Parishioners reclaim Ojibwe language through hymn translation - Catholic News Service - Translation

ST. PAUL, Minn. (CNS) — Holding a wooden flute, Larry Martin stood during a recent Mass and welcomed the congregation to join the responsorial psalm. He began: “Aw ge-chi-twaaa-wen-daa-go-zid, Gi-gi-zhe-ma-ni-doo-mi-nann.”

The language was Ojibwe, and the words translated to “Our God is one who is glorious,” taken from Psalm 19.

Martin, a 79-year-old director emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, worked with another language expert to convert the English to Ojibwe, the traditional language of many of the American Indian Catholics who worship at Gichitwaa Kateri in south Minneapolis, Martin’s parish.

Most of them can’t speak their ancestors’ language, but it’s meaningful to pray in it, he said. “It helps them give voice to their Indian identity,” he said.

Gichitwaa Kateri is home of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ Office of Indian Ministry. Since 2018, Martin and fellow parishioner Rick Gresczyk have translated into Ojibwe most of the responsorial psalms used in the church’s three-year Sunday Mass cycle. Their work built on a project they began years earlier to translate popular hymns such as “Ode to Joy,” “Hail, Holy Queen” and “How Can I Keep from Singing?”

Their accomplishments caught the attention of Catholics planning Pope Francis’ visit to Canada this July. At the request of the visit’s organizers, Martin submitted a few hymns for consideration, including “Wezhitooyan Gakina Go” and “Hymn for Kateri Tekakwitha.”

The first, an Ojibwe creation song Martin and Gresczyk composed, was inspired by three sources: an Old English creation hymn, an Ojibwe creation story and a hymn attributed to Pope St. Gregory the Great.

The second hymn was created by Father Jan Michael Joncas, a well-known liturgical composer and recently retired priest of the archdiocese. In 2012, he collaborated with the Gitchitwaa Kateri community to craft a hymn to celebrate the canonization of the parish’s namesake.

Although the hymns he submitted were not ultimately used during the papal visit, Martin thinks that might be partly due to regional difference: The Ojibwe dialect spoken in Canada differs from the dialect Martin and Gresczyk use, he said. He feels it was an honor for the hymns to even be considered.

In addition to translating popular Catholic hymns and psalms, the two men have set to music Ojibwe-language prayers of Bishop Frederic Baraga, the first bishop of Marquette, Michigan.

Like elements of Pope Francis’ Canadian pilgrimage, Martin and Gresczyk’s translation initiative is tied to culture reclamation efforts underway in the U.S. and Canada, in response to the Indian boarding school era, where American Indian and Indigenous children were removed from their homes and sent to government-funded schools, some run by Catholic religious orders and dioceses, where they were often not allowed to speak their native languages or express their cultures.

“The church is responsible for damage to language, so we thought we should do something about bringing it back,” said Martin, who is Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe.

For the translations, Martin credits Gresczyk’s deep knowledge of Ojibwe. Martin doesn’t consider himself fluent, but says he can tweak grammar and align Gresczyk’s translations with the chosen melodies.

Gresczyk now lives in northern Minnesota, so the two mostly collaborate by phone.

Shawn Phillips, director of the archdiocese’s Office of Indian Ministry and pastoral minister at Gichitwaa Kateri, said the translations help parishioners pray and learn more about their culture and heritage. He hopes one day there will be a similar effort to translate prayers into Dakota, so both of the primary Native American cultures in Minnesota would be represented, he said.

The translation effort is important, Phillips said, because “God will speak to them in their own language.”

“That was the Pentecost message,” he said. “It wasn’t that the Gospel be in Greek or in Roman, but … all of these people could understand it. It’s that God cares about us and speaks to us in our own language and knows us intimately.”

