The Linguist

20 FEATURES By sharing his learning journey in The study. He talks to Kate Trotman about If motivation is lacking in your latest language learning endeavour, Robert Crampton's tales of German evening classes might just be the encouragement you need. He's fortunate enough to have great provision for adult learning in his area of London and is keen to give a shout out to City Lit for everything they offer. The rest is about finding links between who you are and what you enjoy, and then "not mucking about", as he put it in his 'Beta Male' column for The Times. A few years ago, wanting to do something with his daughter, they took a French class together. The concept was fine, but the gap in knowledge between them proved too difficult and demotivating. She had done A level; he only had basic school French. It only lasted a term. Undeterred, he went on to find his niche in a German class. While writing an article that touched on trends in UK language learning, Crampton was shocked by the huge drop in children studying German. Since 2003, the number of GCSE entries had fallen from 125,663 to 35,913. Armed with O level German, taken more than 40 years previously, he joined a beginners class – partly, he admits, out of a sense of ego but also as an intellectual challenge. At school, he was a high achiever, but he regretted not mastering a foreign language. Being back in the classroom felt good. "Some people like going to the pub, some want to go to concerts, I quite like the educational set up as a leisure activity," he says. Judging by the numbers of people pouring into City Lit every evening – for classes ranging from anthropology to ukulele – he is not alone. "Classes are way better than online learning," he says. There's no substitute for Back to class entries in both English and Arabic provide additional context on the term's problematic nature. With such interventions, we aim to introduce distance between ourselves and the colonial authors of the records. By signalling the language, its connotations and biases, rather than simply accepting and reproducing it, we hope to encourage QDL users in Arabic and English to consider the records more critically. The archive is not neutral, nor is its language. They both reflect the colonial project with its imperialist agendas and prejudices. Like most scholarly efforts in this area, CBD remains a work in progress. It is evolving and expanding as the BLQFP teams continue to evaluate the content and context of the collections, hoping to set multilingual standards for the ongoing treatment of colonial and imperialist language. Further information • Qatar Digital Library (in English and in Arabic) • Woodbridge, D, Reid, C and Aboelezz, M (2022) 'Conscientious Bilingual Description: Treating problematic language in colonial records on the Qatar Digital Library'. In Archivoz • Shamma, T (2018) 'Translation and Colonialism'. In Harding, S-A and Carbonell Cortés, O (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture, Routledge • Modest, W and Lelijveld, R (2018) Words Matter: An unfinished guide to word choices in the cultural sector, Tropenmuseum • Wyke, B (2013) 'Ethics and Translation'. In Gambier, Y and van Doorslaer, L, Handbook of Translation Studies: Volume 1, Benjamins The word is originally Arabic but a simple back-translation would misrepresent its usage in the colonial files © JUDE EDGINTON

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