Japanese who command no foreign languages may soon converse with English-speaking guests over a phone connected to a translation system.

The system, being sponsored by the Japanese government, will offer audio-text translations in Japanese, Chinese, English and Korean, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Thursday.

The project, likely to be completed during fiscal 2005, will enable multilingual communications through cell phones and personal digital assistants.

The system would have a database of 500,000 phrases, or 5 million words, in the four languages.

Current translation systems have much smaller vocabularies and limited voice-recognition ability, and can translate only the most commonly used greetings or phrases.

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Chitimacha lost its last fluent speaker in 1940. That year might have marked the end of the language had it not been for a group of government ethnographers who recorded and studied Chitimacha speakers in the early 20th century – and a small group now determined to revive the language.

“There was a movement to document endangered languages, and we just got lucky,” said Chitimacha Tribe Cultural Director Kim Walden.

The Chitimacha language, believed to have been spoken for 7,000 years, was the victim of the countless indignities suffered by Native Americans across the country during forced assimilation.

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Spoken English tests from Ordinate Corp., the leading provider of automated spoken language assessments, will be a standard component of the curriculum of Tsinghua University’s World Exchange College of Language (WECL) English Education Program.

Tsinghua University is often considered to be the top technical university in China. WECL offers English immersion language instruction at Tsinghua and at other locations in China, including Beijing International Studies University, Yantai University and Xiamen WECL English College. WECL English College will use Ordinate's SET-5 and SET-10 spoken English tests for placement and exit testing of all of their students.

The SET-10 and SET-5 tests are fully automated 10- and five-minute tests of English speaking and listening abilities. Both tests are administered over the telephone and scored by the Ordinate testing system. Score reports are provided online, typically within minutes after the test taker has completed the test.

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The European Union’s bill for translation will have to balloon by nearly 60 percent to over 1 billion euros a year to prevent the bloc from turning into a Tower of Babel after its eastward enlargement.

The European Commission said the annual cost of written translation was expected to grow to 807 million euros in the next few years from 549 million in 2003, when Brussels institutions already translated a staggering 1.3 million pages.

Expenditure for oral interpretation of 50-60 meetings held each day in Brussels is forecast to increase to 238 million euros a year from 105 million euros once the EU’s expansion to 25 from 15 members last May is fully digested.

The EU executive said the soaring bill was the price for ensuring a level playing field for all EU citizens, whose number grew to 453 million from 375 million.

The EU’s total budget is 105 billion euros this year, or about 1 percent of the bloc’s gross national income.

The number of official languages increased to 20 from 11 with the EU’s enlargement into mainly ex-communist eastern Europe. Bulgaria and Romania are set to join in 2007 or 2008, bringing two more languages into the club.

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PhatWare Corporation, a leading provider of software products and professional services for mobile and desktop computers, announces the new version of PenOffice, handwriting recognition software for Microsoft Windows Powered Tablet and Desktop PCs. Some new features this improved version of PenOffice includes are: a customizable keyboard with 13 predefined layouts; Auto Corrector, which improves the quality of handwriting recognition; and support for multi-monitor systems.

PenOffice 2.6 is available in two editions: English and Multilingual. While both editions have the same feature set, the Multilingual Edition offers handwriting recognition in eight Western European languages. In addition to Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, the new version adds support for Swedish handwriting recognition.

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The European Union is entering its first full calendar year with 25 Member States and 20 official languages. The scale of its multilingual regime makes it unique in the world, and to some the extra work it creates for its institutions may seem at first sight to outweigh the advantages. But there are special reasons for it. The Union passes laws directly binding on its citizens and companies, and as a matter of simple natural justice they and their courts must have a version of the laws they have to comply with in a language they can understand. Everyone in the Union is also entitled and encouraged to play a part in building it, and must be able to do it in their own language.
Incorporating nine new official languages – Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovene – into the system at one go in May 2004 was an unprecedented situation for the Commission, and its language services have had to adopt some innovative approaches to deal with the resulting challenges. Now that the initial dust has settled, the time is ripe for a review of the situation so far.

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In addressing the seminar on “Combatting Islamophobia,” U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan called for the distinction of the politically-motivated violence from the religiously-motivated one.

“Islam should not be judged by the acts of extremists who deliberately target and kill civilians. The few give a bad name to the many, and this is unfair,” he said.

While addressing an audience of scholars, senior United Nations officials, and representatives from civil society organizations, Annan meant to address the Christian West at large. America in particular?

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Fat Brazilians? In a body-conscious society whose gifts to global culture include the girl from Ipanema, the tanga bikini and Gisele Bündchen and other supermodels, the idea seems heretical. Yet a controversial government study released late last month confirms it: Brazil is experiencing an epidemic of obesity.

