Stacie Nevadomski Berdan: No More Cuts! Keep Foreign Languages in Schools

In “No More Cuts! Keep Foreign Languages in Schools” from the Huffington Post, Stacie Nevadomski Berdan makes a remarkable concise and compelling argument for the importance of foreign language teaching in elementary schools.  She really drives the point home in the following paragraphs.

In the global financial crisis, Americans learned that — for the first time — the so-called developing world surged past the developed world in its share of global productivity; Americans are learning that we can no longer afford to ignore China, Russia, India or Brazil. When today’s kids grow up, they are as likely to be competing for jobs in and with people from Beijing or Brasilia or Bangalore as from Boston or Baton Rouge. In our ever-shrinking world, global experience will continue to move from “nice” to “must-have” for career success.
At stake is nothing less than our ability to compete successfully in the raw global arena, and one of the deciding factors will be American professionals’ ability to speak strategic foreign languages.
However, because studies show that language learning comes more easily to those whose brains are still in the development phase — up until roughly 12 or 13 years of age — when we cut language programs from elementary schools, we are inhibiting bilingualism in future adults. We comfort ourselves with the unrealistic expectation that students will learn in high school or college. But that is unlikely to happen due to the increased difficulty in language learning as we get older. Arguably, bold and innovative new methods of teaching foreign language are needed now more than ever – and instituted in schools as early as kindergarten.

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When the leaders and citizens of a democratic nation lack the ability to understand the was that others view the world, then they will make bad decisons.  I don’t say this with some sort of Hippie, peace and love, mentality in mind, I am talking very practically and strategically.  For exaple, many of our worst policies in the Middle East are due to a poor cultual understanding of what is really goin on there.
As the world becomes more and more interconnected, it becomes all the more imperative that Americans be ready to encounter the other on their terms.  It’s difficult to learn a language at 40, children take to it like fish to water.  Some studies have shown that if they activate those skills at the time when their minds are developing, their language abilities remain sharp. Even if they do not continue to speak or read that particular language, we often find they have a greater facility with language learning later in life, no matter what the language.
Interesting, no?  I can’t find the studies now and it is late, so I’m not going to look more.  But if anyone has thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Developments in Machine Translation of Arabic

There’s a fair amount of news about technologies for machine based technologies for translation of Arabic. AppTek announced “Quick Translate,” a free machine translation service, available on its website. According to the company’s announcement,

Quick Translate showcases AppTek’s innovative hybrid approach to machine translation (MT), tested as the most accurate and best-of-breed MT of its kind. The service covers English and a variety of other languages (bidirectional): Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, PersianDari, Urdu, Pashto-English, Bahasa Indonesian, Tagalog, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Dutch.

Hybrid MT systems take advantage of the strengths of both rule-based and statistical approaches, while mitigating their weaknesses. AppTek’s HMT solution provides a full integration of both MT methodologies, rather than simply adding rules to the statistical system or a minor statistical module to the rule-based engine. Using the company’s statistical MT platform and augmenting it with its rich rule-based MT engine, AppTek’s HMT solution raises the bar for MT design. The three key translation quality parameters of MT systems – fluency, informativeness, and adequacy – are now supported in one comprehensive system with greater performance, quality and accuracy.

(via PR Press Release)
Research into more robust systems continues, however. Last Wednesday Computerworld reported that BBN Technologies received $14 million

from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week to continue developing its speech and text technology.
BBN has now taken in over $30 million from DARPA over the past few years to fill out the agency’s Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The goal of GALE is to translate and distill foreign language material (television shows and newspapers) in near real-time, highlight salient information, and store the results in a searchable database — all with more than 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Through this process, GALE would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly so they could act on it in a timely fashion.

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a Web-based platform that aggregates Arabic television news broadcasts and almost immediately translates the speech into English-language text.
The text is instantly keyword searchable in English.

via FederalComputerWeek