The Linguist

@CIOL_Linguists What the papers say… British Museum Agrees to Pay Translator Whose Work it Used Without Permission, 9/8/23 After the initial online firestorm in June, [Yilin] Wang wasn't satisfied with the museum's response, and launched an online fundraiser to pay for legal representation. An outpouring of support from various corners of the internet ensued, from LGBTQ communities she was part of to academic groups, fellow translators and writers, and even the BTS superfan group known as ARMY. Strategies for Irish Language and Ulster- Scots Due Within Year, 7/7/23 A strategy is a long-term plan to protect and promote the languages, but is separate to language laws. There has been a legal duty on the NI Executive since 1998 to have a strategy for both Irish and Ulster-Scots. However, there is none as yet. The executive has previously been declared in breach of its legal duty in the courts for its failure to adopt an Irish language strategy. The latest from the languages world From Eurovision to K-pop, language diversity in pop music is booming, says Philip Harding-Esch Multilingual diversity is flourishing in pop music and this was particularly evident when the UK hosted the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of last year's winners, Ukraine. Not only did the contest feature songs from across the continent in many different languages, the proceedings also gave pride of place to performances from recent Ukrainian entries and Ukrainian co-presenters. British actress Anna Waddingham, who co-hosted the show, impressed with her excellent French, "sending Eurovision fans wild" in the words of the Evening Standard. British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters also made headlines, especially Adrian Bailey, whose enthusiastic interpretation of runner-up Norway's 'Cha Cha Cha' gained him many fans on social media: "He is so brilliant, absolutely the best act there! Love him." Weeks later, the same phenomenon emerged at Glastonbury Festival when the Foo Fighters' BSL interpreter stole the show. But the increased visibility of different languages in the pop landscape appears to be more substantial than one-off TV events. Eurovision this year delivered some enduring hits in the UK. Indeed, in the week after the NEWS & EDITORIAL final, four of the entries were in the UK Top 10, including 'Cha Cha Cha', which became the UK's first ever Norwegian-language chart hit. This is part of a wider shift in pop music tastes worldwide, which Far Out Magazine explored in an article analysing the rise of non-English hits in the US in the last five years. Looking back at the first non-English- language song to reach number one in the states – 'Nel Blu, Dipinto Di Blu' by Domenico Modugno in 1958 – it described how "occasionally foreign language tracks from the extensive fabric of world music have surpassed cultural barriers, and the trend is only continuing to grow". Despite this, only nine non-English songs have reached number one in America – three of those since 2017. Latin music grew by over 55% between 2020 and 2022 in the US, nearly three times the rate of the industry as a whole. Other majority non-English musical genres have taken the charts by storm, most notably K-pop. The West African-led Afrobeats genre, which was platformed by mainstream pop behemoth Beyoncé in her 2019 Lion King soundtrack album, has also grown in influence. AUTUMN 2023 The Linguist 5 Google Translate vs. ChatGPT: Which one is the best language translator?, 8/6/23 We asked bilingual speakers of seven languages to do a blind test… They ranked the translated version for their language by Google Translate, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Bing. Once they completed the exercise, we revealed which service produced each one… For Amharic and Tagalog, we suspect the chatbots lacked enough data to make a nuanced response that fit the context of the paragraph. Instead, they appeared more literal than Google Translate, the opposite of what we saw for the other languages. Top of the pops

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