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Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/two-from-bathrobe/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17671

A couple of links from the Commenter Known as Bathrobe:

1) Can AI help revive Ainu? Jessie Lau writes for BBC Future:

There are only a handful of native Ainu speakers left. The language is currently listed by Unesco as “Critically Endangered”. Records suggest that in 1870 – one year after Ezo or Ezochi (now Hokkaido) was declared part of Japan – some 15,000 people spoke local varieties of Ainu, and the majority spoke no other language. But various government policies, including the banning of Ainu in schools, almost wiped the language and culture out. By 1917, the estimated number of speakers had plummeted to just 350 and has dropped precipitously since then.

Despite this, Ainu is arguably undergoing a revival. In 2019, Japan legally recognised the Ainu as Indigenous people of the country through a bill that included measures to foster their inclusion and visibility. And now various projects aim to preserve and revitalise the language – including with the help of artificial intelligence. There’s a chance that Ainu could survive for generations to come.

We talked about Ainu in 2016 and earlier this month.

2) Translation in Ukraine During the Stalinist Period: Literary Translation Policies and Practices, an open-access chapter (in Translation Under Communism, pp.141-172); it deals with the translation-related aspects of what I wrote about in this 2010 post and goes into some interesting details, e.g.:

The active phase of the process of Ukrainization (the implementation of indigenization policy in Soviet Ukraine), which effectively lasted from 1925 till 1929, greatly influenced all spheres of cultural life in Ukraine. Its beneficial effects persisted until the late 1930s. It was the national revival idea that inspired a rapid development of literary and non-literary translation in the 1920s, a decade that has gone down in Ukrainian history as the National Renaissance period. The expansion of literary translation into Ukrainian even involved opera houses in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odesa (Odessa in Russian), which in 1926 switched to using Ukrainian translations of Western and Russian classics in accordance with Ukrainization Decrees (Strikha 2006: 1.96).

Sometimes these mandatory measures caused an outraged reaction and resistance, for example, by the Odesa Opera House, with its long-standing Italian and Russian tradition (Shevelov 1989: 118). In spite of the fact that Ukrainization resulted in an increase of media and literature publications in Ukrainian, the introduction of the Ukrainian language into the school and university curriculum, and a general rise in interest in Ukrainian culture, a coercive administrative campaign ‘on the one hand, encouraged and required the use of Ukrainian and, on the other hand, viewed any sincere personal move in that direction as suspect and dangerous’ (ibid.: 128). Moreover, any initiative in this sphere that went beyond the allowed limits was seen as a form of dangerous nationalism.

The flourishing of translation in Soviet Ukraine lasted, then, from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, approximately. In 1925, as Oleksandr Biletskyi (1884–1961) wrote in his review article ‘Perevodnaia literatura na Ukraine’ [Translated literature in Ukraine], translated literature still did not occupy a very prominent place in the Ukrainian book market (Beletskii81929/2011). But in 1927 the situation started to change dramatically: it became possible to offer the reader not only some pamphlets, but also the books of foreign authors, and even entire collections of their works, sometimes even prior to similar publications in Russian, such as An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, compiled and translated into Ukrainian by Ivan Kulyk, which was published as early as 1928 (ibid.: 388).

Literary scholar Yelyzaveta Starynkevych was able to assert in her 1930 review of the literature translated into Ukrainian in 1929–30 that the emergence of numerous valuable translations of world classics compelled sceptical readers to believe that translating into Ukrainian was not a waste of time and effort (Starynkevych 1930/2011: 443) and that the Ukrainian language was absolutely capable of meeting the demands posed by the content and style of these works.

Thanks, Bademantel!

https://languagehat.com/two-from-bathrobe/

https://languagehat.com/?p=17671