaeologists uncovered a scroll in 1892 that contains this version of the prayer, one which has been mistranslated as “Our Father, who art in heaven…” for millennia.

Imagine how many other things have been lost in translation through the years.

“O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration, soften the ground of our being and carve out a space within us where your Presence can abide.

Fill us with your creativity so that we may be empowered to bear the fruit of your mission.

Let each of our actions bear fruit in accordance with our desire.

Endow us with the wisdom to produce and share what each being needs to grow and flourish.

Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release others from the entanglement of past mistakes.

Do not let us be seduced by that which would divert us from our true purpose, but illuminate the opportunities of the present moment.

For you are the ground and the fruitful vision, the birth, power, and fulfillment, as all is gathered and made whole once again.

And So It Is!”

We plan on updating this story in the future.

Adblock test (Why?)

SyncWords Launches Automatic Translations via QR Codes for In-Person Live Events - Victoria Advocate - Translation

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

SyncWords Launches Automatic Translations via QR Codes for In-Person Live Events  Victoria Advocate