U.S. translation project opens window on China's ambitions, fears - Nikkei Asia - Translation

TOKYO -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, has quietly built up an archive of 200 translations of recent Chinese speeches, academic papers and government documents in hopes of offering a better understanding of Beijing's ambitions, fears and how it sees its own capabilities.

The "Interpret: China" project models itself after how the U.S. sought a laserlike understanding of the Soviet leadership during the Cold War. "All too often we're relying on what others are saying about China, but we want to stop and listen to the discussion, the dialogue, the discourse that's happening within the country," the project's co-director, Jude Blanchette, CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies, explains on the website.

Adblock test (Why?)

Dictionary.com just added several new LGBTQ+ words & also “grundle” - LGBTQ Nation - Dictionary

Dictionary.com has added a handful of LGBTQ+ terms to its latest official update, making one of the largest online resources for English just a bit queerer.

Amongst the 313 newly entered words for the website’s winter 2023 update, are pinkwashing, queerbaiting, abrosexual, and multisexual. The update also added 130 new definitions to pre-existing words and 1,140 revised definitions.

In case you don’t know, here are the definitions for each of the LGBTQ+ related words:

• pinkwashing: (noun) an instance or practice of acknowledging and promoting the civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community, but superficially, as a ploy to divert attention from allegiances and activities that are in fact hostile to such liberties.

• queerbaiting: (noun, slang) a marketing technique involving intentional homoeroticism or suggestions of LGBTQ+ themes intended to draw in an LGBTQ+ audience, without explicit inclusion of openly LGBTQ+ relationships, characters, or people.

• abrosexual: (adjective) noting or relating to a person whose sexual orientation is fluid or fluctuates over time.

• multisexual: (adjective) noting or relating to a person who is sexually or romantically attracted to people of more than one gender, used especially as an inclusive term to describe similar, related sexual orientations such as bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, etc.

The website also included a few new words that aren’t exactly LGBTQ+ but are terms or concepts that the queer community may also be familiar with.

• grundle: (noun, slang) the region between the anus and the genitalia; perineum.

• cyberflashing: (noun) an act or instance of sending someone unsolicited, unwanted, sexually explicit images or video using digital platforms.

• woke: (adjective, disparaging) of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities.

To use woke in a sentence: “Some haters will probably respond to Dictionary.com’s newly included words by claiming that the online dictionary has become ‘woke.'”

The website wrote of its newly added terms, “Our lexicographers observe it all, documenting language change wherever it’s happening and defining the terms that help us to understand our times,”

“Words that are new to the dictionary are not always new to the language (or even remotely recent),” the site noted, adding that its inclusion of new words isn’t an endorsement of the concepts, but rather a documentation of language as it is used (rather than how they or others want it to be used).

In 2020, the website added LGBTQ+ terms like “ace,” “deadname,” and “ambisextrous.”

Adblock test (Why?)

Nearlywed to abrosexual: new dating terms added to dictionary - Cosmopolitan UK - Dictionary

Catherine Falls CommercialGetty Images

Situatationships, cuffing season, ghosting, benching, zombieing, the terminology around modern dating and relationships is an ever-changing whirlwind. Honestly, even we struggle to keep up (what the hell is a ‘ben phase’?).

Luckily, very smart people are keeping track of how our language is evolving and what this means for us as a society.

Dictionary.com’s latest update – reflecting some of the most important additions from last winter – had 313 new words and definitions, and the words relating to sex, gender, dating and identity all seem to have a key theme; we’re all about ambiguity, fluidity, and being in-between (even ‘liminal space’ made the cut).

“Our mission is to be descriptive—we work to describe and document language as it is really used (not just how we or others may want it to be used),” writes Nick Norle, Senior Editor of Dictionary.com.

The inclusion of words like ‘Nearlywed’ (a person who lives with another in a life partnership – with or without plans of marriage) and ‘abrosexual’ (a person whose sexual orientation is fluid or fluctuates over time) and 'multisexual' (a person who is sexually or romantically attracted to people of more than one gender) reflect a understanding of identity and relationships that embraces fluidity and the validity ways of approaching relationships beyond traditional structures.

‘Queerbaiting’ has also been included for the first time and is defined as “a marketing technique involving intentional homoeroticism or suggestions of LGBTQ+ themes intended to draw in an LGBTQ+ audience, without explicit inclusion of openly LGBTQ+ relationships, characters, or people” - something Harry Styles, Matt Healy and Billie Eilish have all been accused of in the past. However, there’s no reference to the fact that people not wanting to label their gender, or sexuality is not queerbaiting and accusing people of doing so could be damaging for everyone. Remember when Kit Connor was forced to come out as bisexual after Heartstopper fans accused him of queerbaiting?

