The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/1379045
@Linguist_CIOL JUNE/JULY The Linguist 19 International Ecolinguistics Association, 3 a network of more than 1,000 members, has been central to spreading information and making it freely available, including through a free online course. 4 Participants can access a wide range of resources, including short video clips, economics textbooks and media publications to help them put the theoretical knowledge into practice. They are introduced to eight types of story (or mental model): ideologies, framings, metaphors, evaluations, identities, convictions, erasure and salience. Such stories are useful for revealing whether a discourse is ecologically beneficial, ambivalent or destructive by means of their linguistic manifestation. For example, if nature is framed as an enemy, its linguistic manifestation would entail the use of trigger words that activate the 'war frame' in the reader. Words such as 'battle', 'destroy', 'tame', 'domination' and 'exploitation' might come to mind. Course participants reported an improved ability to analyse texts critically and use language effectively to address ecological issues. For instance, members of staff of an environmental consultancy agency revealed that they now use more challenging language in the blogs and articles they edit, and use more precise terminology when analysing their clients' environmental activities. CHANGING CLIENTS' MINDS Since climate change is ultimately everyone's responsibility, we all have a clear opportunity post-Covid to rebuild a more equal society. Pandemics offer a unique opportunity for understanding the complexity of how an ecological system works. According to Laura Spinney, a pandemic "[…] is a social phenomenon as much as it is a biological one; it cannot be separated from its historical, geographical and cultural context". 5 But for that to happen, the world will need responses from various disciplines and actors. Translators have an important task in making these responses available to everyone – whether by translating new research or by enabling that research to go beyond academia. Another crucial role is highlighting ecologically unhelpful language choices and translating the voices of those who have been marginalised so they can be taken into account in the development of new responses. To this effect, ecolinguistics can offer practical tools to help us contribute to this change more efficiently. The production of palm oil is a practical example of how linguistic patterns can both reveal unhelpful discourses and promote beneficial ones. Palm oil is traditionally used in cosmetics, food manufacturing and biofuel, but it has a devastating environmental impact. A corpus from the English and Spanish websites of two food multinationals shows how companies conveniently reframe their palm oil sourcing policies to make their production 'sustainable'. 6 In the corpus, the overall evaluation is that 'sustainable palm oil is good' and that its mass production should continue even if the system is flawed and company targets have not been met. Evaluations are areas in people's minds which are characterised as negative or positive, and this is achieved linguistically by means of appraisal items. 7 In this example, items such as "it brings money, trade and jobs" and "can contribute to economic development and poverty alleviation" activate a positive economic frame on the reader. A positive appraisal is also achieved by highlighting the versatility of palm oil over its alternatives with the use of superlatives and adverbs: "a highly productive crop", "the most land efficient crop". On the other hand, the parties involved and the areas affected by deforestation are overlooked and given GET INVOLVED Everyone from translators working from home (top) to language teachers (above) can play a part in ecolinguistics IMAGES © SHUTTERSTOCK