– – –

Wiering is editor of The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

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MARSHALLESE NAAN (Dictionary) by Terry Mote | Local News | enidnews.com - Enid News & Eagle - Dictionary

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MARSHALLESE NAAN (Dictionary) by Terry Mote | Local News | enidnews.com  Enid News & Eagle

Translation Issue in the Budapest Memorandum Is Fueling a Messy Row Between the U.S. and Ukraine - The Daily Beast - Translation

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Translation Issue in the Budapest Memorandum Is Fueling a Messy Row Between the U.S. and Ukraine  The Daily Beast

The Cuphead Show! Inspiration Gets Lost in Translation - Collider - Translation

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The Cuphead Show! Inspiration Gets Lost in Translation  Collider

Tech in translation | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT News - Translation

The Sony Walkman and virtual reality headsets are not just prominent examples of personal technology. In the hands of Paul Roquet, they’re also vehicles for learning more about Japan, the U.S., global technology trends — and ourselves.

Roquet is an associate professor in MIT’s program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and his forte is analyzing how new consumer technologies change the way people interact with their environments. His focus in this effort has been Japan, an early adopter of many postwar trends in personal tech.

For instance, in his 2016 book “Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self” (University of Minnesota Press), Roquet examines how music, film, and other media have been deployed in Japan to create soothing, relaxing individual atmospheres for people. That gives people a feeling of control, even though their moods are now mediated by the products they consume.

In his 2022 book, “The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan” (Columbia University Press), Roquet explored the impact of VR technologies on users, understanding these devices as tools for both closing off the outside world and interacting with others in networked settings. Roquet also detailed the cross-cultural trajectories of VR, which in the U.S. emerged out of military and aviation applications, but in Japan has been centered around forms of escapist entertainment.

As Roquet puts it, his work is steadily focused on “the relationship between media technologies and environmental perception, and how this relationship plays out differently in different cultural contexts.”

He adds: “There’s a lot to be gained by trying to think through the same questions in different parts of the world.”

Those different cultures are connected, to be sure: In Japan, for example, the English musician Brian Eno was a significant influence in the understanding of ambient media. The translation of VR technologies from the U.S. to Japan happened, in part, via technologists and innovators with MIT links. Meanwhile, Japan gave the world the Sony Walkman, a sonic enclosure of its own. 

As such, Roquet’s work is innovative, pulling together cultural trends across different media and tracing them around the globe, through the history, present, and future of technology. For his research and teaching, Roquet was granted tenure at MIT earlier this year.

Exchange program pays off

Roquet grew up in California, where his family moved around to a few different towns while he was a kid. As a high school student learning Japanese in Davis, he enrolled in an exchange program with Japan, the California-Japan Scholars program, enabling him to see the country up close. It was the first time Roquet had been outside of the U.S., and the trip had a lasting impact.

Roquet kept studying Japanese language and culture while an undergraduate at Pomona College; he earned his BA in 2003, in Asian studies and media studies. Roquet also indulged his growing fascination with atmospheric media by hosting a college radio show featuring often-experimental forms of ambient music. Soon Roquet discovered, to his bemusement, that his show was being played — with unknown effects on customers — at a local car dealership.

Japanese film was still another source of Roquet’s emergent intellectual interests, due to the differences he perceived with mainstream U.S. cinema.

“The storytelling would often function very differently,” Roquet says. “I found myself drawn to films where there was less of an emphasis on plot, and more emphasis on atmosphere and space.”

After college, Roquet won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and immediately spent a year on an ambitious research project, investigating what the local soundscape meant to residents across the Asia-Pacific region — including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands — as well as Canada.

“It made me aware of how different people’s relationship to the soundscape can be from one place to another, and how history, politics, and culture shape the sensory environment,” Roquet says.

He then earned his MA in 2007 from the University of California at Berkeley, and ultimately his PhD from Berkeley in 2012, with a focus on Japan Studies and a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. His dissertation formed the basis of his “Ambient Media” book.

Following three years as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, at Stanford University, and one as a postdoc in global media at Brown University, Roquet joined the MIT faculty in 2016. He has remained at the Institute since, producing his second book, as well as a range of essays on VR and other forms of environmental media.

