Last year, many linguists and teachers were confused about the EKI's plans and the future of the dictionary. There was criticism that the institute of the Institute of the Estonian Language no longer devotes sufficient attention on spelling guidelines, as it is unclear whether words and expressions in the dictionary adhere to the written language standard.
Minister of Education and Research Tõnis Lukas (Isamaa) asked the institute to develop an action plan, which has now been approved. The plan has also been approved by the ministry's language council (Keelenõukogu).
"This is what we have done to clear up these misunderstandings. We have worked very hard to provide answers to all questions," Tavast said. Tavast said that the new spelling dictionary will be published online and in print in 2025.
"The ÕS has been composed essentially the same way for decades, and this continues to be our daily work. Historically, drafter teams have varied in size; the ÕS 18 team consisted of five people; presently, there are 12 drafters and many more participating in the discussions," Tavast said.
Language is evolving
Tavast said that the fact that the way of speaking and the rules of language change, as well as the fact that this ongoing change agitates some people, is not unique to the Estonian language; each generation criticizes the language of the next in every language.
"What we now regard as the cleanest and most beautiful written language was actually a colloquialism of a previous generation's youth. Languages are constantly evolving; language would cease to exist if it stopped evolving. In the same way as organisms. If the cells stop renewing themselves the organism dies. Likewise, if language does not adapt to its users' ever-increasing expressive needs, it will fade. In fact, neither Latin nor Sanskrit are undergoing any change at this time."
Tavast said that the purpose of the written language standard is to harmonize the core of the written language so that communicating on the most important issues is as simple as possible. "Linguistics is now so widely understood that a perfectly accurate comprehension is known to be impossible. The wording of the law demonstrates this. For example, the existence of the judiciary demonstrates that laws are not unambiguous. If laws were completely understandable, we would be merely reading them. Judges are in the business of interpreting the law, and many core documents can be construed in multiple ways. We strive to make interpretation as straightforward as possible," he said.
The written language standard is not that well known
Tavast said that the written language standard is only required for official documents for state and municipal government activities and not in schools, for example.
"The school has decided that it will adhere to this standard. Nonetheless, it is widely acknowledged that even the most educated linguists are incapable of acquiring a detailed and thorough understanding of the norm. Even eminent specialists would doubt if such a uniform standard exists in Estonian. The same is true for native language instructors and literary critics. Frequently, a grammatical rule in the ÕS is not that well known," he explained
Tavast said that the task of the EKI is to improve the recognition and accessibility of the standard.
The EKI has been heavily criticized for its online portal Sõnaveeb, which combines word forms from many dictionaries.
According to Tavast, the confusion stems primarily from the abundance of options. It is usually best to use the most recent official spelling when writing a final report, for example.
The previously used spelling of terms, however, cannot be considered incorrect.
"For the past 40 years, Estonian linguists have held that no previous spelling is incorrect," Tavast added.
If you want to know more about contemporary Estonian, you can review the dictionary published on the online portal Sõnaveeb," Tavast said.
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Telegram Messenger this week released a new update for iPhone and iPad that adds a new chat translation feature, network usage statistics, new emoji features, and more.
Telegram channels have become very popular with groups of various nationalities and languages, and with the arrival of Telegram v9.4.2, if you're a Premium user, it's now possible to translate entire chats in real time as you scroll them or receive new messages.
If you administrate your own groups, this update means you can now control whether group members can send nine different types, like Photos, Voice, and Video Messages. It's also now possible to quickly create group and profile pictures from animated emoji and stickers with a new Set Emoji option.
Elsewhere, there's a new Network Usage section in Settings that allows you to check how much of your data was spent on Telegram, and it's now possible to adjust which media should be automatically saved to your Camera Roll from chats, based on size, type, and source.
As for what's new in the world of emoji: There are new emoji and sticker filters like "love" and "celebration" to help you quickly find the ones you want, and premium users can check out trending emoji packs in the emoji panel and zoom in on individual emoji.
Telegram version 9.4.2 is available now on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, with a new 40% saving for users who pre-pay for a year of Telegram Premium ($39.99).
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Chandigarh: Haryana is bracing for the humongous task of giving all its civil and criminal courts a full Hindi makeover by 1 April this year. The endeavour will entail re-training hundreds of court staff, conducting language orientation programmes for lawyers, and preparing judges to start giving their verdicts in Hindi rather than English.
