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By Mark Polizzotti

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Would history have been different if Khrushchev had used a better interpreter?

By Mark Polizzotti

The author of "Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto."

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Credit Credit Linda Huang

Translation is the silent waiter of linguistic performance: It often gets noticed only when it knocks over the serving cart. Sometimes these are relatively minor errors - a ham-handed rendering of an author's prose, the sort of thing a book reviewer might skewer with an acid pen.

But history is littered with more consequential mistranslations - erroneous, intentional or simply misunderstood. For a job that often involves endless hours poring over books or laptop screens, translation can prove surprisingly hazardous.

Nikita Khrushchev's infamous statement in 1956 - "We will bury you" - ushered in one of the Cold War's most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other. But it turns out that's not what he said, not in Russian, anyway. Khrushchev's actual declaration was "We will outlast you" - prematurely boastful, perhaps, but not quite the declaration of hostilities most Americans heard, thanks to his interpreter's mistake.

The response of Kantaro Suzuki, prime minister of Japan, to an Allied ultimatum in July 1945 - just days before Hiroshima - was conveyed to Harry Truman as "silent contempt" ("mokusatsu"), when it was actually intended as "No comment. We need more time." Japan was not given any.

And the events of Sept. 11, and everything that followed, might well have been averted had the Arabic-language messages that American intelligence intercepted on Sept. 10 been processed sooner than the 12th - a matter less of misreading than of personnel shortages, but a failure of translation nonetheless.

These are recent instances, but examples stretch back to antiquity. The Bible, reportedly the most translated book of all time, has begotten not only the longest-running debates about translation, including the endless war between fidelity and felicity, but also some notable misconceptions.

When Jerome, the patron saint of translators, rendered the Bible into Latin, he introduced a pun that created one of the most potent symbols of Christian iconography, turning the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil ("malus") into the tree of apples ("malum"). It's true that "malum," in Jerome's day, could mean any number of fruits: the serpentine creature on Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, for instance, is coiled around a fig tree. But in the 16th century, both Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder, following Jerome's lead, famously depicted Adam and Evebeside unambiguous apples. And when, the following century, John Milton wrote of Eve's "sharp desire ... / Of tasting those fair Apples," he helped concretize the image of the bright rubine Malus pumilathat we know today.

Of course, "mistranslation" is often in the eye of the beholder, and its consequences can range from the philosophical to the fatal. A populist English translation of the New Testament by the 16th-century scholar William Tyndale got him executed by the clergy for heresy, and not long afterward the French printer and scholar Étienne Dolet was hanged and burned at the stake for a translation of Plato that was also deemed heretical.

More recently, The Armed Forces Journalreported in 2011 that interpreters in Iraq were "10 times more likely to die in combat than deployed American or international forces." Perhaps, in a further twist on the old Italian pun "traduttore, traditore" ("translator, traitor"), neither the troops they were interpreting for nor the enemy they were speaking to had complete faith in what they related.

One of the most infamous cases of translation-related killing involves the 1991 murder of Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." What makes Mr. Igarashi's assassination even more deplorable is that it is due, at least in part, to a mistranslation, and not even his own.

The phrase "satanic verses" was coined by 19th-century British Orientalists to designate one or several suppressed verses in the Quran, which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have repudiated as having been suggested by Satan. This is not how the Muslim world refers to these verses, however, so when the Arabic translator of Mr. Rushdie's novel rendered the title literally, he inadvertently made it sound as if the Quran itself had been dictated by Satan. The perceived blasphemy, unintended by the author, led to international rioting, Mr. Rushdie's enforced seclusion, Mr. Igarashi's stabbing and the attempted murder of the book's Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo.

Lately, the perils of mistranslation have taken on renewed currency. How to convey Donald Trump's free-form declarations to a global audience? The president's capricious employ of his native idiom, his fractured syntax and streaming non sequiturs are challenging enough for Anglophones, so imagine the difficulties they pose to foreigners: How, exactly, do you translate "braggadocious"?

The speed and frequency of Mr. Trump's tweets have spawned an explosion of equally fast, equally viral amateur renditions, with little thought as to how they might be interpreted worldwide. The incendiary nature of many of his statements about other political leaders only exacerbates the problem. As an article in The Boston Globe suggests, Mr. Trump's dealings with North Korea's Kim Jong-un, given the two men's "mercurial speech patterns," is a potential minefield of catastrophic miscommunication. One can all too easily imagine another disaster on the order of Khrushchev's "We will bury you" or Suzuki's "silent contempt," with far more cataclysmic results.

Mark Polizzotti is the author of "Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto."
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Would history have been different if Khrushchev had used a better interpreter? By Mark Polizzotti The author of "Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto." Translation is the silent waiter of linguistic performance: It often gets noticed only when it knocks over the serving cart.

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HOW BILINGUAL BRAINS SWITCH BETWEEN LANGUAGES

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HOW BILINGUAL BRAINS SWITCH BETWEEN LANGUAGES

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POSTED BY JAMES DEVITT-NYU

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Researchers have uncovered what's happening in the brain when we switch between different languages. The finding provides new insights into the nature of bilingualism.

"A remarkable feature of multilingual individuals is their ability to quickly and accurately switch back and forth between their different languages," explains Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, a doctoral candidate at New York University and the lead author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our findings help pinpoint what occurs in the brain in this process-specifically, what neural activity is exclusively associated with disengaging from one language and then engaging with a new one."

"Specifically, this research unveils for the first time that while disengaging from one language requires some cognitive effort, activating a new language comes relatively cost-free from a neurobiological standpoint," notes senior author Liina Pylkkanen, a professor in NYU's linguistics and psychology departments.

On and off

Previous research has linked language switching with increased activity in areas associated with cognitive control (i.e., the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices). It was unknown, however, whether it is disengaging from the previous language or engaging in a new language that drives this activity.

This is largely because these two processes happen simultaneously when those who speak two languages switch from one to the other (i.e., when participants switch from speaking Spanish to speaking English, turning Spanish "off" and turning English "on" happen at the same time).