Even the definition of ‘sex’ has been updated to reflect a less-binary understanding of human anatomy. The definition now explicitly includes intersex people and adds context around how sex is assigned at birth.

“Human sex is often seen as strictly binary and composed only of male and female,” explains a new usage note, “In practice, however, the way that a person's sex is categorized depends on several characteristics: genitals, chromosomes, hormonal profiles, and external physical features such as the development of extensive facial hair or breast tissue.”

Pretty nifty!

Here’s all the new dating/sexuality/gender words that have been added (JIC you’re looking to refresh your vocabulary):

• abrosexual - adjective. noting or relating to a person whose sexual orientation is fluid or fluctuates over time. Note: The prefix abro- comes from the Greek habrós, meaning “graceful, delicate, pretty.”

• grundle - noun. Slang: Vulgar. the region between the anus and the genitalia; perineum.

• multisexual - adjective. noting or relating to a person who is sexually or romantically attracted to people of more than one gender, used especially as an inclusive term to describe similar, related sexual orientations such as bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, etc.

• mixed-gender- adjective. of or relating to two or more people of different genders.

• nearlywed - noun. a person who lives with another in a life partnership, sometimes engaged with no planned wedding date, sometimes with no intention of ever marrying.

• pinkwashing - noun. an instance or practice of acknowledging and promoting the civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community, but superficially, as a ploy to divert attention from allegiances and activities that are in fact hostile to such liberties.

• queerbaiting - noun. Slang. a marketing technique involving intentional homoeroticism or suggestions of LGBTQ+ themes intended to draw in an LGBTQ+ audience, without explicit inclusion of openly LGBTQ+ relationships, characters, or people.

• sexual minority - noun. a member or members of the LGBTQ+ community, used especially in the context of discrimination against or advocacy for a minoritized sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Adblock test (Why?)

‘Clarity of the Gospel’: 2023 National Offering to support needed translation work - Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod - Translation

Later this year, church leaders, delegates and guests from around the world will gather in Milwaukee for the 68th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), set for July 29 to Aug. 3 at the Wisconsin Center.

The convention theme, “We Preach Christ Crucified,” also provides the basis for the theme of the 2023 National Offering: “We Preach Christ Crucified for All.”

The National Offering spans the years between conventions, giving individuals, congregations and districts the opportunity to use their gifts to directly support domestic and international mission work. The 2019 National Offering, under the theme “Joy to the World,” bolstered efforts to proclaim Christ in word and deed in challenging urban areas, to new immigrants, among college-age students, alongside partner-church missionaries, and in church-planting efforts both at home and abroad. The 2023 National Offering will support efforts to make selected materials and resources available in other languages so that all may hear the Good News of the Gospel.

In a February letter, LCMS President Rev. Dr. Matthew C. Harrison explained the 2023 National Offering theme.

“God has blessed us with His Word, readable in our native language,” Harrison wrote. “He has granted us the wisdom and abilities to read theology, Christ-centered devotions and even our Lutheran Confessions in our own language. When we worship, the liturgy makes sense because it is in our language. …

“We can quickly forget that God did not reveal Himself in English. Luther did not speak English. Yet our lives are enriched by all the English-language materials and resources we read each day, especially those that bring to us God’s Word.”

Harrison noted that this work is of heightened importance today as many of the communities in proximity to LCMS congregations increasingly include people for whom English is not their first language. “The need for this translation work is both acute and urgent,” Harrison wrote.

Some of the translation work to be supported by the 2023 National Offering will be simple, produced in a brief time frame, while some will require long-term planning and execution. Individuals actively involved in ministry where translations are needed will help identify which resources would be most useful to the communities they serve. 

“The 2023–2026 LCMS National Offering offers you and other Lutherans the opportunity of working together to bless non-English speakers with the Gospel of Jesus Christ in their native language through the simple act of giving,” Harrison wrote. “By participating, your gift of financial resources will bring the clarity of the Gospel to those around you, in languages they can understand. 

“Your gift will remove the impediment of language so non-English speakers can hear and read the comfort of God’s immense love for them in His Son’s life, death and resurrection. And through that Word, God gives faith in His Son, who is the only means of salvation for sinners.”

