An original goal of ChatGPT, in early 2023 the single hottest topic in the language industry (and in much of the rest of the world), was for the model to interact with humans via fluent “conversation” — not to produce machine translation (MT).
Still, ChatGPT and other large language models’ machine translation abilities featured heavily at SlatorCon Remote March 2023 and sparked concern, at least among professionals, about translators’ and interpreters’ “exposure” to GPT-powered software.
A March 24, 2023 paper, “Towards Making the Most of ChatGPT for Machine Translation,” has now proposed several methods by which users can improve ChatGPT’s translation ability; namely, by adjusting the model’s “temperature” and by providing more detailed task and domain information in the form of prompts.
The roster of contributors was split between academia and industry, including Xuebo Liu and Min Zhang of Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Beihang University’s Yuanxin Ouyang. Lead author Keqin Peng is affiliated with both Beihang University and JD Explore Academy, a project of China’s largest retailer, JD.com. Co-authors from JD Explore Academy were Liang Ding, Qihuang Zhong, Li Shein, and Dacheng Tao, the Academy’s director.
While ChatGPT’s MT abilities have impressed observers, the authors pointed out that the best results are for high-resource, closely-related language pairs (a finding confirmed by research peers), and suggest that other researchers “usually adopt simple prompts which cannot fully elicit the capability of ChatGPT.”
This paper’s remedy: a combination of adjusting ChatGPT’s temperature and providing task- and domain-specific prompts.
In MT, temperature is a parameter that measures the linguistic variety of a model’s output. Higher temperatures yield greater linguistic variety, along with the potential for more errors. Lower temperatures, on the other hand, produce more grammatically correct but less natural text.
Linguistic variety has been key to ChatGPT’s success as a “chatting machine,” but, as the authors wrote, “the diversity of responses may hinder its performance on tasks with a high degree of certainty, such as machine translation, to some extent.”
Evaluating ChatGPT’s translation from English into Romanian, Chinese, and German, researchers found that a lower temperature promoted higher quality translations, particularly for “difficult” (i.e., lower-resource) languages.
The group designed task-specific prompts (TSP) to overcome ChatGPT’s limitations in MT, adopting, perhaps, a “fake-it-till-you-make-it” attitude for the model’s abilities.
Prompt to MT
“Specifically, we prepend the sentence ‘You are a machine translation system.’ to the best translation template […] and adopt it to query ChatGPT,” they wrote.
Researchers incorporated domain-specific prompts (DSP) to identify for ChatGPT the domain of information related to the translated sentences — more specifically, the WMT19 Bio and News datasets.
60-page report on the interaction between human experts and AI in translation production, including AI-enabled workflows, adoption rates, postediting, pricing models.
Results were mixed but, researchers seemed to believe, promising. TSP consistently improved MT quality semantically (as measured by COMET), but not lexically (BLEU and ChrF). DSP also consistently improved ChatGPT’s COMET score, but its impact on BLEU was inconsistent, and the authors acknowledged that ChatGPT “still lags significantly behind Google [Translate’s] performance.”
The team mentioned several other possible avenues for improving MT quality, which they may explore in future research. Few-Shot In-Context Learning was found to improve both BLEU and COMET scores, compared to a zero-shot approach, for English into Chinese, Romanian, and German.
Chain-of-Thought Prompting is effective in large language models but has yet to be studied in depth with regard to MT. These prompts tend to generate low-quality, word-by-word translations. The authors, inspired by the philosophy behind statistical MT, suggested modifying CoT to improve output.
The authors also offered a public service announcement on unintended, and undesirable, side effects of ChatGPT applied to certain language pairs.
“When tackling the non-English-centric tasks (both the input and expected output are non-English), ChatGPT may generate hallucinations, which should be paid more attention to by the MT/NLP community,” they wrote, adding, for emphasis, a siren emoji in the text of the paper.
Panaji: A first-of-its-kind Konkani dictionary in library science will be released on Tuesday. Created by two assistant professors at Goa University, the dictionary translates terminologies used in library science from English to Konkani.