The reason for the switch is to make court proceedings more accessible to the Hindi-speaking public, but the existing judicial machinery in the state currently runs largely on English.
All the readers, stenographers, and data entry operators working in the courts were recruited for their command over English, but now they will have to do all their official work in Hindi. Similarly, lawyers will have to be trained to plead and argue in Hindi and judges too will need to transition to the vernacular in their observations and judgments.
With the deadline looming, Haryana chief secretary Sanjeev Kaushal chaired a meeting Monday with senior officials from across departments to prepare a plan to accomplish the mammoth task.
Speaking to ThePrint over the phone, Kaushal said: “We plan to have master trainers in all the districts so that they can impart training to the court staffers. Besides, various departments have been told to upload Hindi translations of Acts and Rules pertaining to them on the website so that the general public is able to understand their meaning.”
The move to Hindi was set in motion last December when Governor Bandaru Dattatreya approved the state government’s proposal to amend the Haryana Official Language Act, 1969.
The amended law makes Hindi the standard language for “courts and tribunals subordinate to the Punjab and Haryana High Court”. It also makes it incumbent upon the state government to “provide the requisite infrastructure and training to the staff within six months of the Haryana Official Language (Amendment) Act, 2020”.
A 13 December state government statement said that the law would apply from 1 April 2023, and that the decision was made so that litigants could get speedy justice in their own language and “not remain speechless during the proceedings”.
The statement also pointed out at a precedent in Punjab, implemented over 50 years ago. In 1969, the Punjab Official Language Act, 1967, was amended to stipulate the use of Punjabi in all the proceedings of civil and criminal subordinate courts in the state.
However, despite the ongoing efforts to prepare for the change in Haryana, implementation is more complex than it seems on the surface, said government officials and judges that ThePrint spoke to.
Also read: Hindi medium in colleges, govt, recruitment exams…and UN — what Shah-led language panel wants
Training courses, new terminology
There are currently 21 district courts in Haryana, according to the website of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Several other courts come under the jurisdiction of each district court, including sessions courts that hear criminal matters, various civil courts, family courts, and some tribunals.
Each court comes with a small army of staff, not to speak of lawyers, judicial magistrates, and judges. Haryana’s district and other lower courts have as many as 283 judges, going by data on the high court website.
At the Monday meeting chaired by Chief Secretary Kaushal, numerous senior officials put their heads together to review the state’s preparedness for the implementation of the Hindi plan for all these courts and their employees.
File photo of Haryana chief secretary Sanjeev Kaushal | Photo by special arrangement
Among those who attended the meeting were Haryana advocate general Baldev Raj Mahajan, principal secretary of (Information, Public Relations, Language and Culture) Anurag Agarwal, the Chief Minister’s additional principal secretary Dr Amit Agarwal, principal secretary (Higher Education) Vijayendra Kumar, commissioner and secretary (Youth Empowerment and Entrepreneurship) Vijay Singh Dahiya, and Haryana Higher Education Council chairman Prof. BK Kuthiala, and other senior officers and representatives of the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Speaking to ThePrint after the meeting, Prof Kuthiala said that it has been decided that the Haryana State Higher Education Council will impart Hindi training to the staff of courts and offices.
“We will take the help of colleges and universities of the state for this purpose. First, the training will be started at Panipat as a pilot project. Those who will attend this training programme will be given certificates. Apart from this, the council will also consider short-term courses in translation from English to Hindi language,” he added.
Kaushal told ThePrint that in addition to training programmes for staffers and translations of laws and rules, department officials have been told to prepare Hindi alternatives to the English terminology used in civil and criminal courts.
Changes are afoot for the judge recruitment exams for subordinate courts held by the Haryana Public Service Commission (HPSC) too.
“The HPSC has been urged to include Hindi as a medium, along with English, for the Haryana civil services (judicial branch) examination,” Kaushal said.
“We have also urged the Punjab and Haryana High Court to take necessary steps to provide training to their advocates and staff.”
While the Hindi rule will not apply to the HC, the judges and advocates there have to deal with judgments, pleadings, FIRs, and so on from lower courts. These will soon be in Hindi only, which means HC judges and lawyers also have to brush up their skills.
The chief secretary said that revenue courts in Haryana are already using Hindi as their primary language.
Urdu challenge, steno shortage, translation woes
A senior government official told ThePrint on condition of anonymity that implementing the amended law from 1 April is no simple matter.