To untangle this dynamic, the study's researchers studied bilingual individuals fluent in English and American Sign Language (ASL), who often produce both languages simultaneously.

"The fact that they can do both at the same time offers a unique opportunity to disentangle engagement and disengagement processes-that is, how they turn languages 'on' and 'off'," observes Blanco-Elorrieta.

Specifically, this meant the researchers could ask the participants to go from producing both languages to producing only one (thus isolating the process of turning a language "off") or to switch from producing a single language to producing both (thus isolating the process of turning a language "on").

To capture this process, the scientists observed bilingual signers/speakers who viewed the same pictures and named them with semantically identical expressions. In order to gauge the study subjects' brain activity during this experiment, the researchers deployed magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technique that maps neural activity by recording magnetic fields that the electrical currents our brain generates.

One way is more work

The researchers found that when bilinguals fluent in ASL and English switched languages, turning a language "off" led to increased activity in cognitive control areas while turning a language "on" was no different than not switching.

In other words, the brain's work was devoted to turning "off" a language, with little to no cognitive effort required in turning "on" a second language-regardless of whether it was spoken or signed language.

In fact, they also found that for such speakers, producing two words simultaneously (one sign and one spoken word) was not necessarily more cognitively costly than producing only one. Rather, producing both at the same time was easier than having to suppress the dominant language (in this case English) in order to name the picture on the screen only in ASL.

"In all, these results suggest that the burden of language-switching lies in disengagement from the previous language as opposed to engaging a new language," says Blanco-Elorrieta.

The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute, and a La Caixa Foundation fellowship for post-graduate studies funded the research.

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How bilingual brains switch between languages - Futurity

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Researchers have uncovered what's happening in the brain when we switch between different languages. The finding provides new insights into the nature of bilingualism. "A remarkable feature of multilingual individuals is their ability to quickly and accurately switch back and forth between their different languages," explains Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, a doctoral candidate at New York University and the lead author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

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Don't assume language or dialect is locked to a particular place

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Don't assume language or dialect is locked to a particular place

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by Khawla Badwan

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August 29, 2018 by Khawla Badwan, The Conversation

Credit: Wikigraphists via Wikimedia. , CC BY-SA

In an age of globalisation with unprecedented levels of mobility and communication, the world is often described as a "global village". But this metaphor has implications for how we understand the geographical place around us.

There are clearly emotional meanings connected to the concept of place. An expression such as "do you want to come to my place?" refers to place as a space we own and belong to. When we refer to someone feeling "out of place", we're usually referring to their lack of ability to fit in or adjust.

But place has a national meaning, too. Our national ideologies are reinforced every day by little reminders and signals - for example, when we're reminded of our geographical location by looking at the map on a weather forecast or when football commentators refer to "we" when commenting on their home team.

This is something the social psychologist Michael Billig called "banal nationalism". These little reminders reproduce a national ideology that links a geographical place with an imagined community called a nation - be that France, England or Germany. Because nation states have been a common political structure in Europe since before World War I, place has historically been associated with the geopolitical borders between countries and is now firmly linked to nationality and citizenship of a particular country.

It's because of this that connections have tended to be made between nations and their languages. Back in 1794, during the French revolution, Bertrand Barère, a prominent member of the National Convention said that: "For a free people the language must be one and the same for all." A similar message was found in a 1919 letter by the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, who said: "We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language."

Many nationalists believe that a nation state should ideally be a monolingual entity. The "one language one nation" ideology underpins loyalty to an "imagined, homogeneous" nation and subsumes a rather monolithic cultural and linguistic life.

A more recent example was the call by the UK government's former integration tsar, Louise Casey, to set a deadline by which everybody in the UK should speak English. While English is of course important for communication and relationship building, such a proposal ignores the multilingualism and hyper-diversity that characterise urban centres in the UK.
Dissecting a dialect map
In a recent small-scale experiment on the relationship between geographical place and language, I asked a group of 15 university students in a major British city from different linguistic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds to comment on what a dialect map of the city where they were studying told them about themselves.

Dialect maps establish a link between a dialect and place in a way that reinforces a monolithic ideology of language. They rarely acknowledge the multilingual repertoires of people who live in those places. So, for example, if you live in Yorkshire, that doesn't mean that you are necessarily a speaker of Yorkshire English. You may have grown up in a different part of the country with a different dialect, or have learned English as a second language, or lived in different parts of the world before settling in Yorkshire. The possibilities of individual trajectories are endless and they inevitably impact the way we speak.

I asked the students two main questions. First, what does the dialect map tell them about themselves? Second, how do they understand the relationship between language and place?

The majority of the group didn't speak any of the dialects associated with the parts of the city where they were living - a representation of the diversity of the student body in the city. In fact, there were only two students who found the dialect map representative of the linguistic "voice" of the areas of the city where they were currently living.

I asked them how they would represent the connection between the city they "shared" as students and the languages and dialects they spoke. Almost all of them agreed that in an age of unprecedented levels of mobility, any language and any dialect can be spoken anywhere around the world. They blew apart the traditional assumption that a particular dialect or linguistic variety is linked to a particular place.

This has implications for social justice and social cohesion. By departing from traditional views that lock language or dialect in a particular place, we can start to treat linguistic diversity as the norm that it is, rather than the exception. Doing so fosters hospitality and acceptance of difference rather than hostility and fear of diversity. By assuming there is no one "normal" way of speaking, we become more welcoming, accepting and open to learning and sharing our place in the global village.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Provided by: The Conversation

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Don't assume language or dialect is locked to a particular place

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August 29, 2018 by Khawla Badwan, The Conversation In an age of globalisation with unprecedented levels of mobility and communication, the world is often described as a "global village". But this metaphor has implications for how we understand the geographical place around us. There are clearly emotional meanings connected to the concept of place.

