ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Soliloquy category.

Research

I want to be able to talk about the field of Second Language Acquisition, my encounter with it last semester, and how much the questions it raises are more than the answers it provides. I am back into reading extensive materials in the field many of which didn’t make as much of a dent as they should have during that first encounter. I won’t now, not just because my knowledge is not yet as comprehensive as it should, and that a carry-over from a daunting first encounter is unhelpful in allowing me open up more to its possibilities, but also because I’m afraid of misrepresenting the extent and influence of what I already know. My MA thesis will have very much to do with SLA and I need all the concentration I can get.

But talking about what I’m doing always helps, as I have found out. Having less time to travel around the country discovering places now like I did before, all I have now is my research and the hard work of creating relevance in a field that gives me the freedom to think, and the tools to make a difference. This time, I’m looking at tonal acquisition. The fact that not much has been done in the area so far is also as positive as it is challenging. So while the research process begins to take shape, let’s see what Krashen and Chomsky have to say again.

Missing Teaching

Re-reading this post and this one yesterday, I realized how much I miss teaching the language class. My two fun semesters between 2009 and 2010 was filled with a diverse range of students struggling to make sense of a new language and culture while trying to get good grades. And somewhere in-between giving and taking knowledge from each other, we managed to have a swell time every time we met. The Yoruba language classes still remain, but I don’t teach it anymore. I am now a full-time student, and I miss those times.

Homeliness and the Deck

Driving in a dry warm weather through a whiff of air that smells like harmattan and its burnt grass flavour, he heads to school. This is the standard. There are other freedoms along the way: a chance to walk a quiet neighbourhood at night with a coon cat on a leash with a few random stares by those who had never seen anyone of that height and/or complexion in that side of town in a long time, and greeting nods from those who had, or who know him as the new stranger in the big house. An always wonderful evening meal with an amazing family, and after-conversations ranging from events, to issues, to life, and to time.

On the last day of December, 1983 – you were too small to remember – we were stuck at the border point between Benin and Nigeria trying to get back into the country after having traversed the West African coastline visiting very nice places. The Benin border patrols had cleared us but the Nigerian folks won’t let us in. They said there had been a change of government… And the Beninoise then refused to let us back in their country as soon as we got back there… Has anything changed now?

Sitting on the wooden deck out in the warm evening breeze, he looks down into the woods where trees of varying heights and shades go on and on onto a house farther down where no one had ever been. Some people used to live there. On the closer trees are bird feeders filled with sunflower seeds. Father showed him how to add more to it whenever it finished. The squirrels spend much of their times there. Chipmunks also come whenever the sound of hawks are not close by. With little pouches under their necks, they look almost as their exaggerated depictions in those animated movies. A robin came in once along with a little one. Hummingbirds offer a most surprising sight, wheezing in and out of sight like extra large honeybees. The cardinals are the most beautiful, with red crested heads and feathers and a certain grace, all giving the evening a flavour of more than just their sounds.

Whenever the amazing tune of life gets stuck in the mucky throat of over-excitement or even oversimplification, the deck offers comfort, along with the other perks of homeliness. Then everything is all right again.

On Migrations, and Age

This recent post on my colleague Clarissa’s blog on migrations and the kind of immigrants/grad students that we find in the US raises interesting perspectives. The post she wrote and the one she referenced both talk about the two extremes of being migrant students/travellers in the US: they either completely or extremely assimilate (sometimes even more fervently than already settled natives), or refuse to assimilate at all, living in the host country only in the flesh, and keeping their minds fixated only with things from home. Both extremes are unsustainable but we have all at one point or the other met people who leaned more to either side of the continuum.

Does it have to do with age, education, gender or religion? I can’t tell, but one very endearing characteristics of Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay to me was the very removed but well situated (beautifully written) reflections on life in Poland as observed from California where the author had chosen to settle after a career lasting very many years. It was in the interaction of his fossilized Polish cultural personality with the new and dynamic of the American West Coast that the beautiful book of reflections emerged, and one is grateful for it. I suspect that the extent (and more importantly, progression) of the immigrant’s insularity on the continuum of eventual assimilation will determine the extent of creative conflict that might turn out to delight in form of essays and literary reflections. And surely, age does add a very interesting dynamic.

By the end of our teenage years, we are all usually well situated in our cultural surroundings to be able to thrive with it in a foreign country. The result of the melange of attitudes and interactions from then on determines much of how one’s adult life in a foreign country eventually plays out, and much of it is also fuelled by attitude. For a second here, I return to the short moments at the end of Wole Soyinka’s Ake and V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street where the young impressionable men leave their home surroundings for the very first time. Insularity ends, and the real world lessons begin. There might be something to be learnt in comparing the thought progression, attitudes and output of the three writers through the prism of their travel experiences, and more importantly, exposure. And time.

Advances in Indigenous Language Technology

I am fortunate to have worked with some of the most prominent people at the forefront of language technology development in Nigeria. In 2004, during the West African Languages Congress (WALC 2004) conference co-hosted by the Department of Linguistics in my alma mater in Ibadan and the African Languages Technology Initiative, I came across some of the new advancements in localization, and efforts in making African languages relevant to changing times. Work in the area of language technology has produced a Yoruba (and I believe Igbo, Hausa) keyboard for computers, a corpus for translation of computer/technology terms from English to local languages, and a growing body of researchers working between Engineering, Computer Science and Linguistics to bring local languages into the global marketplace. I was the webmaster and quasi-secretary of the conference and I remember the breadth and depth of the number of presentations we had from linguists and scholars from all over the world. (You can find the proceeds from the conference in this book – also available on Amazon).

All new mobile phones aimed at Nigeria today from Nokia, Samsung and Sony, as well computer products from Microsoft have made options in prominent local languages a part of their products. I’ve worked since 2004 in the field of such translation work. Today we have Facebook and Twitter as the most prominent means of global interaction, but they are still mainly in major world languages. Twitter announced their translation centre a few months ago but have still not opened it up to any African language in spite of (I can at least vouch for my) repeated calls and bids for a chance of voluntary participation. I would personally love to see twitter usable (at least) in Yoruba (and I will keep badgering twitter’s translation centre until they budge.) It will take a while for major languages on the continent to catch up with the speed of technological advancements, but significant changes are made everyday.

This article – published in Farafina Magazine’s Issue #12 – documents one of my earliest experiences with language translation involving technology, mixed with some of my personal reflections on the field, on life and culture, and on the process and interactions involved in translation. I wrote it in 2006 and it was published in December 2007. (H/T @toluogunlesi for bringing this piece back to my attention today.)

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