Willingness to explore

MIT has been an excellent fit, Roquet says, given his varied interests in the relationship between technology and culture.

“One thing I love about MIT is there’s a real willingness to explore newly emerging ideas and practices, even if they may not be situated in an established disciplinary context yet,” Roquet says. “MIT allows that interdisciplinary conversation to take place because you have this location that ties everything together.”

Roquet has also taught a wide range of undergraduate classes, including introductions to media studies and to Japanese culture; a course on Japanese and Korean cinema; another on Japanese literature and cinema; and a course on digital media in Japan and Korea. This semester he is teaching a new course on critical approaches to immersive media studies. 

Of MIT’s undergraduates, Roquet notes, “They have a remarkable range of interests, and this means class discussions shift from year to year in really interesting ways.

Whatever sparks their curiosity, they are always ready to dig deep.”

When it comes to his ongoing research, Roquet is exploring how the increasing use of immersive media works to transform a society’s relationship with the existing physical landscape.

“These kinds of questions are not asked nearly enough,” Roquet says. “There’s a lot of emphasis on what virtual spaces offer to the consumer, but there are always  environmental and social impacts created by inserting new layers of mediation between a person and their surrounding world. Not to mention by manufacturing headsets that often become obsolete within a couple years.”

Wherever his work takes him, Roquet will still be engaging in a career-long project of exploring the cultural and historical differences among countries in order to expand our understanding of media and technology.

“I don’t want to make the argument that Japan is radically different from the U.S. These histories are very intertwined, and there’s a lot of back and forth [between the countries],” Roquet says. “But also, when you pay close attention to local contexts you can uncover critical differences in how media technologies are understood and put to use. These can teach us a lot, and challenge our assumptions.”

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Pros and Cons of Using Google Translate to Create a Multilingual Website - JD Supra - Translation

Law firms that provide services in multiple languages should offer multilingual website content. But is it really possible to achieve a high-quality result with an automated translation service like Google Translate? What is the best strategy for crafting a multilingual website? 

Your firm has two basic options when it comes to providing a multilingual online experience: 1) Use an automated translation service that translates on-demand, or 2) Publish a dedicated site (or pages on a site) with static translated content.

In this article, we explain the basics of automated translation, the pros and cons of using Google Translate, and a recommended approach for multilingual law firm websites.

What is automated translation?

Automated translation tools such as Google Translate use machines to translate content in real time with a single click of a button. There is no human touch or manual review involved in automated translation.

By clicking on the embedded website widget, a user can see the existing web content replaced with a live-translated version in their language of choice. However, original formatting doesn’t always carry over and grammar mistakes are common.

Pros of Google Translate

Google Translate can be valuable for both users and law firms. Let’s consider three pros of Google Translate.

1. Google Translate is easy to install and low-cost. The Translation API is very easy to install. Depending on how much traffic your website receives, your Cloud Translation fee could be nominal.

2. Google Translate empowers the user. This tool is not just limited to common languages like English and Spanish. It allows users to pick their own language, which can give you greater reach.

3. Maintenance is minimal. You don’t need to worry about maintaining different versions of your content. Because Google Translation uses exactly what is published on your webpage, you only need to update your English copy—the automated translation takes care of the rest.

Cons of Google Translate

While it’s easy to install and maintain Google Translate, there are some serious drawbacks to using automated translation. Here are three cons of Google Translate.

1. Google’s translations are imperfect—and mistakes can erode a user’s trust. Although Google has gotten much smarter in recent years, its translations are nowhere close to perfect. Without manual review from a fluent speaker, mistakes are guaranteed. Visitors may begin to distrust your website, associating your brand with Google’s translation errors.

2. Translations may give unrealistic expectations. If you don’t have anyone in your office who can speak all 133 of Google’s languages, the widget may give off an inaccurate impression of your firm’s capabilities.