“For the development of any language, a dictionary is basic, because it contains all the terminologies. There has never before been a dictionary on library science in Konkani, which made it essential for us to build one,” said Milind Mhamal, who, along with Carlos Fernandes, created the dictionary. Mhamal and Fernandes are assistant professors at the university’s DD Kosambi school of social sciences and behavioural studies.
They conceptualised and began work on the project during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.
Three years on, the historic dictionary has 4,015 words, 1,000 of which are newly-coined terms introduced to the Konkani lexicon. Some of these are ‘purvamudran’ (pre-print) and ‘suchika’ (catalogue). The new words have been borrowed or inspired by existing words in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Marathi.
In the process of creating the book, Fernandes and Mhamal referred to a variety of resources — the commission for scientific and technical terminology, New Delhi, administrative terminology, directorate of official languages, Goa, the American Library Association glossary of library and information science, Chicago, and the dictionary of library and information science, London.
“To keep up with the ever-growing developments in science and technology, and to document the richness and diversity of a language, a dictionary is indispensable. Librarians can use the Konkani words in library sciences while catering to people in the language. This will also help researchers write new books on library sciences in Konkani,” said Fernandes, who added that the only other such dictionary in India is in Hindi.
Lexicographer Mukesh Thaly wrote the foreword for the dictionary. The release function will also see Jnanpith award winner Damodar Mauzo speak on the dictionary’s significance for the Konkani language.
The Wine 8.5 development release is now available for this translation layer, enabling Windows games and other apps to work on Linux. Part of what makes Steam Play Proton do its thing! This is the usual fortnightly release with the latest work, and then once a year they put up a new stable release that will be Wine 9.0.
Here's the highlights:
Bundled vkd3d upgraded to version 1.7.
Better error reporting in the IDL compiler.
Support for shared Wow64 Classes registry key.
More cleanups in IME support.
Support for configuring a WinRT dark theme.
Various bug fixes.
Some of the bugs noted to be solved up to this release include fixes for Deus Ex: Invisible War, Fair Strike, Bible Black: La Noche de Walpurgis, Sins of the Solar Empire Rebellion, Ultimate Race Pro and various miscellaneous fixes.
Want help managing Wine on Linux? You can try Bottles, Lutris and the Heroic Launcher.
NORMAN — Jackson Arnold once believed he could arrive on Oklahoma’s campus during the summer, adjust to the football program and be prepared for a season in the fall.
After spending two months at OU, the five-star quarterback now realizes how naïve that was.
“I never realized how much of a benefit it truly was until a month in,” Arnold said after a recent practice. “I thought if I came this summer, I could learn this offense pretty quick and get used to it and learn how to essentially play this offense in the fall pretty quick. That’s wrong. I need it. I’m going to need this whole spring to get used to this offense and get used to learning Coach (Jeff) Lebby’s offense.”
Arnold is being mentored by returning starter Dillon Gabriel this spring. He’s also working out with Davis Beville, General Booty and Jacob Switzer at the position.
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Shortly after signing day, Arnold received OU’s vast offensive playbook. He was ready to immediately digest everything, but it was almost like trying to learn a new language.
“After I signed, they were allowed to send us the playbook. Just going through it at my house, there weren’t a lot of things I understood,” he said. “To be able to come up here and talk to the coaches and dealing with the whole quarterbacks room too and going through some stuff, it clears up a lot for me and helps me read out the plays.”
Gabriel is entering his fifth season playing college football, but remembers his first days on the UCF campus. He played as a true freshman, but was a sponge that had to learn a lot.
“You think about a freshman who’s 18 years old, really should be in high school. They’re juggling a lot of things, and a lot of people don’t put that into perspective,” Gabriel said. “We’re playing at a high level, but he’s also 18. He’s learning, he’s growing and you’ve just got to take that all into perspective. He’s got school, he’s got a relationship, he’s got a family, he’s got football, he’s got a lot going on, which is obviously what we signed up for, but just something to think about.
“It’s a lot to put into perspective. He’s doing a great job and he’s doing just fine, but he’s a stud. I love the kid.”
What does Gabriel like most about Arnold’s game?
“More than his game, I just like the type of person he is. I think it takes that kind of person to be a quarterback. Super selfless, loving, caring, and that’s what we need. Not me-guys, but we-guys,” Gabriel said.