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The Importance of Culture in Translation

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The Importance of Culture in Translation

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The Importance of Culture in Translation - Ulatus Translation Blog

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Translation and culture work hand in hand. Meanings in both source and target languages are profoundly affected by their cultural context!

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Mother tongue versus father tongue—a new study reconciles the two hypotheses

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Mother tongue versus father tongue—a new study reconciles the two hypotheses

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by

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Mother tongue versus father tongue-a new study reconciles the two hypotheses

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Does the mother or father have a stronger influence on their children's language? The mother tongue hypothesis suggests that language usage follows matrilineal inheritance. The father tongue hypothesis holds that paternal ...

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Lera Boroditsky: How language shapes the way we think

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There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes.

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10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)

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10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)

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ne of the many great things about languages worldwide is the sizeable number of words for which there is no real English translation. Often they tell us about concepts and ideas that we are missing out on in the anglophone world.

As the northern hemisphere heads abroad in the coming holiday season, here are a few to be looking out for:

SPAIN: sobremesa

You may have witnessed the ritual, knowingly or not, while on the hunt for a coffee or a cold beer towards the end of another long Spanish afternoon.

Sitting clumped around tables inside restaurants or spilling out on to their terrazas, are friends, families and colleagues, preserved in the post-prandial moment like replete insects in amber.

Lunch - and it is more usually lunch than dinner - will long since have yielded to the important act of the sobremesa, that languid time when food gives way to hours of talking, drinking and joking. Coffee and digestivoswill have been taken, or perhaps the large gin and tonic that follows a meal rather than precedes it here.

The sobremesais a digestive period that allows for the slow settling of food, gossip, ideas and conversations. It is also a sybaritic time; a recognition that there is more to life than working long hours and that few pleasures are greater than sharing a table and then chatting nonsense for a hefty portion of what remains of the day.

The world may not have been put completely to rights by the end of the sobremesa, but it will seem a calmer, more benign place.

Ask Mariano Rajoy. At the end of May, as it became clear that he was going to be turfed out of office in a no-confidence vote, the then-prime minister did something very Spanish: he and his close circle retreated to a private room in a smart Madrid restaurant. Lunch was followed by a seven-hour sobremesa, and, reportedly, a couple of bottles of whisky.

After all, what does the loss of a premiership matter after a fine meal, a good cigar and some booze-soaked reminiscing? ¡Salud! Sam Jones in Madrid

PORTUGAL: esperto/esperta

It feels almost counterintuitive to have to explain what esperto/esperta means, a Portuguese word without true parallel in the English dictionary.

There are words that come close, that encapsulate something of the spirit of this word - and the word itself is spirited. On the ball, quick-witted, with-it, canny, having common sense, intuitive, someone who gets things done: these all help shade in the space occupied by esperto.

I grew up in Portugal and have always felt an undercurrent of admiration, almost affection, for the espertas.

A Brazilian friend, Tatiana, though, warns of a negative sense. Someone esperto can, she says, use his or her instincts to take advantage of others; to trap or fool them into trouble.

Sometimes it's easier to understand something by what it is not. Esperta is definitely not slow, dim, unimaginative. If these characteristics were on a spectrum, esperto would be at one end, with "plodding" at the other.

If you understand it, you probably are. Juliette Jowit

ITALY: bella figura

Before celebrating a confirmation in Sicily last year, my aunt breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that her British niece was dressed appropriately enough so as not to make a bad impression in front of the extended family.

I was also relieved, as it meant I had not inflicted the curse of the brutta figura, which literally translates as bad figure, on my family.

In pretty much all areas of life, whether it be in the way people dress, how they behave, how well their homes are kept or how impeccably a cake is presented and a gift wrapped, Italians strive to achieve the bella figura, or beautiful figure.

Such importance is placed on keeping up appearances and the finer detail that for unwitting foreigners there's a sense of being sized up in everything you do, even going as far as to what you eat and drink and at what time of the day you indulge in such activities.

"What matters is not what you do but how you appear," said an Italian friend, likening it to posting the perfect photograph on social media. It's a tactic that enables people to get promoted at work and politicians to win over admirers while giving the impression that they are achieving something.

"I call it 'selfie and spot'," the friend said. "For example, the politician takes a selfie against a beautiful backdrop, posts it on Facebook with a promise to do something, but then doesn't follow it through. With a good selfie and a good spot, you can survive an entire career without doing anything." Angela Giuffrida in Rome

GERMANY: Feierabend

One of the most misleading, but also most enduring, myths about German culture is that it values hard work over a good siesta. Northern Europeans, the legend goes, have a "Protestant work ethic" that means they get the job done even if it means staying in the office late into the night, while the southern Europeans wave it off with a mañana, mañana.

Anyone who sincerely believes that to be the case has never tried to call a German office at one minute past five. When German workers say Ich mach' Feierabend("I am calling it a day"), it rarely carries an apologetic undertone but usually comes with the confidence of someone claiming an ancient right.

Dating back to the 16 th century, the term Feierabend, or "celebration evening", used to denote the evening before a public holiday, but has come to refer to the free time between leaving the office and bedtime on any working day.

The key to understanding Feierabendis that it isn't time for going to the cinema or gym, but time for doing nothing. In 1880, the cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl described the conceptas "an atmosphere of carefree wellbeing, of deep inner reconciliation, of the pure and clear quiet of the evening".

Germany's adherence to the Feierabendrulebook can frustrate when you are trying to make a work call on a Friday afternoon or buy an aspirin from a pharmacy on a Sunday (Sundays being a 24-hour celebration evening).

But as a philosophy, it underpins the proudest achievements of the German labour movement and may just explain why the country has some of the highest productivity levels in Europe: to truly cherish the evening, you make sure you get the job done before five o'clock. Philip Oltermann in Berlin

FINLAND: sisu

Sisu is an untranslatable Finnish term that blends resilience, tenacity, persistence, determination, perseverance and sustained, rather than momentary, courage: the psychological strength to ensure that regardless of the cost or the consequences, what has to be done will be done.