According to the report, conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and issued right as summer arrived and people began flocking to the beaches in skimpy clothing, just over 40 percent of Brazil’s adult population is overweight. Overall, 1 adult in 10, or more than 10 million people, are obese, by international standards, compared with fewer than four million who were deemed to be undernourished.

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With over 111,000 people arriving and settling, 2003-2004 saw the highest number of migrants and refugees coming to Australia in ten years, according to Australia’s Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (IMIA).

According to data released January 10, last year’s number was 20,000 more than in 2002-2003, and reflects a general trend for increased migration – in 1993-1994 just 70,000 settlers arrived in Australia. Furthermore, IMIA says that these figures do not include increasing numbers of people gaining permanent residency status, such as overseas students making onshore skilled migration applications.

With 18,000 British migrants to Australia last year, the UK contributed the most new arrivals, followed by New Zealand, China, India, South Africa, the Sudan and the Philippines. Over half the entrants (68,500) settled in the two most populous Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria, which contain the country’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.

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HMW Online, the Hispanic Marketing Source, has upgraded its Market Profiles section and expanded its geo-demographic population and household data from 21 to 40 selected DMA’s. HMW Online now provides the latest and most complete information including population, language, economics, origin and education. The information, prepared by Geoscape International, provides data for 1990 and 2000, and projections for 2005 and 2010.

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The woman who led the way in fostering better German-American relations in the 1960s with the Kontakt program died Jan. 6 of natural causes in her home near Heidelberg, Germany.

A funeral for Jeanne Jones, 82, will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at the city cemetery in the town where she lived, Handschuhsheim.

Jones, who was also a public affairs specialist with U.S. Army Europe for about 30 years, was considered the mother of Kontakt, according to a statement issued by USAREUR. Kontakt clubs focus on bringing together American soldiers and local German citizens for cross-cultural activities. Jones wanted Germans and Americans to become better friends through cultural awareness, the statement said.

Jones was the original author of USAREUR Regulation 360-90, which covers Kontakt clubs in Germany. She also spearheaded the short-lived Cross-Cultural Program directly after the fall of the Berlin Wall that helped forge better relations between people living in the former East and Germans and Americans living in the West.

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Rudyard Kipling’s famous line “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” no longer applies. Today, East and West are commingled, and in this country, the East is on the rise.

Take movies. American audiences are growing more familiar with movies from China, Japan and South Korea. Quentin Tarantino is planning a kung fu movie entirely in Mandarin, and Zhang Yimou’s stylized martial arts films like “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers” are popular across the country. Hollywood is remaking Japanese blockbusters like “The Ring” and “Shall We Dance?”

What many Asian Americans once considered proprietary culture — kung fu, acupuncture, ginseng, incense, Confucian dramas, beef noodle soup and so on — has spilled irrevocably into the mainstream.

Three decades ago, who would have thought that sushi would become an indelible part of American cuisine? Or that Vietnamese fish sauce would be found on Aisle 3 of Safeway? Or that acupuncture would be accepted by some HMOs? That feng shui would become a household word? Or that Asian writers, especially Indian, would play a large and important role in the pantheon of American letters?

American pundits tend to look at the world through a very old prism — they associate globalization as synonymous with Americanization: i.e., how the United States influences the world. What many tend to overlook, in the age of porous borders, is how much the world has changed the United States.

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LOOKING someone straight in the eye is bad manners for Ethiopians, but taking a pencil from a classmate without asking shows your friendship is close enough to do away with formality.

These are a couple of the ways misunderstandings can arise for the 150 Ethiopians now living in Tasmania.

It is up to cross-cultural workers such as Terhas Bayru not only to translate the language but also to explain cultural differences to both newcomers and locals.

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In an interview with DW-WORLD, the president of Germany’s Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, stressed it was important for the Arab-Islamic world to open up to the West for the dialogue between the two to be really fruitful.

On Dec. 12, 2005 DW-WORLD’s Arabic Web site goes online. To mark the event, the editors spoke to Wolfgang Thierse, president of the German parliament, about the much-vaunted dialogue between the West and the Arab-Islamic world.

The interview comes at a time of intense debate in Germany about the integration of foreigners living in the country and the compatibility of Islam with European values.

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The conference on Arab media in the information age concluded [in Abu Dhabi] yesterday with a clear message that the media should be given full freedom to carry out its duty in a balanced way.

The three-day conference, organised by the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR), focused on issues like how media is influenced by governments as well as by regional cultural considerations and the roles that these considerations could play both as a bridge and a barrier to cross-cultural understanding.

Media experts from around the world addressed access of information and control of media by political and commercial interests. They investigated whether the media can remain impartial in situations of war and crisis.

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