Arnold said he’s spent much time adapting to the pace of the game at OU. He played in an up-tempo attack at Denton Guyer (Texas) High School, but this may be a bit speedier.
He now understands how intense the practices can be. While at Guyer, he said, the teams rarely worked out against each other. At OU, scrimmages are common.
When something complicated emerges, Arnold leans on his older teammates.
“Learning this offense isn’t easy at all and having somebody like Dylan and the rest of the quarterbacks in the room — Davis and General — being able to ask them a question in meetings about something I don’t quite understand has been really helpful so far,” Arnold said.
Lebby said Arnold spends plenty of time studying video, which impresses the offensive coordinator.
“He understands what it means to be the guy here and understands what it is going to take for him to get to that point. He’s spent a lot of time and has done a good job in there, which has been good to see,” Lebby said.
Arnold said Lebby hasn’t changed since his recruitment, which included being wooed to Ole Miss by the current OU coach.
Lofty expectations have followed Arnold since he arrived on campus. They’ve continued through spring drills and likely will carry over into the fall.
How is he handling that now that he’s going through spring drills?
“My expectation coming into here was become a better football player overall. Come in the spring and learn the playbook and not only being a better football player, but a better student too — come to college and transition to that life,” Arnold said.
Leon is running around the Spanish countryside like a chicken with its head cut off. Everywhere he turns, there are maniacal villagers hellbent on killing him. It's safe to say that Leon has had a rough go between his days as a fresh-faced cop and his daring fetch quest for the President of the United States in Resident Evil 4.
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Unless Leon picked up Rosetta Stone during the last few years, he likely doesn't understand a lick of what the Spanish villagers are hollering at him. What he does understand, however, is the looks on their faces and their brandished weapons.
10You Can Run, But You Can't Hide. (Puedes Correr, Pero No Te Puedes Esconder)
It's obvious that most of what the villagers are uttering in their native tongue are threats and taunts toward poor Leon. Creepy blood trails on wooden bridges aside, Leon probably didn't know what to expect from the first person he encountered. But by the time he witnesses an entire village burning a police officer alive, he understands his predicament entirely.
You might try to run from the slow-moving mob. When you break their line of sight, they will inform you that, "you can run, but you can't hide." This is their turf after all, and they know it like the back of their hands.
9Don't Let Him Escape (No Dejéis Que Se Escape)
These villagers don't really seem to have a sense of urgency. They crouch and walk toward you carefully like a lion ready to pounce. Leon can run circles around them. So it's a wonder why you might hear one Ganado say to another, "don't let him escape!"
Well, if you don't want Leon to leave you in the dust, maybe pick up your feet a little! Also, maybe don't bring a pitchfork to a gunfight. It's bad for your health.
8Behind You, Imbecile (Detrás De Ti Imbecil)
None of these villagers are using their brains. The parasite has total control over their actions. Still, they communicate with each other like irritated siblings.
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"Behind you, idiot," one of the villagers might shout. This line is far more common than it should be. Perhaps, Saddler just managed to gain control over a stock of incapable idiots. Maybe that explains how Leon can survive the onslaught.
7It Can't Be (No Puede Ser)
Leon is really quite magnificent when you think about it. Retrospectively, it's a wonder that he manages to keep that silky curtain mane looking like he just exited the salon after fighting in the mud with monsters. To complete the package, he also has a wicked roundhouse kick that'd make Patrick Swayze proud.
Knowing all of this, it's not really a surprise that a Ganado might exclaim in surprise, "it can't be." when they see this majestic hero marching in their direction with perfectly quaffed hair. Yes, my friend. Your end is nigh and this baby face is the last one you'll ever see.
6Prepare The Trap (Preparad La Trampa)
The villagers aren't really skilled hunters. They just know how to bury a bear trap in every conceivable walking path throughout their neck of the woods. They don't care about catching prey. They just enjoy causing suffering. And we're not just talking about Leon, but you, the player. Let's be real, how many times have you cursed in irritation after being stuck by another one?
Well, you can hear them dishing out marching orders saying things like, "prepare the trap". Admiral Ackbar would be on edge in this godforsaken place.