It originates from the word sisus, meaning "intestines" or "guts"; Daniel Juslenius, author of the first Finnish-language dictionary in 1745, defined sisucunda as the place in the body where strong emotions live. In a harsh environment and with powerful neighbours, it was what a young nation needed.

Sisu is what, in 1939-40, allowed an army of 350,000 Finns to twice fight off Soviet forces three times their number, inflicting losses five times heavier than those they sustained.

More prosaically, it has helped Finns get through a lot of long, lonely, dark and freezing winters, building in the process one of the wealthiest, safest, most stable and best-governed countries in the world. It is not all good, of course. Sisu can lead to stubbornness, a refusal to take advice, an inability to admit weakness, a lack of compassion.

It has become a bit of cliché in Finland - a brand name for trucks and strongly-flavoured sweets. Research shows it holds little appeal to the young. But ask a Finn to define the national character, and it's the word most still reach for. Jon Henley

IRAN: Ta'arof

Ta'arofis a Persian word that has no English equivalent, referring to the art of etiquette ubiquitous in everyday Iranian life.

"You go first," says Mr A as he meets Mr B at the doorstep, as they try to enter a building. "No, it's not possible, you go first," Mr B insists in response. Ta'arof dictates a ritual that may see them both waiting for a couple of unnecessary minutes before one steps forward to enter.

It is an etiquette that is seen almost in all aspects of Iranian life, from hosts insisting on guests taking more food from the table, to the exchanges in the bazaar. "How much is this carpet?" asks Ms A after choosing her favourite in the shop. "It's worthless, you can just take it," responds the seller, quite disingenuously.

Although Ms A in reality cannot take the carpet out of the shop without paying for it, the seller might insist up to three times that she should just do that, until the amount of the price is finally mentioned.

The awkward exchanges may have originated out of politeness; ultimately, they may work to the seller's favour, as the buyer feels a certain obligation to respond to such deference with a purchase, even if the final price is more than she expected.

Another example: you are walking with a friend and you end up doing Ta'arof, asking him to come to yours for lunch, even though you don't have anything prepared and you don't really want him to accept.

The friend insists out of Ta'arof that he wouldn't come because he knows you're tired and doesn't want to be a burden, even though deep down he really wants to have lunch at your place.

"Oh, don't Ta'arof," you say in a Ta'arof asking your friend not to Ta'arof. He ends up accepting your reluctant Ta'arof. You're a bit irked, but you'll have to be all smiles. Not all Taa'rofs are insincere; some are, some aren't. You'd Ta'arof even if you badly want something, saying you don't want it; you'd Ta'arof if you really hate something, pretending you want it. Saeed Kamali Dehghan

RUSSIA: тоска (toska)

Leave it to Russia to serve up the melancholy: toska translates as yearning or ennui. Except it doesn't, because no English word can accurately reflect all the shades of the word, to paraphrase Vladimir Nabokov.

What can toska (pronounced tahs- kah) mean? Spiritual anguish, a deep pining, perhaps the product of nostalgia or love-sickness, toskais depression plus longing, an unbearable feeling that you need to escape but lack the hope or energy to do so.

Visually to me, toska conjures up an endless field of birch on the edge of St Petersburg, in the dead of winter when the clouds never part, and it's only light for five hours a day anyway.

Toska is the stuff of great literature. Evgeny Onegin, the foundational Russian novel-in-verse about superfluous men, unrequited love and duels? Loads of toska.

Anton Chekhov wrote an entire short story called Toska about a cabman who recently lost his son and searches for someone to talk to about his grief. He ends up talking to his horse. All that broodiness in the great (and not-so-great) Russian novels? You get the picture.

So why choose toska for this list of positivity? Because if the Russian soul s the place where great emotions reside, then toska pays the rent. Without toska there cannot be delirious happiness, endless heartfelt conversations at 4am at the kitchen table, boundless generosity at obvious personal expense.

Toska is a sign that your emotions go beyond logic and that you are really, truly living your emotions. Perhaps you've felt toska and you didn't realise it, but it's a good thing: it means you've got a little bit of the Russian soul in you. Andrew Roth in Moscow

JAPAN: shoganai

As inhabitants of an archipelago that is regularly struck by earthquakes and tsunamis, and - as recent events have tragically demonstrated - floods and landslides, it is little wonder that the Japanese have a well-developed sense of fatalism. Any verbal reflection on humans' powerlessness to control nature's most destructive forces often elicit the phrase shoganai.

The expression, meaning, "it can't be helped," is Japan's catchall response to any situation, large or small, over which people believe they have no influence. A more voguish translation might be "it is what it is". A French person would immediately recognise it as a version of "c'est la vie".

It could be heard, delivered with deep reflection, amid the rubble of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and, in resigned tones, after Japan's agonising exit from the World Cup in Russia.

Shoganai, and its synonymshikata ga nai, are verbal coping mechanisms that apply equally to unwelcome developments in everyday life, from getting struck in a traffic jam to having to spend Friday evening at the office.

With its roots in the Zen Buddhist belief that suffering is a natural part of life, it could perhaps be described as Japan's version of the serenity prayer - a personal and communal recognition that, on occasion, passive acceptance of an unfortunate truth is far easier than trying to deny it.

But resigning oneself to one's fate with a muttered "shoganai" has its drawbacks. Some observers of Japanese culture note that it is too often applied in situations in which humans have more influence than they think.

For much of the seven decades since the end of the second world war, there has been a general acceptance of the dominance of the conservative Liberal Democratic party, even among liberal voters. Some have pointed to its role in allowing the rise of Japanese militarism in the first half of the 20th century.

Shikata ga nai is, then, partly to blame for weaknesses at the heart of Japan's democracy, allowing one party to dominate even, as is the case today, when it is mired in scandal.

In a country with few energy resources of its own, nuclear power was for decades the beneficiary of the shoganai mindset, one that accepted the construction of dozens of nuclear reactors along the coastline as a necessary evil.

