May 2009 Archives

Imagine my surprise upon entering the lobby at Lessius University and witnessing a conversation in American Sign Language! My brain has been so otherwise-occupied that it never once crossed my mind that

a) anyone other than European spoken language trainers/researchers would attend or that
b) I might actually know people!

It was absolutely delightful to re-encounter respected colleagues, meet some of the luminaries whose work is required reading, and make new friends (although one always wonders whether they'll claim me, and/or for how long!) ;-)


We started quite seriously, with the keynoter, Mariachiara, setting the context with a superb history of the tension between innate talent and built skill. Are interpreters born or made? Perhaps it is a both/and kind of question, with challenges of re-molding/re-training those with "the aptitude to perform" and fresh cultivation of those with "the aptitude to learn."

At the end of the day, Miriam reflected that we (interpreter researchers) have learned that we're asking the right questions, but we don't seem any closer to clear answers! One needs only hark back to the presentations of Her Majesty of No Results and the Princess of No Significance to find evidence supporting Miriam's perception. Are we guilty of trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse?

"You're argumentative!" one of my dinnermates proclaimed, as I sought to champion a shadowing task based on the persuasive argumentation of the aforementioned Queen.

I don't want to be accused of breaking the pinkie pact (especially since I wasn't at the presenter's dinner the night before when they apparently made a rule not to ask each other hard questions), but . . . aren't the hard questions the ones that most need to be asked?!

"You're against essentialism in all forms!" Miriam bought me a coffee. :-)

(I think this means we are now bonded for life.) Franz invited me to come after him hard....which I did but it wasn't easy going. First he thought I was arguing that "everything is cognition," which he agreed is a way that knowledge in the field can be understood. It took some fancy footwork to get across the idea that what I am critiquing is the way that we (interpreters, interpreter trainers, interpreting researchers) collude in assuming that everything in the field can be broken down into nice, neat, discrete boxes. Miriam rephrased this as the human propensity to put everything in categories.

"It's interesting, but I don't agree with half of it!" (Shhhsh that interpreter in the corner!)


"Why does your badge say 'Belgium' but you are speaking English?" Heidi was trying to process where I was from and why I was delinquent in signing up for the conference dinner. Really, I'm here under cover . . . just as there are "slides no wants to see" (recall the pinkie promise), there are also "some matters untouched" (Cronbach and Snow 1977:6).

"Is this rubbish?" (Get ready, I'm gonna be asking you, Chris!) Meanwhile, Amalija has two weeks to devise the perfect comprehensive provable aptitude test for her incoming screening. She has the power! As Sarka explained,

"some of these people want to be translating Shakespeare's sonnets, they don't want anything to do with other people!"

One of the huge dilemmas in interpreter training is predicting when a potential interpreting student might succeed against the evidence that convinces us they won't, and how to justify the investment of resources when even those students with all the promising signs turn out unable in the end.

"There are no future facts." (Robert S Brumbaugh, 1966)


What can we learn from the ones who had it made?

It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don't even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can't even fathom.

The East-West debate came up: does one interpret only into one's mother tongue, or from a mother tongue into another fluent language? Why, I wonder, are people so invested in this directionality? Meanwhile, the non-sign repetition task of nonsense biological motion that Chris reported seems an awful lot like shadowing to me.... and can I just mention how cool it is to attend a conference with five active languages, three of which are signed?! I am not able to articulate the significance of increases in visual memory, but it caught my attention...advanced interpreters can apparently correctly select geometric shapes after a delay more rapidly than beginning interpreters. Perhaps this is related to what I've noticed in my own neural net, specifically the new capacity to learn math after twenty years of signing.

Brooke had the two best slides so far, understating the case for the performance of simultaneous interpretation: "we have a lot to do." (Can I get copies? Beg beg beg!) I'm especially intrigued by the risk/avoidance measures....just a few days ago I came up with the title for my next conference proposal: "Risk, Resignation, and Loss: Interlocutors on Interpretation in the European Parliament." (Next week I present some of the results at a conference on Mikhail Bakhtin in Stockholm).