Gifts to the 2023–2026 National Offering may be made at any time at lcms.org/national-offering. For more information, contact LCMS Mission Advancement at 888-930-4438 or mission.advancement@lcms.org. 

Posted March 2, 2023

Print page

Adblock test (Why?)

Opinion | The Dictionary I Read for Fun - The New York Times - Dictionary

Not long ago, a book that is truly a gorgeous thing, in all senses of the word, was published. It is a third and expanded edition of a full-length dictionary of the Native American language Lakota. And I mean full-length. The New Lakota Dictionary, compiled by the Lakota Language Consortium under the supervision of the linguist Jan Ullrich, is of the physical heft most commonly associated with brands like Webster and American Heritage. (There is also an online version.)

Lakota is primarily spoken in North and South Dakota. The closely related Dakota language is spoken there as well. Of the more than 300 Indigenous languages once spoken in the present-day United States — differing as much as English, Japanese, Hungarian, Thai and Indonesian do — the vast majority now are extinct as spoken languages or are spoken fluently only by people nearing the end of their lives.

Without serious efforts toward revitalization, dozens of them will become extinct a generation from now, according to an estimate in “Ethnologue,” which catalogs languages. Many of the groups, often assisted by linguists, seek to keep the languages spoken in some fashion. Of course, an important step is compiling dictionaries and descriptions of how their grammars work.

Compared with many Indigenous American languages, Lakota is doing rather well, with an estimated 2,000 native speakers remaining, according to the Endangered Languages Project, and this marvelous dictionary may help keep the number of speakers from falling. It gathers over 41,000 words and illustrates them with more than 50,000 sentences, usage notes and collocations.

Lakota is not my language of study, nor are other Native American languages. Yet partly because I am this strange thing called a linguist and partly because I am the kind of linguist who wants to know a little of every language on Earth, I have curled up with this book with a glass of wine countless times over the past couple of months just to savor the cornucopia that this dictionary is.

However, I must admit that one section of the dictionary gives me pause. For this edition, Ullrich has contributed a new section on the language’s grammar, and as expertly composed as it is, it’s hard to miss that Lakota, frankly, is hard!

I’ll give you just a quick sample. In a basic sense, the word for “I” is “wa.” Or more properly, it’s a prefix. So “made it” is “káǧe,” and “I made it” is “wa-káǧe.” If this were a language like English, that’s pretty much all you’d need to know about “I.” But the thing is that with many verbs, you have to jam “wa” into the middle of them. So “I found it” is “iyé-wa-ye,” not “wa-iyéye.” There’s more: If the verb is less about doing something than having an experience, then “I” is said differently, as “ma” instead of “wa,” also often jammed in the middle. “Tired” is “watúkȟa," and “I am tired” is “wa-má-tukȟa.”

Lakota is like this throughout. But in the grand scheme of things, it is about as hard to learn as most of the world’s 7,000 languages. When it comes to grammar, English is on the easy side. You need just a single suffix, “-s,” to run through the present tense conjugation. There are no suffixes for the past, future or conditional that change for person and number the way they do in, for example, Romance languages. “I” stays the same whether you are doing something or experiencing it, and we certainly don’t plug it into the middle of other words.

But as the world’s languages go, English’s relatively streamlined grammatical nature is by no means the norm. Typically, a language makes you face either a boatload of prefixes and suffixes or, if not, then a lot of tones. To oversimplify, what this means is that a language tends to be like either Russian or Chinese. Lakota is more like Russian.

So if a typical language — i.e., one not like English — isn’t passed on from parents to their children but is learned in school and maybe starting only in the teen years or later, the signal has a way of weakening.

Researchers stipulate that the window on our ability to learn languages with native competence starts closing sometime during adolescence, because of biology or just the fact that you get busier and also shyer about making mistakes.

The result tends to be that beyond older speakers who grew up speaking only the tribal language or learned it alongside English from infancy, a new version of the language develops. Predictably, it is less grammatically elaborate. For example, I surmise that someone learning Lakota in school might not master exactly which verbs you slide the pronoun into, putting it instead at the beginning as one would feel comfortable doing when used to English. Also, vocabulary gets smaller. It is natural to sub in, for example, English words, especially for things most often encountered in English such as laptops and the kiddie goop called slime. You might even often sprinkle in transitional words like “anyway.”

