| Mercator
Newsletter - No.14, May 2005 |
| From January 2005 the Mercator Common Newsletter is a monthly newsletter. This way you will be kept informed with more recent and updated information. |
| 4th
Mercator International Symposium Translation of Culture, Culture of Translation:
Languages in Film, Television and Literature |
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IV
Mercator International Symposium MERCATOR-MEDIA |
| Dates Announced for the 4th Mercator International Symposium The 4th Mercator International Symposium will be held on 26, 27 and 28 October 2005 in Aberystwyth, Wales and will have the theme of "Translation of Culture, Culture of Translation: Languages in Film, Television and Literature". Language transfer, which includes, for the purposes of this symposium, subtitling and dubbing of both film and television as well as literary translation, is a multi-faceted phenomenon from the point of view of minority languages. It can be used to disseminate cultures which find themselves outside the audiovisual and literary ‘mainstream’ and to maximise audience or reader numbers for minority cultural products. Moreover, translation into minority languages not only increases the volume of available material in a marginalised language, but may have a wider cultural impact and contribute to the development of the language as a dynamic creative medium. On the other hand, the effect of ‘importing’ cultural references on a large scale may not always be viewed positively. This symposium will seek contributions to this discussion from those active as practitioners and policy-makers in the audiovisual and literary fields (producers, directors, broadcasters, subtitlers and dubbers, scriptwriters, publishers, authors, translators) as well as those concerned with these issues in an academic context. While the emphasis will be on autochthonous minority languages (that is to say the languages of groups long-established on their current territory and using a language other than the primary official language of their state or a language in some sense socially and/or politically marginalised) connections may be made with issues of concern to smaller state languages, migrant languages and cultural production originating from beyond the metropolitan mainstream. We shall welcome contributions which make those connections. Key areas of discussion will include (but need not be limited to):
Abstracts of approximately 500 words or suggestions for panel discussions should be sent (as Word files or as plain text within the e-mail) to george.jones@aber.ac.uk by 1 June 2005. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 1 July 2005. Written abstracts/proposals submitted for consideration will be accepted in Welsh, English, German or French. Abstracts in other languages can be considered subject to prior agreement with the organising committee. Full details of registration and programme will shortly appear on the
Mercator-Media website http://www.aber.ac.uk/mercator. |
| News May 2005 (links to the Mercator websites) |
| Media News - Mercator-Media |
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| Legislation news - Mercator-Linguistic Rights and Legislation |
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| TV Breizh denied terrestrial digital broadcasting once more The private television channel serving Brittany, TV Breizh, has again been refused the possibility of terrestrial digital broadcasting by the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, the authority which regulates broadcasting in France. The political party Parti Breton has condemned the decision and questioned the logic of making available in Brittany by terrestrial broadcasting channels such as Télé Monte Carlo and Paris Première but not TV Breizh, adding that the CSA appears to take an extremely biased position against the channel. International Association for the Defense of Menaced Languages and Cultures to be held in Portugal The twenty-second congress of the Association for the Defense of Menaced Languages and Cultures is to be held from the 22nd to the 24th of July this year at the Casa da Cultura Mirandesa (House of Mirandese Culture) in Miranda do Douro in Portugal. The theme of the congress will be ‘Threatened Languages, Bilingualism and Learning’, bringing together specialists and representatives of the different European linguistic minorities. The congress is open to all. For more information contact aidlcm@skynet.be. Minority Department of ORF Burgenland wins Prize The minority department of ORF, the state broadcaster, in Burgenland,
Austria has been awarded the Burgenland Prize for Journalism. The department
produces programmes in the region’s three minority languages, Croatian,
Hungarian and Romany on television and radio and on the internet. This
is the sixth year that this prize has been awarded by the Club Burgenland,
an organisation which describes itself as a non-party political, innovative
and open forum for all interested in the social development of Burgenland. Galician Broadcaster affected by Industrial Action Workers at the Galician broadcasting corporation CRTVG are currently
engaged in a series of seven one-day strikes during the period leading
up to elections in Galicia on 19th June. This follows the collapse of
negotiations with the management of CRTVG about working conditions,
one contentious issue being the lack of job security of many employees.
The first strike took place on 25th of May and another is planned for
2nd - 3rd of June. CRTVG claimed that essential services were uninterrupted
by the strike on 25th May but the strikers claim programming was affected,
with the broadcasting of the programme ‘Telexornal’ being delayed and
‘A Revista’ being cancelled. Basque Virtual Library Launched Two Basque cultural organisations, la Fundación Sancho el Sabio and Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, have recently launched a virtual library. It is a new database named Kulturaldi, in which can be found over 30,000 articles published in the most prestigious Basque magazines, including, for example, the now discontinued titles Euskal-Erria, Euskal-Esnalea, Euskalerriaren alde and Gure Herria. The virtual library can be found at http://www4.gipuzkoa.net/corporac/cul/kulturaldi/index.asp Specific Mention of Irish left out of BBC Charter Proposal Any specific mention of Irish was omitted from a proposal sent by the BBC to the British government as part of the process of establishing a new charter for the broadcaster, although it was recommended in the document that the new Charter create a context which would allow BBC Northern Ireland to develop programmes in native languages, a context which would accord with the commitments the BBC has and is planning in relation to broadcasting in Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. It was also recommended that additional funding be made available to BBC Northern Ireland to enable it to add to its programmes and services in this area. The Irish umbrella organisation in the six counties, POBAL, expressed disappointment thet there was no specific reference to Irish in the proposal and they are currently engaged in a campaign to get members of the public to put pressure on the British government to mention Irish specifically in the White Paper to be published in the autumn. Janet Muller, director of POBAL said, ‘We very much welcome the framework which has been set out in this statement for the support of native languages but it is clear that Irish has not been left out merely by accident’. She recommended that groups and individuals throughout the six counties write to the government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport in London before the 31 May, which is the end of the period of public consultation with regard to the White Paper. Local Newspaper introduces Breton and English Due to the increase of English immigrants to Ar Poc’her/Le Poher, a region in central Brittany, the local paper has decided to include English columns, which were introduced in October 2004. In light of this, the paper has also decided to acknowledge the Breton language. Out of a population of 105,000 of the 80 communes of Ar Poc’her, about 15,000 speak Breton and about the same number are English speakers. Thus about 14.5% speak Breton and 14.5% are English speakers. The English and Breton material is published in the back pages of the paper.
