Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

Immersion
Dipping your toe into the sea is not immersion. Dipping into language is not
immersion. Immersion is where you take your whole body and submerge it into
the sea. Immersion in language is the ability to do everything in your language.
At Translate immersion is our vision, while for most languages it might not be
a reality it is a goal for which we strive.
For a language that is fully immersed this would mean: you switch on your
computer and it boots in your language, your emails are written in your
language and spell checked correctly, your keyboard works for your language.
Your cellphone, TV, ATM are all in your language. When you surf the web
you can get content: news, wikipedia, facebook in your language. You look for
books online and you find ones written in your language.
That is a fully immersed language.
First Aid Kit for Languages
Moving from a dream to reality. We often hear talk of the 6000 languages of the
world, often that figure is used to indicate how fast our languages are dying.
Why are we so fascinated by languages dying Is this a morbid fascination with
death and destruction We really shouldn’t care if languages die. Time has told
us that languages come and go. What we should be very concerned about are
the people behind those languages. If people are dying then we really should
be concerned.
The reality is in many cases people are dying. Without language they have
poor access to education, health care and employment. Without these, people’s
lives are impacted often leading to them not reaching their potential, dying of
treatable diseases and not being able to sustain their own families.
Instead of bemoaning the dying languages we need to focus on how to give
them first aid. First aid of course is medical intervention before real medical
care commences. What is critical for a written language is the ability to:
60
1. Capture content
2. See content
3. Store content
We achieve this with a keyboard, to type in content; fonts, to see the content
and a locale to store the information correctly on a computer. With these