This is the way new generations speak many threatened languages worldwide. It’s been documented in the case of Irish Gaelic, for example. In some parts of Ireland, younger people are certainly speaking it, but to a considerable extent, it could be said to be Irish in English, in which the quirkier Irish rules get flattened out in favor of rendering it the way you would in English. And the truth is that there is nothing wrong with this. We can see it as language changing, especially given that languages are always changing in countless ways, many of them because they’re being used alongside other languages. Languages in the same mouth will mix, unsurprisingly.

For example, my linguist friend Ghil’ad Zuckermann has assisted in the revival of an Australian language, Barngarla, which stopped being spoken in 1964. In his book “Revivalistics,” he notes that New Barngarla, inevitably, does not use some of the things that original Barngarla did. For example, Indigenous Barngarla pronouns were awesomely baroque: “Ngadlaga” means “we two” (but not “we three” or “we four”) and only when used by a mother and child or a man and his sister’s child (not his brother’s) and then only in a sentence that has an object. If there’s no object — as in “We two are sleeping” — then you have to use a different pronoun.

This distinction corresponded, in part, to the nature of kinship in Indigenous Barngarla society. But much has changed in Barngarla lives since then to force them into integration with white Australian society to a large extent, and making distinctions between pronouns like that naturally feels less urgent today. But what they are working with is still Barngarla; it sure isn’t English.

This might seem like a dilution or disintegration, but keep in mind that the language I am writing in is a lexically infected and grammatically streamlined version of Old English. King Alfred would find modern English alternately incomprehensible and barbaric. Many researchers think it got this way mainly because of what Viking invaders did to the language starting in the late eighth century, C.E. They spoke Old Norse, which was related to Old English but different. When they started using Old English, they probably spoke it as well as an American speaks Spanish after a few years of classes — functional, but just.

And they stripped Old English of its harder things, like vast tables of verb conjugations and noun declensions and the meaningless gendering of nouns of the kind that German imposes on “silverware.” It’s why English is the only standard language in Europe (other than, for instance, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian and Saami, which are not in the family that all the other languages belong to) that does not assign things to genders.

Then because of the Norman Conquest that followed the Vikings’ invasion, you can scarcely produce an English sentence without recourse to originally French words. Just in that last sentence there are eight (“because,” “Norman,” “conquest,” “invasion,” “scarcely,” “sentence,” “recourse” and “originally”). And the Vikings planted plenty of their own words, too. Without these new users, our word for “take” would be “nim,” our word for “knife” would be “sax,” and we would speak casually of being blithe rather than happy. I doubt anyone sees this as a problem. We speak our English; only the linguist calls it modern English, in salute to there having once been some earlier stage, which to us was a noble but bygone, “Beowulf”-y thing.

Revived languages today are going through a similar process, and the result will be more new versions of languages. A great many languages of the future will be structurally streamlined versions of their original form, but in the end, most of languages’ grammatical doodads are accidental accretions. They creep into a language and pile up over time, and somehow toddlers can wangle them and therefore do. But just as “silverware” doesn’t need to be gendered, full human expression hardly needs eight tones (in Hmong), four gradations of past tense, as in today, yesterday, a little while ago or just now (in Kikongo) or so many prefixes and suffixes that a single verb can appear in 1,502,839 forms (in Archi, a language of the Caucasus Mountains).

Lakota will likely change in the same way that many languages have. And that’s normal. In any case, in this succulent pot roast of a dictionary, the language lives, improvises and even beckons between the book’s covers. I salute Ullrich, the Lakota Language Consortium and the many, many native speakers they collaborated with for 1,420 pages of glory.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

---

Adblock test (Why?)

Prince Harry cant translate virality ‘into untold riches - Geo News - Translation

File Footage

Experts believe Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are ‘viral’ but not famous enough to “translate” it into “effortless professional success, untold riches and swanning about with society darlings.”

Royal commentator and author Daniela Elser made these admissions in a piece for the New Zealand Herald.

In it, she wrote, “When Harry released his guided missile of a tell-all Spare in January, the Jimmy Kimmel show first did a sketch mocking the altercation between the duke and brother Prince William with two actors dressed up as the singer Prince.”

“This would all be a bit of a giggle – the foibles, scandals and extramarital shenanigans of the royal family having long been juicy fodder for comedians and sketch writers – if it wasn’t for the fact that the Sussexes’ are starting to look less like power players and much more like a punchline.”

“For one thing, the US does not seem to like them all that much. Polling done after the release of Spare and Harry’s myriad TV appearances found that more Americans have an unfavourable view of the two of them than favourable.”