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| Publications |
| Soon in the next Bulletin - Mercator-Linguistic Rights and Legislation |
| The Mercator-Linguistic Rights and Legislation team is currently preparing Bulletin 62, to be published at the end of June. Here is a preview of its contents, which are being translated into several languages: |
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Introduction Digital Library project In 2003 we started our preparations to realize a Digital Library on European Minority Languages. The aim of the Digibybproject was to carry out a pilot project on digital data storage and data retrieval concerning minority languages in Europe. The project finished at the end of April 2005. To realize this digital library concept, the attention was directed towards the establisment of a digital library in Frisian, while enabling the extension of the project towards other minority libraries or at least creating such a flexible concept that other libraries could easily be linked up with the Frisian pilot project. Parties involved Parties that were involved were Mercator-Education and the Fryske Akademy. Practical collaboration could be established with ‘Tresoar’: The Frisian Historical and Literary Centre which resulted in access to a small subsection of their digital archive, i.e. digital images of old manuscripts. Furthermore with the publishing house Bornmeer from whom we received digital PDF-versions of recent book publications. Mostly for reasons of international cooperation and with the future project in mind we collaborated with the digital library of Galica (Spain) and linked up with their digital library BVG : Biblioteca Virtual Galega. The model The Digital Library project has resulted in a two layer organization scheme. On the first level the language specific library has taken shape : a digital library of Frisian. This library is addressing the regional user and will basically contain Frisian language data and data in Dutch. In the pilot project the emphasis has been on developing the technical framework and to make a beginning with adding context to the library. The results can been seen at http://www.dbfrysk.org The second layer is the European framework for a digital library of minority languages. The emphasis on documents and data written in large European languages, preferable English. The content of the European library itself should rather contain information about the languages than information in the languages involved. This European framework furthermore gives access to the different individual libraries. The European framework can be found at http://www.emill.org The general approach of both libraries is that of subsidiarity: information should be maintained and stored on the lowest possible level. By harvesting the data and creating library repositories, the information is collected on the European library level. The actual library data, like texts, remain on the local servers of participating partners. Keyword is open standard (OAI (Open Archive Initiative)) : by providing the local data with metadata according to OAI-standards, the library is able to detect the information and harvest it. Documentation The documentation of the project is written in English with a view
to the follow-up of this project called EMILL (European Minority Languages
Library) and possible future European partners. The documentation consists
of three separate reports: In June 2005 this documentation will be available on both websites of the project as a PDF-document. |
| Miscellany |
| Follow-up project EMILL - Mercator-Education |
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Galicia will be one of our official partners with the Biblioteca Virtual Galega. We are still looking for partners for the follow-up EMILL (European Minority Languages Library). At this moment we have contacts with members of the Sami, Kashubian, Romani, Faroer and Welsh language communities which will hopefully result in official cooperation. In the summer we are planning to write a Call for Proposal for this
project and send it to the eContentplus programme of the European Commission,
the deadline will be October 2005. Further information and registration forms are available on : |
| Endangered Languages - Mercator-Education |
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Since March 2005 the web site of Mercator Education contains information on the projects by Tjeerd the Graaf, who joined the Mercator Education team in 2004. His research is focused on the study of language contrasts, language contact and language change, with special attention for phonetic aspects of endangered languages, in particular those of the Russian Federation and neighbouring countries. This work is supported by grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Organisation INTAS of the European Union, Japanese Foundations and Sakhalin Energy Investment Company Ltd.. The project Voices from Tundra and Taiga is nearly completed and has resulted in important data on archive material for endangered language in the Russian North, whereas special facilities have been developed for the teaching of these languages. The web site contains more detailed information on these Endangered Archives and earlier research projects, such as the ones about Jiddisch (Voices from the Shtetl) and the Siberian Mennonites (Frisian and Dutch in Siberia). A historical project is related to the work of Nicolaas Witsen, who wrote about the peoples of Siberia and provided many interesting details about their languages and way of life. See: http://www.mercator-education.org
--> Endangered Languages |
| The Newspaper to the School: A project for Swedish-speaking schools in Finland - Mercator-Education |
| In the framework of a study visit in Helsinki last May, organized by the Swedish Assembly of Finland, research-assistant Tsjerk Bottema of Mercator Education attended a presentation on a very interesting project called “Tidningen i Skolan” (“Newspaper to the School”). In this article he reports on this project, aiming to learn pupils of mainly Swedish schools in Finland how to read and how to work with newspapers and teachers how to integrate newspapers, or media in general, in their daily educational practice. Introduction Aims of the project Education material and activities From theory to practice Network of Schools |
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