I love the metaphor of the airplane and its engines. Sarka and Heidi get credit for this one together, right? There are the pair (or more) of wing engines that are all about cruising, and then there's the solo job in the tail, which is all about getting up to altitude. Sherry might win the prize for getting the earliest start, although there is a four year discrepancy concerning the age at which she began interpreting: four? Eight? Then you've got peeps like me who didn't even start learning a second language until 28! Anyway, I am pleased to go along with the decisions that "all of us made" in Sherry's "we", particularly the one about merging modalities. The two tests she shared intrigue me: the CNS Vital Signs and the Achievement Motivation Inventory.

I hope no one throws a wobbly because of anything I've written here. I was duly warned that someone would have my guts for garters if I transgressed too far. Might I ask, instead, for a soft word on the side and the chance to edit?

:-)

Seventy-five Members of the European Parliament (or, in a few instances, their Assistants) expressed interest in talking with me, and I managed to arrange conversations with fifty-five of them. Nearly half of the MEPs spoke with me twice (23/55), and a handful spoke with me three times (5). If I had been able to get off my duff more consistently last fall then the rates of second and third conversations would have been higher. I also was able to talk with a range of administrators and staff - including assistants, political advisers to various secretariats, and functionnaires in other permanent departments of the European Parliament.

Two-thirds of the Members I spoke with are up for re-election. Voting is on the 7th of June.

Anecdotes:

We saw a strange movie the other night. I was wildly amused: although bored at times and put off by some of the surrealism, I recognized much that is familiar in Synecdoche, NY. By "familiar," I do not mean flattering, but I have to admit that I could see myself, my logic, and some of my life experience reflected in the mangle of enactments and re-enactments. The funniest part, however, was the company with whom I saw the film - I knew they were suffering through on my account and I love them for it. :-)

Another day:
"You like to fight," she said, and continued: "I don't."
Not really, I thought about the first. I know, about the second.

"I'm a magnet for conflict," I told some friends later in the day. "Do you really think so?" they asked. I do. It's the concept of valence; whether I want to be or not, my attention is drawn to tension. The more others try to get by, pass, or otherwise slide around it, the larger it looms in my consciousness. What, I begin to wonder, is so bad or terrible or fearful or otherwise so undesirable that someone would prefer to ignore it?

Sometimes I feel trapped, as I watch others "read" me, attributing their meanings to what I say, to what I'm doing. I understand that they perceive me making things worse, yet I only say the things that I say because I perceive it as a contribution along a path to resolution.

"You have a balanced head," the photographer said.

"People pick out only one part," he said, "but the overall, the whole, is balanced." I never saw this man before, he knows nothing about me and didn't ask. But I felt seen. "Artists," a friend later scoffed, teasing me about how easily I was seduced, "they know just what to say to get what they want!" :-) Maybe. It was quite an experience, though, in the moment, before and after listening to four piano pieces that sorted, scattered, and then re-organized my consciousness.

The concert began with Sonate in sol groot by Franz Schubert (opus 78, D894, 1826), played by Charlotte Otte. The familiar enough romantic classicism enabled my thinking to settle, slowly sorting and separating the intertwined threads of a book review, a job application, an upcoming presentation, the beginnings of the dissertation, and a chapter for an unrelated publication... so many ideas to be placed, positioned in counterpart and harmony, composed to produce a whole...

Then came Schonberg. The dodecaphony destroyed my ability to conceptualize, not that I had been thinking in any concentrated or focused way before, its just that I had been aware of thoughts and now there were none! Jasper Vanpaemel's rendition of the Cinq pieces pour piano (opus 23, 1923) wrenched me out of myself. Next he played Etude nr 4 (1999) by Pascal Dusapin: the minimalism allowed the neurons in my brain to resume firing in a more-or-less normal manner. Finally, during the last piece, Variationen uber Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (1862) by Franz Liszt, my mind felt whole again, recomposed.

egg sightings and guerilla gardening

• Sacred comedy offers its own rich twist on these, the lingering last days. What was I doing with my head on the ground, nestled among last fall's composting leaves and this spring's still fresh green shoots?!
• Did I actually hit the right note (!), "consecrating the tonality" of Do, Re, Me as I learned about the socialized difference between 7 and 12 tone scales?
• How bad/boring is The Sound of Music? ("It's 50 years old!" Ah, the troubles of teaching (some) young people today - they want to absorb videos passively rather than actually think!)

no conclusions

Interactions with different individuals, across generations, nationalities, and contexts ... yet similar themes (or at least references) emerge. I find myself betwixt and between, too aware or completely clueless. Sometimes, paradoxically, both at the same time.