“A big challenge before the government is the functioning of revenue courts where Urdu and Persian words are used in abundance. The question now is whether to continue with this terminology or substitute these too with Devanagari terms,” the official said.
He added that most IAS and Haryana Civil Services (HCS) officers favoured continuing with the existing terminology “because they are already conversant with these terms”.
Such terms include ‘abadi deh’, which refers to the inhabited area of a village, ‘mauja’, meaning village, and ‘shajra’, a map showing the boundaries of agricultural fields.
Immediately after coming to power in 2014, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar had announced that the state government would replace Urdu and Persian words from the revenue records. However, this has not happened yet, said a senior advocate who specialises in revenue matters at the Fatehabad district court.
One of the matters discussed in the meeting was the availability of Hindi stenographers to document court proceedings. While it was communicated that the Industrial Training Department is running a one-year course in Hindi stenography in 54 training institutes and that as many of 1,441 students were currently enrolled, there are concerns that there may be serious gaps at least in the short term.
“The biggest challenge that I foresee is the availability of Hindi stenographers,” said an additional district session judge at a Haryana court.
Gurugram district court | Photo by special arrangement
“We already have an acute shortage of stenographers in the courts. With the sudden demand for hundreds of Hindi stenographers, the problem is likely to be compounded,” he explained.
The government official noted that translating court records of ongoing cases was also proving to be an arduous task.
“We tried a few translation apps, but they sometimes change the sense of the sentence almost entirely,” he said.
Judgment dilemmas
Having to switch to Hindi will be tough for some judges but others might welcome the change, said the additional district sessions judge quoted earlier.
“We have officers who are exceptionally bright in writing judgments in English, but there are others who are just okay with the Queen’s English — given a choice, they will like to write judgments in Hindi,” he noted.
However, he pointed out that incorporating citations from the Supreme Court and high courts in judgments would present a dilemma from now on.
“All judgments of the Supreme Court and high courts are written in English. These are produced by the contesting lawyers as citations to strengthen their claims because these judgments serve as case law. The judges reproduce excerpts from such citations in their judgments. Now, when the judges of the district courts will write their judgments in Hindi, questions arise about whether they will translate citations into Hindi first,” the judge said.
This, he added, would not just be an “onerous” job, but also ran the risk of changing the meaning of the judgment.
“We sometimes quote Sanskrit shlokas or lines from the Bhagavad Gita in our court orders, but these are very small phrases. The citations are sometimes quite lengthy,” he added.
Question of ‘discrimination’
Will the language shift shut the doors of the Haryana judiciary for those from the non-Hindi belt? According to judicial officers that ThePrint spoke to, the system in Haryana already requires proficiency in Hindi.
“Though the Haryana judicial exam is open to law graduates from across the country, we hardly got any officers from the non-Hindi belt even before the present amendment. This is because clearing an examination in Hindi is mandatory for those appearing for the HCS (Judicial),” said the additional district sessions judge.
“Also, pleadings can still be made in Hindi in the subordinate courts. In fact, a large majority of cases filed in the subordinate courts are in Hindi. The only difference is that now, the courts will also have to pronounce judgments in Hindi, which were earlier being written in English,” he added.
Another judicial officer working as a civil judge (senior division) told ThePrint that the situation was no different from that in Punjab, where Punjabi is the official language in the subordinate courts. Aspirants for judicial services have to clear a paper in Punjabi too.
“Several of our youths have got jobs in Delhi, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh. Likewise, many people from Punjab and Delhi get into judicial services in Haryana,” he added.
On whether the amendment will impact the training of judges in Haryana, another additional district and sessions judge said that Hindi proficiency would get higher priority than it has before.
“Those selected for judicial services have to undergo one-year training in the Chandigarh Judicial Academy before they are asked to preside over courts,” he said. “The only difference this amendment will make is that the judicial academy will need to appoint officers who are well versed in Hindi.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
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“Gaining a better understanding of each other’s cultures and standpoints is more important than ever today,” remarked Johannes Hahn, Commissioner for Budget and Administration, while congratulating this year’s winners of the European Commission’s Juvenes Translatores competition.
The 27 winners of the 2022-23 young translators’ competition were announced on February 9, 2023 — one from each EU member state. 2,883 pupils from 681 schools participated in the 16th edition of the contest in November 2022.
An additional 287 pupils received special mentions for outstanding translations. And for the first time since the competition began in 2007, teachers will also be honored for their hard work.