5Be Careful (Cuidado)
Imagine for just a second that you're a villager. Your mind is foggy with the influence of the parasite holding strong. Your spouse, cousins, and the farmer next door sharpen their melee tools ready to gut the American as he heads down the dusty road. Within a matter of seconds, he mows down half your pals with the heat he's packing.
Because you're still stuck in the Dark Ages where guns don't exist, you grab your sickle and yell to your comrades, "be careful!" as you circle this killing machine. Really? Be careful? The villagers' attack plans are anything but. Yet, you'll hear them shout this puzzling line regardless.
4What The F***? (¿Qué Coño?)
Leon is bound to scare his enemies just as much as they scare him. Let's be honest, he kills hundreds of people by the time he's ready to ride off into the sunset. Somehow, the enemies flocking his way don't understand the body count he's left in his wake.
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When Leon inevitably cuts them down to size or shoots the lit dynamite stick from their hand. "what the f***?" is the realization of their surprise. Leon is a sly devil crouching to dodge those two-handed lunges. That's right, Leon just got the better of you even if you thought your ax stood a chance against his gun.
3I'm Going To Kill You (Te Voy A Matar)
And then there are the obvious lines. You know, the ones the Ghost Face says to his victims on the phone just so they understand what's about to happen to them as if they didn't already know.
"I'm going to kill you" the Ganado says with bloodshot eyes, gnashing teeth, and a bloody sickle in hand. No, really? We thought you were just going to help Leon scratch his back with that tool you've got there. Oh, well. Eventually, one of them will make good on that promise in the gauntlet which is Resident Evil 4.
2We Need To Serve (Tenemos Que Servir)
Not everything is about slicing and dicing, though. The villagers surely have other things on their minds besides a gross tentacle-y parasite. They're ultimately bound to their master.
When the bell tolls in the center of town at the start of the game, you'll hear one of the villagers in his trance-like state say, "we need to serve" as he makes his way to the church. Maybe, Lord Saddler needs his morning coffee.
1To Lord Saddler Almighty (A Lord Saddler Todopoderoso)
Saddler ultimately fancies himself a god. With this complex, he intends to enslave the free world by infecting world leaders starting with the President's daughter. So, it isn't any wonder that he's created a pious groupthink among his followers (who really lack agency anyway) that places him on a god-like pedestal.
"To Lord Saddler Almighty," is a line you'll hear among the villagers. Saddler has really created himself quite the creepy little cult. Though, he required a parasite to get the job done.
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MOUNT PLEASANT — Emily Zogas walked slowly through the rows of students in her sixth-grade science class at Thomas Cario Middle School surveying their work. The children were hunched over their desks, using crayons to draw on white paper.
They were learning about protists — microorganisms such as amoebas and diatoms. Their assignment was to create a pseudo-baseball card that included facts about their assigned organism and themselves.
Zogas stopped in front of Mari Mkrtchyan, a young girl sitting in the back row. Mari's paper was divided into a grid. In one row, she had correctly written that she liked to eat Hershey's Kisses and drew a picture of the candy in orange crayon. She was struggling, however, to find information on her laptop about what her protist ate.
Mari's family is from Armenia. She is what educators call a multilingual learner, which is another way of saying she is still learning English. She is one of a growing population of multilingual learners in South Carolina.
Mari is bright. She speaks five languages and dances for fun, but sometimes she needs extra assistance in class. To help with the assignment, Zogas showed her how to use Snap and Read. The technology purchased by the school reads highlighted passages of text out loud in English as many times as a student wants, to help them better understand the language.
The girl plugged her lime green headphones into her laptop and highlighted a paragraph about Euglena, her protist. Zogas smiled as she watched Mari nod along with the audio reading before moving on to help other students.
Adjusting lesson plans or teaching strategies to accommodate multilingual learners is just an example of how teachers at Thomas Cario and across Charleston County help these students. The district has one of the largest populations of multilingual learners in South Carolina. Two of its schools, Cairo and Charleston School of the Arts, have some of the highest-scoring multilingual learners in English and math at the elementary and middle school levels.
But the district didn’t always have a strong relationship with these students and their families.