Thanks to all who teach me, reflecting back the many parts of myself.

It isn't all - or only - narcissim! :-)

Language is a force.

Language names, and by naming, it calls into being. This is how social reality is constructed and maintained. I think it is an effect of quantum mechanics, but smarter minds than mine are needed to make the connections in a compelling scientific manner.

Last fall I wrote a post on some dynamics of dialogue and discourse, in which I engaged with ideas of a discursive psychologist, Michel Billig.

The core of the argument laid out by Michael Billig (in the articles from Discourse and Society 2008, Vol. 19, Issue 6) is that we who think in terms of critical discourse analysis (CDA) need to be acutely aware of our own uses of language, lest we repeat some of the very elements of language use that we critique in others. Billig's concern is with social scientific language in general; he selects CDA for heuristic and practical purposes: "It should be a major issue for analysts who stress the pivotal role of language in the reproduction of ideology, inequality and power" (p. 784).

In particular, Billig goes after the academic/theoretical use of nominalization, which is a shorthand way of condensing a particular dynamical concept (something with a lot of parts) into a single term. Debate over costs and benefits of using nominalization seem to swing on the temporal grounding of interlocutors. I'm thinking at the mundane level as well as at level of ideological reproduction. For instance, does saying something about (i.e., naming) tensions in a friendship necessarily make them worse or can it provide a means to shift footings? At the precise moment of making the utterance, there may be a spike in bad feelings - all that tension concentrated and released in the acts of speaking and hearing. But I think that it is what comes next (at least, so I hope) that becomes determinative for the subsequent unfolding. When nominalization is at play, Billig argues there is a tendency to depersonalize behavior or action such that individual contributions to whatever unfolds are lost to perception. So the pattern of tensions enacted when one or another party to the tension actually says something directly about the presence or evidence of tension becomes bigger than the minute social interactions that compose it. The pattern itself becomes "the thing", and individuals are simply swept up in it, all agency erased.

The question is, when things are not going the way one wishes, what next? I watched an interesting video on the synthesis of happiness this morning (20 minutes long) which argues that if we assume irretrievability, then we enhance our capacity to choose happiness. I'm wondering if this basic precept - that's what done is done and can't be changed - could guide many other choices, including the ways we respond when we find ourselves seemingly trapped in a discourse that we don't necessarily want. I believe it is the element of acknowledgment that I am finding most attractive. Perhaps my general communicative strategy is to reduce uncertainty (see What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous) in order to make choices clear.

Perhaps.

A year ago, I marked a confluence of transitions. How many times, I continue to wonder, can one bounce back from failure? I also consider, if failure (however conceived) has lead me here . . .

So what if the museum is closed on Tuesday? (Familiar.) I think I'm gonna have to order "The Lives of Einstein."

I got enough of a buzz from the outdoor displays. Auguste de la Rive's ideas about the Aurora Borealis, for instance, were half correct: they do result from a combination of magnetism (strongest at the earth's poles) and electricity. He was only wrong about the origins of the involved electricity - not terrestrial, but from the larger cosmos. Marc-Auguste Pictet was involved in negotiations concerning the establishment of the prime meridian, and Jean-Robert Chovet (unlike yours truly) was known for his diplomatic skill and (similar to yours truly) believed "more weight should be given to lay people in the management of the Academy" (emphasis added, and - in addition to esteemed institutions of higher learning, many domains could be substituted in place of the organizational forebear of the University of Geneva). (Time, by the way, to read Descartes: Discourse on the Method. And do you think it is remotely possible for a person to function like a gnomon?)