“What is so surprising is that while they might be the most famous people in the world not on TikTok (or occupying the White House) that fame has not translated into effortless professional success, untold riches and swanning about with society darlings.”

Adblock test (Why?)

From ‘woke’ to ‘queerbait’: Dictonary.com adds 300 new words - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Dictionary

Well, folx, you’re going to want to see the new entries Dictionary.com has added to describe our collective hellscape. Deadass. And if you didn’t understand that, don’t worry — that’s what these new definitions are for.

Dictionary.com — the popular online dictionary that’s been running since 1995 — announced Tuesday that it added more than 1,500 new, updated, and revised words to its catalog. New entries include modern-day slang terms, like petfluencer, a person who gains a large following on social media by posting entertaining images or videos of their cat, dog, or other pet.

» READ MORE: Language scholars decided ‘-ussy’ was the word of 2022. Here’s what that means.

Other updates and revisions include the adjustment of the phrase anti-Semitism to antisemitism, to reflect the widely preferred form of the word. The word’s definition has not changed; it’s still described by the site as “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.”

In total, Dictionary.com announced there were:

1. 313 new entries

2. 130 new definitions for existing entries

3. 1,140 revised definitions

Updating and adding to dictionaries is a common practice across the board. John Kelly, Dictionary.com’s senior director of editorial, said the site’s regular updates are meant to reflect how times change and language evolves.

“The sheer range and volume of vocabulary captured in our latest update to Dictionary.com reflects a shared feeling that change today is happening faster and more than ever before,” Kelly said. “Our team of lexicographers is documenting and contextualizing that unstoppable swirl of the English language.”

Dictionary.com says it uses a set of criteria to decide what words make the cut. Words are added when they’re:

1. used by a lot of people

2. used by those people in largely the same way

3. likely to stick around

4. are useful for a general audience

New entries added Tuesday include:

1. Bedwetting: exhibition of emotional overreaction, as anxiety or alarm, to events, especially major decisions or outcomes

2. Deadass: genuinely, sincerely, or truly; in fact

3. Digital nomad: a person who works remotely while traveling for leisure, especially when having no fixed, permanent address

4. Fan service: material added to a work of fiction for the perceived or actual purpose of appealing to the audience, used especially of material that is risque or sexual in nature

5. Folx: people; a variant spelling of folks (spelled with x not only as shorthand for the /ks/ sound, but also in parallel with other gender-inclusive spellings, like Latinx)

6. Forever chemicals: long-lasting chemicals, including PFAS and hydrofluorocarbons, used in the manufacture of common household items such as refrigerators, nonstick cookware, and flame-resistant furniture, that remain in the environment because they break down very slowly, and subsequently accumulate within animals and people

7. Hellscape: a place or time that is hopeless, unbearable, or irredeemable

8. Microdosing: the practice of taking or administering very small amounts of a psychoactive drug, such as cannabis, LSD, or psilocybin, to improve mood or enhance cognitive functioning, without hallucinogenic or other disorienting effects

9. Multisexual: noting or relating to a person who is sexually or romantically attracted to people of more than one gender, used especially as an inclusive term to describe similar, related sexual orientations such as bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, etc.

10. Nearlywed: a person who lives with another in a life partnership, sometimes engaged with no planned wedding date, sometimes with no intention of ever marrying

11. 
    

12. Pinkwashing: an instance or practice of acknowledging and promoting the civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community, but superficially, as a ploy to divert attention from allegiances and activities that are in fact hostile to such liberties

13. Queerbaiting: a marketing technique involving intentional homoeroticism or suggestions of LGBTQ+ themes intended to draw in an LGBTQ+ audience, without explicit inclusion of openly LGBTQ+ relationships, characters, or people

14. Rage farming: the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media, in order to elicit angry responses and thus high engagement or widespread exposure for the original poster

15. Self-coup: a coup d’état performed by the current, legitimate government or a duly elected head of state to retain or extend control over government, through an additional term, an extension of term, an expansion of executive power, the dismantling of other government branches, or the declaration that an election won by an opponent is illegitimate

16. Talmbout: a phonetic spelling representing an African American Vernacular English pronunciation of talking about, used especially online

17. Trauma dumping: unsolicited, one-sided sharing of traumatic or intensely negative experiences or emotions in an inappropriate setting or with people who are unprepared for the interaction

18. Woke: of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities

19. WOC: abbreviation. woman of color: a woman of color; a nonwhite woman

Adblock test (Why?)