Instructional teacher Cheryl McGee talks with sixth graders Tatyanna Evans and Preston Riffer during teacher Emily Zogas' science class Wednesday, March 22, 2023, at Thomas C. Cario Middle School in Mount Pleasant. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Grace Beahm Alford gbeahm@postandcourier.com
In March 2021, a federal investigation found the school district wasn’t communicating essential information to thousands of Spanish-speaking families, denying these children equal access to education programs and services. Charleston County settled with the U.S. Department of Justice and changed its practices. It now has an Office of Translation and Interpretation dedicated to communicating with multilingual families and has increased its number of bilingual parent advocates to improve community relations.
This type of family engagement is important because involving the families of multilingual learners in their education is the best way to ensure their academic success, according to experts.
The county’s strategic plan for supporting these students and communicating with their families provides a roadmap showing how other districts can support growing populations of multilingual learners.
In-house translation services
Stephanie Vickers, a translation and interpretation specialist from CCSD’s Office of Translation and Interpretation, arranged a dozen headphones on a small round table in the gym at E.B. Ellington Elementary School. It was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, and the school was hosting a Fellowship and Families breakfast to inform parents about their children’s academic progress.
At the front of the gym was a stage with a speaker’s podium and projection screen advertising the event. The room was filled with round tables covered in green and white tablecloths. In the back, school staff put out bagels and other breakfast foods for families.
Students use their lockers between class Wednesday, March 22, 2023, at Cario Middle School in Mount Pleasant. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Grace Beahm Alford gbeahm@postandcourier.com
Vickers' job that day was interpreting what Principal James Dallas said on stage for Spanish-speaking families. When the parents arrived, they could take headsets and listen to Vickers when the principal was making his speech.
Vickers joined the Office of Translation and Interpretation shortly after it was formed two years ago. Before that she worked for an accounts receivable firm in he transportation industry and managed international accounts in Latin America. She then moved to CCSD where she worked as a bilingual secretary.
Getting the office up and running wasn’t easy. Most districts use outside translation services to communicate with families, said Susan Murphy, the state Title III coordinator with the S.C. Department of Education.
The first year was spent translating the district’s code of conduct and any flyers and information for families. Different COVID-19 variants were spreading through the country, forcing schools to go remote and extending staffers’ responsibilities beyond their typical job duties. Employees interviewed by The Post and Courier that year said they helped families with immunization forms, finding affordable housing and connecting with primary care providers.
Vickers also learned that interpreting differed from simply repeating what someone said in another language. It requires communicating what someone means rather than a word-for-word interpretation. A famous example of translation and interpretation going wrong is when Nikita Khrushchev, a Soviet leader in 1956, was said to have told Western ambassadors “we will bury you” instead of “we will live to see you buried.”
The statement shocked the Western world which took it as a nuclear war threat, and it increased tensions during the Cold War. But Khrushchev’s statement was translated too literally. What he actually meant was that communism would outlast capitalism. Vickers also had to communicate with families that spoke a variety of different Spanish dialects and understand a litany of niche cultural issues.
CCSD provided the office with coaching and other assistance. The district gives the office ongoing coaching and training support regarding ethics in the field of translation and interpretation services, specialized terminology in education, simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, and best practices for achieving accuracy in communication. Vickers began working at events like the one at E.B. Ellington. After one such event called Top Dog, a monthly recognition ceremony where teachers reward students for good performance, a parent approached Vickers and thanked her.
"She said, this is the first time I know why I'm clapping for my daughter because I know what's being said," Vickers said.
Families dressed in green trickled into the breakfast event. Parents filled seats at the tables. Children ran around the gym playing tag. Every set of headphones Vickers had arranged were soon gone.
Dallas took the stage and thanked the families for attending. The curtain lifted, and several students performed a song and dance in front of a multicolored sign that said, “Empower.” Afterward, parents lined up to get food. One woman broke out of line and thanked Vickers for her assistance.
Schools are friends, not foes
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Amalia Chamorro monitored how multilingual learners were doing as part of her job as director of the education policy project at Unidos, the largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. The number of multilingual learners in the country increased by over 1 million students since 2000. Yet, despite their growing presence in schools, Chamorro noticed that their primary language skills were viewed by many educators as a problem to overcome rather than something that could benefit both them and their community.