It took Fukushima to prove that Japan's lauded sense of fatalism can sometimes be downright dangerous. Justin McCurry in Tokyo

NETHERLANDS: polderen

Het poldermodeland its associated verb, polderen, derive from the Dutch habit of working together to reclaim parts of their country from the sea. Since the Middle Ages, everyone on the same polder, regardless of religion, politics, class and local rivalries, has had to cooperate in maintaining the complex but vital system of windmills and dykes that kept their land dry.

The term, which has been defined as "pragmatic cooperation despite differences", has been used since the mid-1970s to describe the kind of consensus political decision-making common in the Netherlands, which has been governed by coalitions for over a century, since no single party has ever held a majority.

In policymaking, the concept is exemplified by a Dutch institution known as the Social-Economic Council, a tripartite forum in which government, employers' federations and unions air their differences, generally reaching consensus on issues such as wage restraint, working hours, job creation and productivity.

In politics, Dutch governments - the latest, a coalition between four parties with widely different views, took a record 208 days to hammer out - are the embodiment of the poldermodel, which has come in for increasing criticism, particularly from the radical right, since the financial crisis of 2008.

Politicians such as Thierry Baudet of the nativist, right-wing Forum for Democracy argue the poldermodel has led to a "political cartel" in which endless compromise has robbed the major parties of all distinguishing features and left them incapable of taking essential decisions. Jon Henley

CHINA: tiáo 条

How do we categorise or classify things, thereby imagining them as one thing and not another? Unlike French or German, gender does not provide categories in Chinese, which groups things by something else entirely: shape.

Tiáo is one of at least 140 classifiers and measure words in the Chinese language. It's a measure word for long-narrow-shape things. For example, bed sheets, fish, ships, bars of soap, cartons of cigarettes, avenues, trousers, dragons, rivers.

These measure words embrace the ways in which shape imprints itself upon us, while playfully noticing the relationships between all things. The measure word kē 颗 (kernel) is used for small, roundish things, or objects that appear small: pearls, teeth, bullets and seeds, as well as distant stars and satellites.

Gēn 根, for thin-slender objects, will appear before needles, bananas, fried chicken legs, lollipops, chopsticks, guitar strings and matches, among a thousand other things. "Flower-like" objects gather under the word duo 朵: bunches of flowers, clouds, mushrooms and ears.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how we attempt to group anything or anyone together, and how formations change. Philosopher Wang Lianqing charts how tiáowas first applied to objects we can pick up by hand (belts, branches, string) and then expanded outward (streets, rivers, mountain ranges).

And finallytiáo extended metaphorically. News and events are also classified with tiáo, perhaps because news was written in long vertical lines, and events, as the 7th-century scholar Yan Shigu wrote, arrive in lists "one by one, as (arranging) long-shaped twigs".

Onwards the idea broadened, so that an idea or opinion is also "long-shaped news," and in the 14th century, tiáo was used for spirit, which was imagined as straight, high and lofty. In language, another geometry is at work, gathering recurrences through time and space. Madeleine Thien
What is your favourite word, concept or idea in the country you live in? Let us know in the comments, or at theupside@theguardian.com

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10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)

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As millions head abroad, our correspondents pick out the words that for them speak volumes about the countries they love and live in

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The Surprising Power of Language Over Memory and Choice

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The Surprising Power of Language Over Memory and Choice

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Co authored by Sayuri Hayakawa, Ph.D.

It's not uncommon to see a Japanese person bowing while on the telephone. One of us is a Japanese-American who bows on the phone-but only in Japanese. Behaviors and manners can become so routine that they emerge even when there's no need for them. Those who are bilingual and bicultural know first-hand that how we behave can depend on what language we are speaking. As scientists with a combined 30 years of expertise studying bilingualism and decision-making, our research shows that who you are in the moment can depend on the language you are using at that time.

This is because when you have an experience, the language you are using becomes associated with it. For bilingual people, this means certain memories are more closely linked to one language than the other-a phenomenon called language-dependent memory. For instance, a childhood memory is more likely to be remembered when the language spoken during that childhood event is spoken again. Just as listening to nostalgic music can transport you back to a specific period of your life, the language you are using in the moment acts as a hook to draw associated memories closer to the surface. Memories will also often be more emotional when there is a match between the language spoken when the experience took place and the language spoken when remembering it.

How we think and feel can thus change depending on what language we are using. For example, people who are bilingual have a heightened stress response when listening to taboo words and reprimands in a native language. This may be, in part, because our early memories associated with learning a "bad" word or being yelled at by our parents happened in our native tongue. This can mean that a situation can feel more psychologically or emotionally distant when viewed through a foreign language lens.

Because emotions play a key role in how we make decisions, people are often less biased and more consistent when making choices in the less emotional foreign language. Language can even influence our moral judgments and decisions. When asked whether they would be willing to sacrifice one person's life to save a group, people who speak more than one language are significantly more likely to say "yes" when answering in a foreign language. The negative feelings that can prevent us from making difficult choices are muted when using a non-native tongue. For individuals who are responsible for the lives and well-being of others, the potential impact could be significant.

Our memories can also have a dramatic influence on how we assess probability and risk. Take for example the fact that "terrorist attacks" rank among Americans' greatest fears, when they are thousands of times more likely to be killed by a gun. This is partly because of the availability heuristic, which is our tendency to judge the likelihood of events based on how easily and clearly examples come to mind. Because of language-dependent memory, using different languages can bring different examples to mind, potentially changing our assessments of risk.

This could have substantial consequences, as how risky something feels affects the choices that we make for everything from medical decisions to national security. For example, in the United States, over 25% of doctors are foreign-born and many of their patients speak another language as well. It is important to be aware of how the language being spoken may be influencing the decisions we and others around us make.