For the competition, pupils can translate between any two of the EU’s 24 official languages. This year, 141 language combinations out of the possible 552 were used, including some less common pairs, such as Spanish to Slovenian and Polish to Danish.
High Achievers
The astounding work done by the young translators was highlighted by the translators and revisers from the Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) who assessed the pupils’ efforts. On social media, the Polish team noted the higher level of translations this year compared to previous years.
Maxence Launay-Querré, translating from English to French, bested 371 other French pupils. France took the top spot as the country with the most competing participants, moving up the ranks from the previous year.
Italy — which had been the most competitive country for several years in a row — had 363 competitors in 2022-23. Ginevra Mingione from Naples snatched the Italian crown with her winning translation from English to Italian.
The country with the third highest participation was Germany, which showcased the linguistic talents of 284 pupils. Paul Möllecken, translating from French, from Brühl near Cologne, emerged victorious in Germany.
European Year of Youth
The theme of this year’s competition focused on the role of young people in shaping Europe, mirroring the 2022 European Year of Youth. According to Johannes Hahn, the source texts included important topics, such as “unity, peace, and a greener future.”
The English source text, titled, ‘Is Age Just a Number?’ followed a text conversation between an 18-year-old boy and his grandmother about the impact of social media and technology, the perception and often negative stereotypes of young people today.
The French text broached whether the EU is doing enough for young people in the form of a round table discussion. The German source text used cloud watching imagery to represent the current political climate in Europe, as part of a chat between two philosophizing friends.
One upshot of Juvenes Translatores is the additional linguistic and cultural events schools and individuals are subsequently involved in. Including visits to local universities offering translation courses, educational exchanges, and the EU’s e-Twinning project.
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Former participants have gone on to study translation at higher education institutions, and others have joined the EC’s translation department as a trainee or full-time translator.
A Word From the Winners
The winners, one from each member state, will gather in Brussels in March 2023 to receive their awards. Before then, Slator spoke with Ginevra Mingione, the 2022 vincitrice from Italy, and Theresa Drexler, the Austrian Königin, both of whom grew up bilingually.
While Mingione’s mother tongues are Italian and Neapolitan, she has also learned English, Spanish, Latin, and knows basic German and Portuguese.
Drexler, a native German and Hungarian speaker, learned English and Spanish in school, and told Slator she “will not stop at just four languages.” She would also like to learn French, hopes to transform her passion for languages into a career, and observed that “languages make up a huge part of my identity.”
Mingione and Drexler shared how, although they had never done any formal translation prior to the event, they have often acted as informal interpreters. Drexler described it as an almost automatic consequence of having had the privilege of growing up bilingual.
Mingione said she prepared for the competition by translating previous source texts and described the encouraging yet competitive environment the school and her fellow pupils created during the lead-up: “All of my schoolmates were eager to test themselves and to help each other.” She added, “We encouraged each other to compete as our best selves.”
Similarly, the group from Drexler’s school met weekly to discuss the art of translation, peer review each other’s translations, and offer suggestions and advice.
Participating in Juvenes Translatores comes highly recommended by the winners. Drexler summed up her experience as, “Exciting, rewarding, and educational.”, highlighting that the competition “allows you to recognise how different languages can be, but that at the core they connect us all.”
Business email compromise (BEC) attacks are a major issue and are reckoned to have accounted for over a third of all financial losses from cyberattacks in 2021.
While not as common as phishing, BEC is a serious threat and it's not just in English-speaking countries. Abnormal Security has identified two groups using executive impersonation to execute BEC attacks on companies worldwide.
The groups -- Midnight Hedgehog, a group engaging in payment fraud, and Mandarin Capybara, a group executing payroll diversion attacks -- have launched BEC campaigns in at least 13 different languages, including Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
To properly translate email text for more believable social engineering efforts in the past would have required hiring a native speaker. Now though, widely available, accurate translation apps such as Google Translate have lowered the barrier to entry. This means attackers can rapidly scale their efforts, maximizing their reach and launching campaigns across the globe.
Fewer grammatical mistakes and syntax errors mean fewer alarm bells to alert email recipients that something isn't right about a message.
The Midnight Hedgehog group has only been seen to target companies in Europe with non-English messages. Mandarin Capybara though has attacked companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Researchers have observed the group targeting American and Australian companies in English, Canadian organizations in French, and European companies in six languages, including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
You can read more and see details of attack campaigns on the Abnormal Security blog.