This troubled her because multilingual learners often did as well as other students once they mastered English. The University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research analyzed the long-term progress of 18,000 Chicago public school students who weren’t proficient in English in kindergarten. Researchers found that they performed similarly to students fluent in English and had better attendance and higher math scores, according to a December 2019 report.
But when the pandemic hit, much of the academic progress multilingual learners had made was threatened. These students often were from minority or low-income families — two groups that were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Many of their parents were not technology savvy, which made it hard for them to help their children when they had to learn remotely.
Instructional teacher Cheryl McGee helps Gabbie Chenoweth and Grayson Raines as she stops by Emily Zogas’ sixth grade science class Wednesday, March 22, 2023, at Thomas C. Cario Middle School in Mount Pleasant. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Grace Beahm Alford gbeahm@postandcourier.com
Chamorro’s group connected with community-based organizations to help these families during the pandemic. In some cases, they had to create outreach programs from scratch. They held educational technology seminars to show parents how to login into Zoom and check their email. They also assisted children with turning in their work digitally.
Families which received the educational technology training felt more comfortable communicating with their children’s schools when in-person classes resumed. Chamorro said that many of these families immigrated from countries with problematic bureaucracies and were suspicious of government bodies like schools.
Engaging with multilingual learners’ families is key to their academic success, according to a brief published in September 2018 by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But the engagement efforts must be tailored to the families' needs and be affirming and respectful. This includes celebrating the language these families speak at home and finding ways multilingual families can better a school community.
It also includes listening to families about what their needs are and advocating for them when necessary. Since the Office of Translation and Interpretation manages most of CCSD’s communication needs with these families, bilingual parent advocates have the time to form deep relationships with them and help them with non-school-related issues, giving these families support they may not have received in other school districts.
Beyond the classroom
Magaly Torres, a multilingual-learner program parent advocate for CCSD, became interested in helping form connections with Spanish-speaking families in Charleston early in her life. Torres was the daughter of migrant workers and learned English at an elementary school on Johns Island in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“I did a lot of interpreting and translating because I was the only Spanish-speaking child on my grade level,” she said.
If a Spanish-speaking parent came to the school, she often was called to the administration office to help interpret. This went on until third grade, when there was an influx of other Spanish-speaking students. Torres saw firsthand the anxiety many of these parents felt coming into the school and their relief when they learned she could help them communicate with educators.
Torres became a bilingual parents advocate for the district after graduating from the College of Charleston with dual major in biology and Spanish. What she enjoys about the work is that it helps multilingual families with all aspects of their life.
Bilingual advocates created programs like Latino Family Literacy Project to make families feel more connected to their schools’ communities. It's a multi-week program to promote love of reading through bilingual, culturally relevant books and universal themes. As part of the program, families read different series of books written in both English and Spanish that tackle topics their children can relate to. One of the series focuses on a girl who comes to America from a different country and struggles to learn English.
The advocates also developed a program to help multilingual learners with their social-emotional needs. Children across the country experienced a mental health crisis during the pandemic, but multilingual learners faced obstacles their peers may not have experienced, according to a report the U.S. Department of Education released last April. Many multilingual families may have been hesitant to seek medical care for ailments or struggled to find a competent mental health provider who spoke their language. For some families who experienced trauma in their home countries, the pandemic triggered the re-emergence of horrible memories.
The advocates' program is for newcomer students who arrived in the U.S. in the past three years. It's called A New Sun, and focuses on helping students identify their emotions and learn different coping strategies.
A broader goal of these initiatives is to get families comfortable with the school system and advocating for their children.
“They can get intimidated coming into an institution or building that maybe hasn’t made them feel welcome in the past,” Torres said.
In addition to the programs, advocates work closely with individual families. One of the families Torres works with is from Guatemala. Two little girls are being raised by a single mother. When they came to CCSD, Torres helped them get school uniforms and supplies. She helped set their mother up with medical care providers for general medical needs. Now, the oldest of the two girls is in second grade. Her teacher said she is speaking English wonderfully.
More than just Spanish
Mari moved to the United States seven months ago. What she liked most was how kind everyone was in Charleston, especially her teachers and classmates. Her favorite subject was math because it has the smallest learning curve for her in English. But she struggled with science.