To be sure, some may doubt that language is powerful enough to change our basic beliefs, values, and goals. And indeed, a bilingual person speaking two different languages does not magically become two completely different people. Rather, language creates a strong context that can draw different aspects of ourselves forward. Just as we may become more charitable when reminded of religion, or more withdrawn when reminded of disease, language can influence us by making certain ideas and memories more salient than others.

The influence of language on how we think, feel, and even behave can have an impact beyond the individual all the way to the social and economic levels. While the United States has not had a truly multilingual president since Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was fluent in English, French, and German), prior to WWII, bilingualism was the norm rather than the exception among our heads of state. Outside of the U.S., this is often still the case, with world leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel making important decisions while using multiple languages. In a way, knowing different languages can provide people with a variety of lenses through which to see the world.

To build a functional society, we must work to understand how using or not using multiple languages affects our psychology and behavior; whether it be in our homes, in our hospitals, or at the highest levels of government.

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The Surprising Power of Language Over Memory and Choice

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Co authored by Sayuri Hayakawa, Ph.D. It's not uncommon to see a Japanese person bowing while on the telephone. One of us is a Japanese-American who bows on the phone-but only in Japanese. Behaviors and manners can become so routine that they emerge even when there's no need for them.

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Languages provide a window into culture and history. They're also a unique way to map the world - not through landmasses or geopolitical borders, but through mother tongues.

The Tower of Babel

Today's infographic from Alberto Lucas Lopez condenses the 7,102 known living languages today into a stunning visualization, with individual colors representing each world region.

Only 23 languages are spoken by at least 50 million people. What's more, over half the planet speaks at least one of these 23 languages as their mother tongue.

Chinese dominates as a macrolanguage, but it's important to note that it consists of numerous languages. Mandarin, Yue (including Cantonese), Min, Wu, and Hakka cover over 200 individual dialects, which vary further by geographic location.

Chinese is one of the most challenging languages for English speakers to pick up, in part due its completely unfamiliar scripts. You'd have to know at least 3,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper, a far cry from memorizing the A-Z alphabet.

Spanglish Takes Over

After Chinese, the languages of Spanish and English sit in second and third place in terms of global popularity. The rapid proliferation of these languages can be traced back to the history of Spanish conquistadors in the Americas, and British colonies around the world.

Animation: Map of Colonization (1492 - 2008):

Today, Spanish has 399 million native speakers, but these are mostly concentrated in Latin America. English has 335 million native speakers under its belt, with a widespread reach all over the globe.

Two Worlds, One Family

While the visualization makes all the world's languages seem disparate, this linguistic family tree shows how they grew from a common root. It also explains how languages can evolve and branch out over time.
Created by Minna Sundberg. Full version.
This linguistic tree also includes many languages that are not on the large visualization of 23 mother tongues. Some of them might be considered endangered or at risk today, such as Catalan or Welsh. However, with globalization, a few interesting linguistic trends are arising.

1. Language revival
Certain enclaves of marginalized languages are being preserved out of pride for the traditional and cultural histories attached.

While Catalan was once banned, its rebirth is a key marker of identity in Barcelona. More than 150 universities teach Catalan worldwide. In the case of Welsh, a mammoth university project plans to make sure it does not die out. Researchers are compiling ten million Welsh words to preserve the past, present, and future of the language.

2. Language forecast
At this point in time, English is the lingua franca - adopted as a common language among speakers with different mother tongues. However, this status might soon be fuzzier as demographic trends continue.

The rise of China is an obvious one to consider. As China continues to increase its economic might and influence, its languages will proliferate as well.

At the same time, 26 African countries are projected to double their current size, many of which speak French as a first language. One study by investment bank Natixis suggests that Africa's growth may well bring French to the forefront - making it the most-spoken language by 2050.

Is it possible that French provides a certain je ne sais quoi that no other language can quite replace?

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Languages provide a window into culture and history. They're also a unique way to map the world - not through landmasses or geopolitical borders, but through mother tongues. Today's infographic from Alberto Lucas Lopez condenses the 7,102 known living languages today into a stunning visualization, with individual colors representing each world region.

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Panduan Menterjemah Istilah-Istilah Fizik Kepada Bahasa Melayu

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Panduan Menterjemah Istilah-Istilah Fizik Kepada Bahasa Melayu

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Fizik, seperti bidang-bidang sains yang lain telah sekian lama diajar dalam Bahasa Inggeris bermula daripada peringkat sekolah menengah sehinggalah ke universiti. Melainkan anda adalah generasi pelajar sekolah semasa dasar Memartabatkan Bahasa Melayu Memperkukuh Bahasa Inggeris (MBMMBI) dilaksanakan atau pun anda menamatkan pengajian tinggi di Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), anda adalah golongan yang memperoleh ilmu sains dalam Bahasa Inggeris secara penuh (seperti penulis).

Sebelum itu - MBMMBI adalah dasar pendidikan yang diperkenalkan susulan pemansuhan dasar Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dalam Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris (PPSMI). MBMMBI mengembalikan kedudukan Bahasa Melayu sebagai bahasa pengantar utama bagi subjek-subjek sains dan matematik di sekolah. Manakala, UKM, sesuai dengan statusnya sebagai universiti kebangsaan Negara menjadikan Bahasa Melayu sebagai bahasa pengajaran dan pembelajaran di kebanyakan fakulti.

Adalah sesuatu yang tidak asing jika golongan (seperti kita) ini sedikit janggal apabila hendak menulis, misalnya abstrak tesis dalam Bahasa Melayu yang tulen dan saintifik. Untuk makalah kali ini, penulis berkongsi Pedoman Pembentukan Istilah Fizik sebagai panduan penterjemahan istilah fizik daripada Bahasa Inggeris (BI) ke dalam Bahasa Melayu (BM) yang mungkin tidak didaftarkan dalam sumber rasmi seperti Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Pedoman-pedoman ini diambil dan disesuaikan daripada buku Istilah Kejuruteraan Bahasa Inggeris - Bahasa Melayu terbitan Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka tahun 1978. Buku ini dijadikan sumber rujukan bagi makalah kali ini kerana kami tidak memiliki buku Istilah Fizik Pengajian Tinggi Jilid 1 daripada penerbit yang sama; tetapi pedoman yang diberikan adalah dirasakan bersesuaian dalam konteks fizik.