As it turned out, I did not travel by water taxi across the lake to the Jardin Anglais to see the flower clock or the Musee de l'Horlogerie (which may or may not have been open). I did, however, wander through the Jardin Botanique spying all manner of flower, plant, and tree, not to mention several varieties of parrot, swans, geese, flamingos, and ducks, including some fantastically-plumaged Mandarin Ducks and Indian Peafowl. For spice, there were also Hermann's Tortoises and Fallow Deer.

In case there was any danger of not living up to full nerdist credentials, I spent several hours writing (a book review, hopefully coming soon), during which I fielded delightful communiques from dearest friends and family. Whatever shadows thought to threaten the day were readily banished and I've just got the feeling that the coming second year after the cutting will proceed in more-or-less similar fashion as this one just passed.

At any rate, here's hoping!

First, we ate at Restaurant 1; quality defeating PR at least for a day. "R1 definitely has the best food, but R2 has better publicity." Dustin is an extraordinary tour guide, beginning our education immediately. "I don't know how up you are on particle physics?" he half-inquired, scanning our eager (and no doubt blank) faces. "There are six kinds of quarks..." His service project is updating some software for analyzing the top quark. "The detector," he continued, "gives two types of information: voltages and times." The software takes these data, reconstructs it, then reconstructs it again. I'm vague on the reconstruction process but understand the necessity because quarks are inherently unstable.

Over ristretto, topics temporarily wander. Doris comments on a physical family resemblance, then mimics Colin as he gestures his way through a description of his current project on combinatorial optimalization. Colin asks about demographics: are the hundreds of people around us all scientists who work here? Mostly yes, and visitors too. Both physicists and engineers work at the facility, which has its own hostel for visiting researchers. Currently there are more experimental physicists around than theoretical physicists, since "the detector" (formally, ATLAS) is undergoing maintenance. The theoretical guys will show up once ATLAS resumes generating data. Repairs, by the way, are complete, but the supercooling process requires significant time. If you take the temperature down too fast then elements will break.

I am intrigued by the protocols for generating knowledge. There are several layers of internal scrutiny before information (usually, it seems, in the form of a model) is made public. The raw data from ATLAS is not being widely-shared. The main reason is a combination of quantity and complexity. There's the instability problem (my term): since quarks only exist for periods of time much shorter than an instant, and because it is impossible to isolate individual quarks, the original data is itself already a step or two removed from physical reality, being an aggregation of patterns captured from the impacts of quarks in space and time over 27 kilometers of the detector. The so-called raw data is basically a stable representation of the inherent instability of quarks. To make sense of the original data, then, requires not only reconstruction but also intimate knowledge of the precise conditions of the detector at every moment and each location where data was gathered.

If you recall high school science when you had to measure height, weight, temperature and duration (for instance) for some kind of reaction in order to identify a particular chemical result, then you've got the general idea. But let me share an illustration from the predecessor project, OPAL, in order to impress the scope of detail here. Before ATLAS, which is colliding protons against protons, there was a project colliding electrons and positrons (anti-electrons). Using the same twenty-seven kilometer ring, buried 100 meters underground, the LEP energy measurements detected changes in the overall length of the entire detector of one millimeter. Think on this: the detector (more-or-less a hollow tube) is 27 kilometers long (more than 16 miles), the fluctuation in energy generated from the collisions was fine-tuned to the point of being able to monitor the tube getting shorter, then longer, then shorter, then longer again by one millimeter, twice every day. Literally, the rocks move, rhythmically, this infinitesimal amount daily. Why, you might ask? Because of the orbit of the moon! Alex, a colleague of Dustin's who escorted us to the Microcosm, CERN's onsite museum, described this effect as "the tidal flow of rock."

Moon effect, therefore, is only one of the conditions that must be known in order to read the raw data and come up with reliable observations. Hence, the usefulness of simply pouring the data into the public sphere (as was so successful with the Human Genome Project) is not transparent. Rather, if an individual working on their own analysis comes up with an observation or finding with meaning potential, they must first present it to their Working Group, which - if satisfied with the rigor of the analysis, recommends it to be published in an internal publication for review by the specific scientific community associated with CERN. If the model passes this review, then it will be presented for publication to the general public. I wondered if this procedure is an inhibitory mode of control on the generation of knowledge, but Dustin's explanation presents it as a basic system of checks-and-balances.

