Latino Reaction Split On Republicans' Spanish Language Message

Thursday's raucous GOP presidential debate, with its heated rhetoric around the issue of immigration, highlighted some of the challenges Republican Party faces in reaching Latino voters. That was also clear earlier in the week, when Republicans delivered two responses to President Obama's State of the Union address: one by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in English; the other, by Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, was in Spanish.

The speeches were nearly identical, except when it came to immigration. On this topic, the lawmakers' remarks differed both in tone and in substance. Analysts said the mixed messaging reflected a growing rift within the party over immigration, especially as the anti-immigrant message of leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has pulled some of his competitors to the right on the issue.

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'Purple Rain' — As Retold In A Language Without A Word For Purple

Heard on  All Things Considered

In 1984, Prince was on top of the world, with a No. 1 album and later a No. 1 movie, both named Purple Rain.

Little did Prince know then how widely his projects' influence would spread, or the ways in which they might translate — literally. Three decades after the film first premiered, it got a remake filmed in Niger, featuring members of a nomadic group of people known as the Tuareg.

It's called Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai — which translates to "Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It." That's because there's no word for "purple" in Tamajeq, the language spoken by the Tuareg. 

Like the original, this version of Purple Rain, directed by Christopher Kirkley, tells the story of a guitarist and songwriter who battles his musical rivals, his conservative father — and eventually, his own ego. Those struggles are every bit as resonant in Niger's desert community as they were in Prince's Minneapolis. Over the past few decades, a vibrant new music scene has exploded among the Tuareg. Bootlegged cassette tapes of artists like Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits have been traded and retraded across the Sahara.

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French, Spanish, German ... Java? Making Coding Count As A Foreign Language

Heard on  All Things Considered

LYNN HATTER

Florida is poised to become the first state to allow computer coding to fulfill a foreign-language requirement in high school. In a competitive job market, the thinking goes, computer skills are as important as speaking another language.

At SAIL High School in Tallahassee, a 3-D printer whirs away. It's turning PVC pipe into a red, Lego-like piece for a robot.

This is the OctoPiRates robotics club. These students will soon compete in a national contest with their hand-built robot. It features a square, metal frame with eight rubber wheels and a scooping arm.

Many of the OctoPiRates members, like Ram Moore, are self-taught.

"I mostly learned on my own, and I took AP Computer Science," Moore explains. "And from there, I taught myself some other skills."

Another student, Alexander Olson, says he's forgotten a lot of the Spanish he took for two years in middle school, and wishes he had learned coding instead: "This would have stuck with me a lot longer."

Most technology runs on computer code. But it's not widely taught in Florida's public schools. Lawmakers are hoping to change that.

State Sen. Jeremy Ring, a Democrat, says he wants students to add coding languages like Python, Java or C++ into the mix of traditional languages like French and Spanish.

Volunteers Offer Italian Language Lessons To Young Migrants

SYLVIA POGGIOLI

In Italy, volunteers are helping young migrants cope with their new reality through one-on-one language lessons.

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TRANSCRIPT

AUDIE CORNISH, BYLINE: The migrants that have been traveling to Europe include large numbers of unaccompanied minors. In Italy, one of the major front-line countries, regional governments are tasked with providing food, housing and education for the young people fleeing war and poverty. And as NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, there are also many volunteers who are pitching in to help them get a fresh start.

SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: On two afternoons a week, dozens of teenagers from places like Afghanistan, Egypt and Nigeria crowd into this public high school in a Roman middle-class neighborhood. Forty volunteers - mostly retirees - are here to give the new arrivals Italian language lessons one on one.

ISMAIL: Ismail.

DELIA: Delia.

POGGIOLI: Ismail and volunteer Delia join other students and teachers in eight large, noisy classrooms. Italy has strict privacy laws to protect minors, making direct access difficult. So we listen in as the students read from their textbooks.

Youth And The English Language Define U.S. Latino Population

RICHARD GONZALES

As the number of young Hispanics born in this country has grown over the past 14 years, so too their proficiency in English as fewer said they speak Spanish at home, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

The study is based on an analysis of 2014 U.S. Census Bureau data. It finds 65 percent of Hispanics in 2014 were U.S. born, compared with 60% in 2000. Also, one-third, or 17.9 million, of the Latino population is younger than 18 years old. Of these, 88 percent said they speak only English at home or speak English very well. In 2000, only 73 percent said the same.