Fiziklah! begitu mementingkan penggunaan Bahasa Melayu dalam usaha kami membawakan fizik kepada semua, bukan kerana kami mahu, tetapi kami perlu. Bukan kami, kita semua! Jika bukan kita, siapa lagi? Semoga suatu hari nanti Bahasa Melayu mampu dituturkan dan digunakan bukan sahaja dalam perbualan seharian, tetapi juga dalam bidang sains dan ilmu.

Dirgahayu Bahasa Melayuku.

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Panduan Menterjemah Istilah-Istilah Fizik Kepada Bahasa Melayu - MajalahSains

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Oleh: Admin Fiziklah! Fizik, seperti bidang-bidang sains yang lain telah sekian lama diajar dalam Bahasa Inggeris bermula daripada peringkat sekolah menengah sehinggalah ke universiti. Melainkan anda adalah generasi pelajar sekolah semasa dasar Memartabatkan Bahasa Melayu Memperkukuh Bahasa Inggeris (MBMMBI) dilaksanakan atau pun anda menamatkan pengajian tinggi di Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), anda adalah golongan yang memperoleh ilmu sains dalam Bahasa Inggeris secara penuh (seperti ...

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Can genes change the way languages evolve?

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Can genes change the way languages evolve?

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WRITTEN BY Nikhil Sonnad

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Languages are dynamic. After just a few hundred years, the English of Chaucer looks bizarre to today's readers.

The factors that drive language changes are familiar. Interaction with other languages: Roman conquest spread the influence of Latin across Europe. Metaphor: The description of a circle as "round" came to refer to a "well-rounded" individual. New needs: Technological change requires the formation of words like "internet."

A new study proposes another, surprising mechanism behind language change: genes. A group led by researchers at Yale University wondered whether the presence of a gene called DCDC2, which has previously been shown to influence how sounds are processed by the brain, might have played a role in linguistic change over the millennia.

"Traditionally language change is not often attributed to genetics, full stop," says Kevin Tang, a linguist who worked on the research.

The researchers aimed to do just that, by synthesizing a few working theories about the gene in question.

First, DCDC2, a gene found in nearly all vertebrates, has been connected to sound-processing in the brain. One particular variant of the gene has been associated, for example, with dyslexia (though that connection has been disputed). In one study, after scientists removed the gene in rats, they found that the timing of their neuron firings became less precise.

Turns out this kind of neural precision is also important for hearing the sounds of consonants. Vowels are drawn out, but consonants are staccato bursts of sound. So exactness is key. In addition, previous studies have isolated an area of the DCDC2 gene, called READ1, that appears to affect language processing in humans.

Every time a cell in the body replicates, it copies its DNA over to the new cell. Mistakes can happen, but when they aren't detrimental to the body's functioning, they end up getting passed on from cell to cell and from parent to child. When there are variations of a given gene spread through a species, they're called "alleles." A good example is your blood type: You get one blood-type gene from each biological parent. If your blood type is AB, that means you have one allele for A and one for B; if you are type A, you have two alleles for A.

DCDC2 also comes in alleles: two that have the READ1 section of genetic code, and one that doesn't. The way that these variations of the gene are geographically distributed in humans provided the researchers with a second intriguing fact: the alleles with READ1 are less common the farther a population is from Africa.

Working from that body of research, the group set out to see if human languages exhibited any evidence of the proposed relationship of DCDC2 and consonant processing. They analyzed 43 distinct genetic populations-including, for example, Irish, Japanese, Yoruba, and Finns-and found that variants of the DCDC2 gene READ1 was stronger in those with more consonants in their spoken languages. This is even true controlling for geographic distance, meaning neighboring populations with fewer consonants are less likely to have the gene. And there is no relationship between the gene and vowels, which aren't thought to be affected by DCDC2.

This is not to say that genes determine language, or that particular people are predisposed to learning particular languages. What the study found is the kind of subtle genetic effect that would lead to tiny, non-discernible differences over the course of millennia. Think of it as just one more factor leading to outcomes like whether a language tends, in a very slow way, toward short, snappy sounds or relatively long ones.

Indeed, any genetic influence on a given language will be far less apparent than the cultural factors that have normally been the subject of linguistics research. The effect of Roman conquest is obvious across dozens of languages. The evolution of metaphors is easy enough to track.

But if this finding holds up, theories of linguistic evolution will have to be updated to include the original natural selector, genes.

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Can genes change the way languages evolve?

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Languages are dynamic. After just a few hundred years, the English of Chaucer looks bizarre to today's readers. The factors that drive language changes are familiar. Interaction with other languages: Roman conquest spread the influence of Latin across Europe. Metaphor: The description of a circle as "round" came to refer to a "well-rounded" individual.

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Children learn better in their mother tongue (Part 2)

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Children learn better in their mother tongue (Part 2)

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International mother language day on February 21 celebrates using children’s early language skills to improve learning

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Children learn better in their mother tongue.

This was the title of one of our most popular blog posts, topping our monthly lists ever since it was first published in February 2014.

It would seem obvious that children can understand better what they are being taught if their teacher speaks the same language they've been hearing at home since they were born.

But in many developing countries, especially those where the number of different languages is high (did you know that Papua New Guinea holds the world's record, with 820 languages?), the curriculum is usually developed in one of the national languages.

And when children first go to school, they may not understand a word their teacher says. Or worse, a teacher may not speak well enough the official language of instruction and thus may not be able to teach the children how to read successfully.

This is changing though, and some countries have embraced teaching in the children's mother tongues during the early grades, with good results. Children who learn to read in their mother tongue first are usually able to transfer these skills to a second language a few years down the road.