Later, on the bus ride back into Geneva, I make a parallel with Kevin's idea about economics and capitalism that markets cannot all be completely open, but neither does each type need to be regulated in the same way. Just as we need to distinguish which kinds of markets require varying extents of relative regulation, perhaps there is legitimacy in determining which types of scientific knowledge deserve more or less safeguarding in order to avoid - or at least minimize - counterproductive tangents. CERN is, after all, a nuclear research laboratory. I was surprised to learn that CERN was conceived in 1952 as a post-World War II initiative to generate peaceful cooperation among countries in Europe, particularly in relation to nuclear research. This is nearly the same time as the European Union was getting underway.

Speaking of tangents (!), let's get back to CERN, and the Microcosm.

The body, one of the first exhibits explains, starting with cells, moving down to atoms, and finally to quarks, is 99.9% empty space. This is a more shocking statistic than the fact that our bodies are mostly water: we are less ourselves than we think we are! Three basic elements make us up: the electron, the top quark, and the down quark. In addition to the cognitive challenge of wrapping one's mind around this fact, is the additional fact that the combined mass of all the electrons, top quarks, and down quarks in your body do not add up to your total weight. The remaining mass - subtracting the total mass of actual particles in your body from what you weigh on the scale - is "binding energy." I did not see a percentage breakdown of energy/mass for the human body, but I think it's pretty cool that once those quarks and atoms are built up into molecules (water, fat, protein, bone), the rest of you (e.g., gluons, hadrons) is . . .

The terminology is complicated because the words don't make sense by themselves, it is only by learning the conceptual relationships between the words that the meanings begin to come clear. A "proton" (positive charge) and an "electron" (negatively-charged) for instance, make sense because they are in opposition to each other. Just like "empty" (as a concept) is only sensible as the opposite of "full." When we "know" something (anything!) we never know "it" by itself, we know "it" by what it isn't, by how it compares and contrasts with other related (and un-related) things. (Philosophers, however, speak of bracketing out and reduction as processes of exclusion to get down to the essence of a thing-by-itself, and the scientific method obviously still relies on this logic.) Anyway, to become familiar with a new subject, one has to learn its categories. The categories of particle physics involve the different types of particles that compose atoms. The standard model (which refers to the interactions of the four fundamental forces) begins with the parts of an atom: protons, nucleus, and electrons.

For most of my life, this kind of information failed to materialize into coherent consciousness for me. The three-dimensional world floated vaguely on a two-dimensional grid. I (more-or-less) grasped the flat plane of an x and y grid but the z axis was elusive. These three dimensions are described in CERN's Microcosm as "latitude, longitude, and altitude." Concepts I thought I understood discretely but not well in terms of being able to transfer their relationships to other realms. Now I understand better, for instance, that electrons orbiting a nucleus are not all on a flat plane, but crisscross each other in spherically diagonal manners. But why should anyone care, going down so much smaller, to the tiniest of the small, to the ways that quarks compose protons?

Because figuring out what's happening at that lowest, smallest level of reality might explain how time happens. The standard model, you see, which has had amazing (virtually perfect) accuracy of prediction for nearly thirty years, cannot explain where mass comes from. In other words, even though scientists continue to rely on it, they know that it isn't quite right! (In addition to being unable to explain mass, the standard model also doesn't adequately explain gravity.)

I'm going to skip a lot of details here, because I'm not capable, yet, of explaining the relationships all that well. Basically, the six types of quarks combine in a variety of ways to make the familiar atoms. Something quite fascinating happens with these combinations, because the basic rule seems to be that "things can only exist in neutral," meaning: the types of charges have to add up to zero. Each quark has a charge, or, as the physicists call it, a color. Enter the bosons, which carry the charges - these charges, by the way, are of weak force (which is not the same as "strong force" - the energy that holds the physical body together). There are different types of bosons, meaning different ways of carrying charge: the z boson, the w+ and the w-. In theory, the Higgs boson might explain where mass actually comes from: the theory suggests that Higgs causes things to move through time rather than at the speed of light. If you're moving at the speed of light, the reference frame of time stops.