That trend is also evident among the 14.6 million Latino millennials, ages 18 to 33. Among this cohort, 76 percent said they speak only English at home or speak English very well. That's up from 59 percent in 2000.

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Smashing Snow Globes: A Writer On Essays, Novels And Translation

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Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City, but she'll admit with a laugh that where she's from is a complicated question. She lived there for only two years before packing up for, at various times, Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, India, Spain and France.

These days, Luiselli lives in Harlem. And that's the neighborhood where her novel Faces in the Crowd is set: both the Harlem of the recent past and the Harlem of the Harlem Renaissance, along with present-day Mexico City.

The story follows a young translator living in New York, who is trying to convince an American publisher to release the poems of a real-life Mexican poet named Gilberto Owen, Luiselli explains: "She does so by faking a series of translations and saying that they're written by a famous American poet."

In a slim 146 pages, Faces in the Crowd swaps perspectives every few pages or paragraphs between three main narrative threads: the present-day narrator living in Mexico City with her husband and two young children, that narrator's semi-autobiographical novel-within-a-novel, and the fictionalized experiences of Gilberto Owen himself living in 1920s New York City. Each gradually becomes more indistinguishable from the others.

Faces in the Crowd was released this year in the United States, along with Luiselli's collection of essays Sidewalks. (Both books had been previously released in Spanish and were translated into English.)

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Machines, Lost In Translation: The Dream Of Universal Understanding

ANNE LI

Annette Elizabeth Allen/NPR

It was early 1954 when computer scientists, for the first time, publicly revealed a machine that could translate between human languages. It became known as the Georgetown-IBM experiment: an "electronic brain" that translated sentences from Russian into English.

The scientists believed a universal translator, once developed, would not only give Americans a security edge over the Soviets but also promote world peace by eliminating language barriers.

They also believed this kind of progress was just around the corner: Leon Dostert, the Georgetown language scholar who initiated the collaboration with IBM founder Thomas Watson, suggested that people might be able to use electronic translators to bridge several languages within five years, or even less.

The process proved far slower. (So slow, in fact, that about a decade later, funders of the research launched an investigation into its lack of progress.) And more than 60 years later, a true real-time universal translator — a la C-3PO from Star Wars or the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — is still the stuff of science fiction.

How far are we from one, really? Expert opinions vary. As with so many other areas of machine learning, it depends on how quickly computers can be trained to emulate human thinking.

Vikram Dendi says we're very close.

"It's cool to stand here and look back and say, 'We really turned science fiction into a reality,' " Dendi, the technical and strategy adviser to the chief of Microsoft Research, tells All Tech.

Microsoft's translation work has produced apps that can translate voice to voice and voice to text in addition to the familiar text to text. The big rollout this year was the Skype Translator, which takes what you say over video chat and turns it into spoken or written translations, currently in seven languages.

Microsoft, of course, is far from alone. A company called Voxox does Internet calling and chat and has a text-to-text translation service for its messaging app. Google, in addition to its familiar text translations, has introduced a feature in its Translate app that uses your phone camera to scan an image of foreign text and display the translation.

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Translators are finally being recognized by the Man Booker International Prize

Orhan Pamuk at the Frankfurt Book Fair. (AP Photo/Pool/Arne Desert)

The English-speaking world has a pretty dismal track record when it comes to reading works in translation—roughly 3% of books published in the US and UK are originally written in a language other than English, according to a report published last year by Literature Across Frontiers. But in recent years, the prestigious UK literary prize Man Booker has tried to pay more attention to fiction from outside the country, and this year, it’s all in.

From 2016 onward, the Man Booker International Prize (a spin-off of the original Man Booker Prize, which is awarded to any novel written in English and published in the UK) will be awarded just to works in translation. The £50,000 prize (about $71,000) will be split evenly between the winning book’s author and English-language translator.

The prize committee announced its longlist today (Mar. 10), and nominees include a reclusive farmer and an anonymous bestselling author.

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