The Global Partnership for Education supports mother tongue education as part of quality improvements in literacy. Because learning to read is a foundational skill that children need to master to be able to continue learning.

Here are a four examples from GPE partner countries.

The Gambia: a pilot program taken to scale

Children point to the word Baku on their classroom chalkboard

Photo Credit: GPE

The government of the Gambia has made reading proficiency and comprehension its priority. The government piloted successfully and evaluated three early literacy programs, which informed its current reading program.

One of the three initiatives piloted in 2011 was the Early Learning in National Languages (ELINL) program. The program was first implemented in 125 classrooms. Children were taught to read in one of the five national languages. During one hour every day, they learned letters one by one along with systematic combinations to blend into words.

When the pilot was evaluated in 2014 the results were striking. Gambian children who participated in the pilot performed better than other children in not only in the national language but also in English.

Apart from the ELINL, positive results were also obtained with Jolly Phonics (GATE) and the Serholt Early Grade Reading Ability (SEGRA) program. Encouraged by the results, the ministry developed a new early literacy program, which integrates elements of all three reading programs. The hybrid has been successfully introduced in all public schools nationwide since September 2015.

Supported by the World Bank and the Global Partnership for Education, the program has led to the development of a unified approach to teaching literacy in early grades in the Gambia.

Haiti: Learning to read in creole

Students working with Map li nèt ale workbooks at the Collège Mixte Joinvil in Port au Prince, Haiti

Photo Credit: GPE/Chantal Rigaud

Map li nèt ale means "I'm reading all the way" in creole. It was designed and funded by USAID and the World Bank as part of a $24.1 million grant financing from GPE to Haiti.

Typically, most schools in Haiti teach children in French, the second official language. The Map Li reading program provides a full course of reading instruction in creole for the first year of school, coupled with a companion textbook.

In class, the teacher receives support from a trained aide to ensure that children follow the steps closely and don't fall behind. Close to 10,000 children in 299 schools are benefitting from the program.

The objective is to test this approach this school year and the next one and assess its impact compared to control schools where reading instruction remains the same. The results will be shared with the ministry of education, who will decide whether the approach can be spread to more schools and continued in second grade.

The original approach is resource-intensive and Haiti's education budget is limited, so an adapted method is tested before potentially being used in more schools.

Eritrea: Covering all the bases in mother tongue education

One of the key components of the $25.3 million GPE grant to Eritrea aims to improve the quality of teaching and learning at all levels of education.

To do so, the ministry of education is using several entry points, one of them being to improve the preschool experience for young learners by developing standards translated into the 9 languages of the country.

A second entry point is to ensure that teachers have the required language skills, and so the ministry, in collaboration with the zoba offices (regional administrations) is recruiting grade 10 to 12 graduates to train some of them to be "mother tongue" teachers.

More than 100 teachers have been trained and certified so far. The expectation is that their presence will increase the number of children enrolled in primary school in the communities where they work.

A third entry point is the production of teaching materials in the nine languages: textbooks and audio recordings were produced and distributed to schools. Children are now able to read and listen to songs, poems and rhymes in a language they know.

Finally, the ministry has developed new learning assessments for Grades 3 and 5 students. Children in these grades will now be able to take their math exams in Tigrinya or Afar, two of the country's languages.

South Sudan: new learning assessments in 5 languages

Students sit around the room on a rug with their books in front of them. Gudele West BRAC Community Girls' School, outside Juba. South Sudan. May 2013.

Credit: GPE/David K. Bridges

In South Sudan, the inclusion of national languages in the curriculum is based on the country's aspiration to promote multilingualism-in June 2015, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology organized a conference titled: "Unity in diversity through multilingualism for a peaceful South Sudan"-and on credible literature and evidence of the educational advantages of mother tongue usage to improve early learning.

The South Sudan General Education Act of 2012 stipulates that early grade literacy should be taught in indigenous languages. The new national curriculum reflects this, with mother tongues used as a medium of instruction for early childhood development, and from grades 1 to 3

However, only 10% of learners who start grade 1 complete the primary cycle. To ensure effective learning in the early grades, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, with support from the Global Partnership for Education, identified five national languages to initiate an assessment system that will eventually become part of the national learner assessment procedures.

Working with local linguists, the early grade reading and mathematics assessments (EGRA and EGMA) were adapted into these five languages, spoken by 65% of the population. They were administered to a sample of 250 learners as "diagnostic" assessments to determine literacy and numeracy in mother tongue as well as English literacy.

The results are being used to inform the teaching and learning materials developed for early grade learners, as well as teacher training inputs. Both will be essential to achieve improved learning outcomes.

Share your story of mother tongue education

The Gambia, Haiti, Eritrea, South Sudan have embraced mother tongue education.

Do you know of other countries? Have you personally experienced what it's like to learn something new in a language that you don't understand?

Please share your experience in the comments.
With thanks to Tizie Maphalala, Fazle Rabbani, Ludovic Signarbieux and Josephine Kiyenje for their contributions to the country examples in this blog.

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Children learn better in their mother tongue. Part 2

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Children learn better in their mother tongue. This was the title of one of our most popular blog posts, topping our monthly lists ever since it was first published in February 2014. It would seem obvious that children can understand better what they are being taught if their teacher speaks the same language they've been hearing at home since they were born.

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Why schools should teach young learners in home language.

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Why schools should teach young learners in home language.

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By Professor Angelina Kioko

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Why schools should teach young learners in home language | British Council

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Many believe their children will get a head start in education by going straight for English and bypassing the home language. Not so, according to Professor Kioko.

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Children Learn Better in Their Mother Tongue

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Children Learn Better in Their Mother Tongue

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Advancing research on mother tongue-based multilingual education

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Children Learn Better in Their Mother Tongue

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Globally, there are 50-75 million 'marginalized' children who are not enrolled in school. Children whose primary language is not the language of instruction in school are more likely to drop out of school or fail in early grades.