Once we find Higgs (if it does exist as predicted), I imagine some interesting shifts in the possibilities for human consciousness.

Why not?!

:-)
_____

It took guts for Renzo Martens to make this film. The images he presents and the strategies he attempts mirror the white west back to itself, largely in unappealing ways. Exposing the exploitation of poverty implicates himself just as much as it critiques casual disregard for suffering.

By chance, earlier today I came across a quote I'd clipped out of Newsweek a few months ago, from a special they did on women leaders.

It seems to me that we often avoid looking down. The quote from the film refers physically to the black water of a river, potentially populated by dangerous creatures. Metaphorically, it refers to socioeconomic status. What does it mean to look down, to actually see the suffering of others, to face the fact that our relatively pain-free lives are built on an edifice of others' deprivation? There are limits to sympathy, indeed: we can only feel so much. But we can do more to change the structural conditions that perpetuate hopelessness.

The music track for the promovideo compiled from last year's event makes me feel like I'm missing a real party!

Interpreter for a Day at the Commission Open Day, 9 May - live streaming from 11:00 till 17:00 CET

Open Day is a great party and a great chance for the staff of the European Commission to tell the general public about what we do - to give the Commission a human face and to reach out to citizens. SCIC staff, and freelance interpreters explain what it is we do behind the walls of the European headquarters and members of the public can try themselves to be Interpreter for a Day (or a few minutes).

I listened to a bunch of kids giving it a go, very cute! :-)

This webcast is interpreted in German, English, French and Dutch by volunteer interpreters from the European Commission. A fifth language will also be available on a rotating basis. 9 May is a fun day. If the language of your choice is not available , please switch to another Channel.

The Directorate-General on Interpretation is pitching their call for interpreters working into English, which is the first video linked in a short list of webcasts I compiled in April.

I don't want your departure to hurt so much, but it does.

Silly, I know. I'm watching the wind blow lush spring foliage like currents in the sea, swirling in multiply-rippled design - now unfurling a wide swath then cutting back against itself, sweeping into new unpredictable configurations and keeping me guessing, waiting, eager for the next sussuration. I envision your spirit - free and unconfined, stretching luxuriously in a slow rush into each nook and every new cranny available to your expansive perception.

Life with you was like that. Fun, adventurous - serious with plenty of irreverence and mischief to keep everything in balance.

You figure prominently in so many significant experiences of my life: co-chairing the BiBi Committee at Austine, corralling some wild women into a spirituality group, modeling motherhood - so proud and respectful of your daughter, she of the best name-sign in the world! All those talks and walks and meals in Vermont, the summer of our Saturday mornings at the Farmer's Market. The trip to Hawai'i. Our friendship crested and ebbed like breathing as we experienced stretches of intimacy, distance, renewed closeness, and then this long, quiet goodbye.

I remember when you told me they'd found a lump in your breast. You minimized it, sure that it was nothing really, just a bit of lingering karmic energy that you would dissolve in no time. I believed you. You whose consciousness encompassed more spacetime than anyone else I know - probably more than all of us put together! - it just did not occur to me that you might be wrong. Even as the illness got worse and you left work, moving to a safe and quiet place for deep and wholesome healing, I never doubted that you would be back: that your laugh would ring out, your gaze question my grip on reality, your compassion pour out in my presence.

It will have to wait for the next incarnation, now, won't it? Maybe I'll have caught up a bit by then.

;-)

Love,
steph

The mood this week is surprisingly calm compared with the frenzy of previous sessions building up to this final session of the Sixth Term of the European Parliament. There are many contentious issues and a huge amount of work - as always - but the hustle and buzz seems subdued.

I've been following a particular dossier for the past few months which comes up for debate today and will be voted tomorrow, along with four other policies that are being recast - modified after a period of implementation. Together they are referred to as the asylum package.