One thing she loved about Zogas' class was how she was willing to adjust her lessons to accommodate her, like when she showed Mari how to use Snap and Read. Mari also liked how Zogas incorporated pictures and drawings into her lesson plans. Earlier in the year when Zogas taught about different types of energy, she had students draw a farm and label forms of energy the farm used. It was supposed to be a single scene but she found that Mari understood the assignment better and was able to break it up. She drew a dozen small pictures of how different forms of energy were used in everyday life, drawing a person eating an apple to illustrate chemical energy and a boiling pot for thermal energy.
While CCSD multilingual students were predominantly from Spanish-speaking families, many — like Mari — spoke other languages.
Zogas said that even if a student is mostly proficient there might be some basic words in English they don’t know. For example, one student she taught didn't know the word for pencil. She often associates words with pictures during her classes to avoid confusion.
Bryan Coleman, the school’s interim principal, said that students at Cario speak 13 different primary languages, including Polish, Italian and Chinese. This reflects a new trend of more multilingual learners from non-Spanish speaking counties moving to Charleston and other areas in South Carolina.
The S.C. Department of Education received numerous inquiries last year about the influx of Afghan and Ukrainian students enrolling in schools, said Zach Taylor, the agency's team lead for Diversity, Inclusion and Access. Questions from districts ranged from whether it was OK to enroll the students mid-year or even mid-semester to how they could best support them. He theorized that more multilingual learners were coming to South Carolina from countries where Spanish wasn’t the primary language because of problems in those countries, such as the war in Ukraine.
To communicate with these families, CCSD uses technology like TalkingPoints, a two-way communications platform that can generate text messages on general communication topics in over 145 languages. It also has LangaugeLine, which provides over-the-phone interpretation support in 240 languages.
Mari used Snap and Read for the rest of the class on protists. By the end, she finished her baseball card filling it with pictures and information of what Euglena like to eat and different facts about the microorganism.
She turned her assignment in with a smile and headed to her next class.
BENGALURU: In the hierarchy of government lexicon, the term "sarkar" might signal omnipotence. Not so much the Bengali surname "Sarkar", as 727 Hindu refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan settled in Karnataka would testify.
Vibhuti Sarkar, a 65-year-old farmer, is among those who have had their vested land holdings of many decades suddenly flagged as "sarkari", or government property, in a bureaucratic bungle blamed on their "similar sounding" shared surname.
The change in ownership from Sarkar to "sarkari" meant Vibhuti was denied insurance last year for the jowar crop he had sown on five acres in Sindhanur taluk of Raichur district.
Based on his complaint, an inquiry by the revenue department revealed that holdings of 726 other people settled in three rehabilitation camps had been earmarked as government land in the records of rights, tenancy and crops. Updated data available on Bhoomi, the Karnataka government's land records portal, reflected the change.
Prasen Raptana, a representative of the 22,000-odd erstwhile refugees settled in four rehabilitation camps of Sindhanur taluk - RH2, RH3, RH4 and RH5 - took up cudgels for Vibhuti and wrote to the Raichur DC last December about the "technical problem". A month earlier, the assistant commissioner of Lingasugur had flagged the issue in a communication to the DC. TOI has a copy of that letter.
All the affected farmers are residents of RH 2, 3 and 4.
"We are having to contend with this strange problem for no fault of ours," said Pankaj Sarkar, another of those caught in the land ownership tangle triggered by an unwelcome "i" being added to their surname.
"We spoke to the tehsildar, who said it was a software problem and had to be fixed in Bengaluru. Why do we have to travel to Bengaluru to fix the problem created by the government?" he told TOI.
Raptana said the 727 farmers were not only having to battle the bureaucracy, but also unable to get the MSP for their crops at government centres, mortgage land for loans and apply for crop insurance.
Sindhanur tehsildar Arun said the DC had already brought the issue to the notice of the survey settlement and land records department for changes to be made in the Bhoomi portal.
Thousands of persecuted Hindus who had fled what was then East Pakistan in 1971 were housed in refugee camps in seven states, including Karnataka. Each family was given five acres of land to make a new beginning.
For Vibhuti and his ilk, learning the difference between "Sarkar" and "sarkari" more than five decades later would certainly count as a fresh start.