3. SEO may be negatively impacted. This may surprise you, as most people think that Google favors its own tool. However, search engines favor high-quality content that delivers value to users. Acknowledging the shortcomings of automated translation services, leaders from Google have said that because these tools can result in low-quality content, sites that use Google Translate may not rank as well. 

Recommended approach for effective multilingual websites

If your top priority is maximizing reach, then Google Translate could help people from all over the world engage with your content—but this approach can only accomplish so much.

The most effective long-term strategy is to create a website with valuable, high-quality, and accurate content to build trust and set clear expectations with your users. For most firms, professionally translated content on dedicated pages is the right solution. 

In creating a multilingual website, consider the full user journey. When a visitor submits a web form, will the confirmation message be translated correctly? Do you offer a newsletter in these other languages?

Remember, it’s all about serving your user. You must establish credibility early on, starting with accurate and useful content.

Review and next steps

Google Translate is an affordable automatic translation tool that is easy to install. However, translation mistakes are common. Plus, the widget’s wide range of languages could set up unrealistic expectations for the linguistic capabilities of your team.

All in all, we cannot recommend Google Translate as a tool for creating a multilingual website. 

Instead of losing a potential client’s trust due to error-ridden copy generated by automatic translators, it is better to develop web pages in the languages that you can provide service. 

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Alaska Native linguists create digital Inupiaq dictionary - Arctic Sounder - Dictionary

Edna Ahgeak Paniattaaq MacLean smiled when her granddaughter Sirroun carried a thick tome with two hands and put it carefully on the table before her.

"I had some young people or teenagers tell me, 'We're trying to learn Inupiaq but it's so heavy!'" linguist and educator MacLean laughed, looking at the Inupiaq dictionary she wrote.

In June, MacLean and two Yup'ik web developers, Christopher Egalaaq Liu and Lonny Alaskuk Strunk, completed an online Inupiaq dictionary and word-building app, available at inupiaqonline.com.

The project is based on MacLean's Inupiaq dictionary and aims to make learning the language in school and at home faster, easier and more accessible, even in rural areas.

"It'll work," MacLean said. "People are excited about it."

The Inupiaq Online website - launched by the Arctic Slope Community Foundation - is the first of its kind for the North Slope dialect of Inupiaq and features a dictionary, a word-building function and an audio library to hear the way words are pronounced.

"It was designed for everyone," Liu said. "We have it so that people can just look up words quickly. We made it so that they can look up the underlying grammatical information if they want to."

So far, about 1,200 unique viewers have visited the website, Liu said. Visitors can look up how to translate a word, see the plural form of the word, change the tense of a verb or add an adjective to a noun.

"The computer has been taught to create new words for the user based on the morphological rules," MacLean said.

This is how it works: A learner might want to say, "I want to eat," and type the word "eat" into the dictionary. The verb "to eat" has nigi as the stem - the part that helps drive the meaning of the phrase. To build out the full phrase, additional words are translated into different phrase components - postbases, endings and suffixes - that are then attached to the stem.

Using the website, a learner can pick a postbase - in this case, "I want to" - then choose the correct case for "I" and see the result as "nigisuktuna," or "I want to eat."

In the same way, by looking up the word "truck," learners can end up with the sentence, "It is a big truck," or "qamutiqpauruq," by adding other elements to the original noun.

"This is just the first stage," MacLean said. "There are over 400 suffixes or postbases, and we've worked only on 10."

Starting as soon as in September, linguists plan to start improving the algorithms for the website to include more complex elements - for example, connective verb phrases for complex sentences - as well as conversational phrases.

"We are planning to make updates to the website and include more sentence types," Liu said, "and also just like, bringing in maybe more dialogue, or conversational-centered speech. ... Over the next year, you can expect to see updates to the website."

For now, learners can use the current version of the website and enjoy the featured artwork created by the late Inupiaq sculptor, silversmith and woodcarver, Ronald Senungetuk.

