The Linguist

24 The Linguist Vol/62 No/1 thelinguist.uberflip.com REVIEWS This short book is the result of an online dialogue between Noam Chomsky and his former student Andrea Moro. It touches on The avowed purpose of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) with a humanitarian focus, such as Amnesty International, Save the Children and Oxfam, is to defend human rights and provide assistance to people in need around the world. Many of these people – victims of famine, war, poverty etc – are in countries where English is not commonly spoken. To provide them with the help they need, therefore, it would seem essential that NGO staff are able to communicate with them in their own languages, to avoid misunderstandings and to foster a sense of engagement and empowerment. As Wine Tesseur eloquently explains in Translation as Social Justice: Translation policies and practices in non-governmental organisations, however, this is not usually the case. Drawing on a considerable volume of research, she describes how only one of the INGOs studied in the book has a robust internal translation and interpreting service. In the other organisations, even when written language policies do exist, the day-to-day utilisation of translation and interpreting in dealings with non-English speakers is haphazard, ill-defined and inefficient. To resolve their translation needs these INGOs generally draw on the skills of staff with some knowledge of the local language, on an informal basis, or resort to free online machine translation. The pitfalls of these approaches are obvious. In the first case, the employees concerned may not have sufficient fluency in the local language to communicate effectively, while the second involves a considerable risk of potentially serious inaccuracies. Tesseur mentions how several NGOs operating in Kyrgyzstan regularly use Google Translate to translate entire funding applications from Russian or Kyrgyz into English as they cannot afford a professional job, without having any means of verifying the translation's accuracy. Slapdash solutions of this kind cause discomfort, or even embarrassment, among some – but not all – of the NGOs' administrative staff. They are well aware of their shortcomings and advocate greater investment in systematic and reliable translation and interpreting procedures within their organisations. In a concluding chapter, the author provides a number of recommendations that could be applied for this purpose, as a means of ensuring that translation really does lead to empowerment and social justice. Ross Smith MCIL Translation as Social Justice Wine Tesseur Routledge, 2022 192 pp; ISBN 9781032331317 Paperback, £34.99 The Secrets of Words Noam Chomsky and Andrea Moro MIT Press, 2022 136 pp; ISBN 9780262046718 Hardback, £16.99 linguistics, neurobiology and philosophy, with digressions on the history of science, its paradigms and its pioneers, such as Newton, Pasteur and de Saussure. In the last third, Moro summarises the central tenets of Chomsky's theories of language and then considers whether a truly unified science of neurolinguistics will ever come into being. Chomsky makes a distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' in language, similar to langue and parole, but with the importance of the former greatly emphasised. It manifests itself as the innate capacity of infants to acquire their mother tongue without conscious learning and despite "the poverty of the stimulus". The process occurs in the stage of development when the infant is open to any language: "the stem mind". Thus, language acquisition is regarded as analogous to the development of the digestive system or the onset of puberty. Language is structure dependent (sentence, noun phrase, verb phrase…) with hierarchy embedded in it. If this were not the case and language operated only as strings of words then adjacency would overrule syntax and meaning would be confounded. Moro would call this "an impossible language". We know that in the sentence '[the bombing of the cities] is a crime' the bracketed noun phrase requires a singular form of the verb although a plural noun immediately precedes it. Currently, neuro-imaging can show the 'where' of language processing and production, but not the 'what' (i.e. the actual neurobiological mechanisms associated with primitive elements of language). Could this be an area of future discovery? Or will access to such knowledge remain occluded in the brain, our most complex organ? Moro considers such mapping using the imagery of a tapestry which, when viewed from underneath, shows different, unexpected patterns. Chomsky ruminates: "Puzzles and challenges abound, maybe even mysteries that are beyond our cognitive reach." The Secrets of Words is a small but engrossing book that will repay further readings. I would have liked the authors to expand on the area where Chomsky refers to the "hype and propaganda" from Silicon

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