A package of measures to improve the way the EU asylum system works and strengthening asylum seekers' rights is being put forward by the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee. MEPs propose amendments to enhance solidarity between Member States when managing asylum applications. The five co-decision reports that make up the package will be debated on Wednesday (6 May).

In particular, I've been observing the progress of COD/2009/0027, Establishing a European Asylum Support Office, which - this morning - is at the stage of "Awaiting EP decision, 1st reading or one reading only." Over the past two months, I have been able to watch debate unfold among most of the political groups in the Parliament and also between the Parliament, Council, and European Commission. There are some definite points of tension reflective of different ideological stances, as well as large areas of agreement. The process of negotiating compromise is what the intra- and interinstitutional structure of meetings, with reports and amendments and - eventually - voting, is designed to accomplish.

Each act of legislation is designed to stand on its own, but must also complement related procedures and relevant law. Thus my interest has been drawn to the extended asylum recast, which includes the European Refugee Fund, Minimum Reception Standards for Asylum Seekers, Member State Responsibility for Application and Protection of Asylum Seekers (known as "Dublin"), and the EURODAC fingerprinting system.

There are two Amendment (#15 and 19) to the Minimum Reception Standards concerning language that I have been watching closely. Bold marks changes. The original text from the European Commission (#15) reads,

Detained asylum seekers shall immediately be informed of the reasons for detention, the maximum duration of the detention and the procedures laid down in national law for challenging the detention order, in a language they are reasonably supposed to understand.

and the proposed text reads:

Detained asylum seekers shall immediately be informed of the reasons for detention, the maximum duration of the detention and the procedures laid down in national law for challenging the detention order, in a language they understand or may reasonably be presumed to understand.

Amendment 19 makes the same proposal concerning information being provided in a language that the seeker may be presumed to understand. While Amendment 15 refers specifically to the written notification that they will receive regarding the outcome of their request for asylum, Amendment 19 regards the provision of information about the rules, rights, and obligations of applying for asylum.

While the amendments above refer to written texts, Amendment 3 in the Member State Responsibility for Application and Protection bill refers to the provision of oral information.

Amendment 25 refers again to language, although the amendment aims to replace "person" with "applicant," leaving the original text: "Such notification shall be made in writing, in a language which the applicant is reasonably supposed to understand..." (my emphasis). A later Amendment brings this language into conformity with the formulation proposed in the other bills.

Amendment 35 to the EURODAC proposes the same language as that in the Minimum Standards amendments, but mentions both written and oral modes:

"A person covered by this Regulation shall be informed by the Member State of origin in writing, and where appropriate, orally, in a language which he or she understands or may reasonably be presumed to understand..."

At the end of all of these Amendments is a further Amendment which would change the language to state openly and without equivocation that information/communication needs to occur with asylum seekers in a language they understand, full stop.

We'll see what happens.

A post I wrote in February was discovered by l'AIIC (Professional Conference Interpreters Worldwide) and linked to from their Language in the News section:

Observing communication dynamics at the EP

"The technical orchestration of twenty-three languages performed by Members of the European Parliament and the cadre of Simultaneous Interpreters assigned to generate spontaneous comprehension is nearly seamless." Read the whole piece at Reflexivity.

Now, a few months and several observations later, my initial impressions still ring true. The technology enables parallel monolingualisms, the illusion of using the same, shared language. When Members codeswitch among different languages, this is also experienced and understood as a common, shared form of communication. The differences are blended into a new homogenous social construction.

"Are you speaking English?" asked the marine biologist. (I get that a lot.) NGO told me about dynamic semiotics while The Woman from Ghent provided commentary on the group's unique social interaction - not to mention demonstrating the lesbian walk. Several times! Meanwhile, Irish informed me she's "not really a tight bitch." (I didn't know that I was wondering!) ;-)

The length of my stay, age, and relationship status was determined (and double-checked), not to mention how I knew who. I was spared "change the subject" moments since none of my ex's are known to this community. :-) The night was divided quite evenly between laughter and dancing.

Yes, the work switch was definitely turned off - how else could I have arrived to my hosts' place at 4:15 thinking it was just a bit past midnight?!