Inupiaq Online is not the first language project that linguists Liu and Strunk have worked on together. A few years ago, they built a similar website for the Yugtun language and presented it at the 2018 AFN Convention. The website received overwhelmingly positive feedback, especially on the translation function of the website, Liu said.

The decision to build an online tool for Inupiaq followed naturally: Both Yugtun and Inupiaq languages do not have many irregularities; they follow a defined structure, making word- and sentence-building more predictable, Strunk said.

"Learning about the mathematical consistency of the language - all these rules can be formed to create complete words - was very interesting to me," he said. "I could see the there would be applications for more exciting language tools."

To create Inupiaq Online, MacLean, Liu and Strunk met weekly via Zoom. MacLean would look at the website design and give developers feedback. Learning from MacLean's insights was a highlight of the project for Liu.

"She wrote the grammar books. She compiled the dictionary. She's Inupiaq herself and the speaker of the language," he said. "It is incredible because a lot of Native resources, language resources, are often not written by their own people."

In her Utqiagvik house a few steps from the famous whale bone arch, MacLean was cutting muktuk on a foggy afternoon in late June. The 77-year-old linguist lives in Anchorage but regularly visits her home village. This time she came for Nalukataq, to celebrate the whale her brother landed.

Utqiagvik is where MacLean's passion for language took shape.

MacLean grew up at a time when parents were asked to speak English to their children, but her father Joseph Ahgeak refused to follow the rule. In third grade, a particularly strict teacher caught MacLean speaking Inupiaq and punished her.

"I was caught once so she pulled my ear," MacLean said, "and I screamed the heck out of pain."

The young MacLean came home for lunch that day, wearing her hood up. Her mother Maria Ahgeak made her take off her parka before eating, and learned what happened after she saw her daughter's bright red ears.

"She got totally mad," MacLean said. "She put on one of my brothers' parkas ... and stormed across the lagoon. It was frozen so she stormed across the lagoon and ran into my teacher's classroom and grabbed her by the arm. 'I am taking you to the principal's and there, I'm going to pull your ear!'"

MacLean's relationship with her teacher improved after that, and MacLean felt even more passionate about speaking her native language no matter what.

"I was one of the people that was punished for speaking Inupiaq, and I got mad, and my mother got mad," she said. "So we just kind of said, 'OK, we're going to do it anyway.' So I've kept up that interest."

Fluent from the time she was a child, MacLean didn't become literate in Inupiaq until she was in her 20s and worked with her mentor, Michael E. Krauss, a linguist and founder of the Alaska Native Language Center. Then MacLean taught Inupiaq at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and immersed herself in the study of the language.

She wrote two Inupiaq grammar books and published her latest dictionary in 2014 - which took years of work. First, MacLean wrote down every word she knew. When she would run across a word she didn't know, she would call her parents and ask them to explain it to her. And if her parents didn't know that word either, she asked elders, hunters and other longtime Inupiaq speakers.

MacLean's "life's work was to translate the Inupiat language - which had been an oral tradition," - at a time when roughly 5% of Inupiaq speakers are fluent, said Ryan Cope, director of grant programs with the Arctic Slope Community Foundation.

While tools like dictionaries and apps can make learning easier, MacLean said that one of the most effective ways to preserve Inupiaq in the community is to create immersion programs that allow students to study the language on a deeper level and for longer periods of time.

"That's the next step that we need to do," she said. "In the schools, they have Inupiaq language programs, but it's not producing speakers. They are teaching it in segments, and they don't have a true immersion environment for the children, especially the preschoolers, to learn it quickly. The immersion method seems to be the only way that works."

Linguists are continuing to work on Inupiaq Online to make it as useful as possible, Liu said, while keeping in mind that a website can't be a full educational resource for the language.

"You can't really learn everything through an app or through a website," Liu said. "You have to also practice and engage with people."

Alena Naiden writes about communities in the North Slope and Northwest Arctic regions for the Arctic Sounder and ADN. Contact her at anaiden@adn.com.

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