FEATURED NEWS
October 2, 2019 | The Hour
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a commission formed to figure out why the attacks occurred.

Prior to 9/11, according to the report, few colleges or universities offered courses in Middle Eastern languages or Islamic studies. The commission maintained that this made it difficult to recruit officers qualified for counterterrorism . Even though the U.S. has funded programs in foreign languages and area studies since the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks exposed our comparative ignorance of the Middle East.

The Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies would seem to represent the answer to the 9/11 report’s call for a broader educational approach to national security. Founded in 2005, the consortium has a substantial number of students studying foreign languages. The program has 300 students studying Arabic, 44 studying Persian, and 91 students studying Urdu, the highest enrollment in Urdu language courses in the United States. Lack of Arabic linguists has been cited as one of the reasons the United States missed critical messages sent by al–Qaiida about the 9/11 attacks a day before they occurred.

September 27, 2019 | Tulsa World
The Cherokee Nation announced on Friday the largest language investment in the tribe’s history.

The Durbin Feeling Cherokee Language Preservation Act would provide $16 million for a new language center, ongoing programming and a new Cabinet position within the tribal government’s administration, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said Friday at a celebration of Cherokee language speakers.

“Now is the time to be bold and act quickly so we do not fail the legacy of our ancestors or the future of our Cherokee speakers ,” Hoskin said in a written press statement. “We have focused on health care and economic development, and we have seen immeasurable achievements, but now we must also focus on saving our Cherokee language as another high priority.”

September 26, 2019 | Pro Publica
It’s a common internet experience: throw a foreign phrase into Google Translate or any other online translation tool and out comes a farcical approximation of the real thing.

That’s why many experts — even Google itself — caution against relying on the popular Google Translate for complex tasks . Google advises users that its machine translation service is not “intended to replace human translators. ”

An internal manual produced by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency charged with admitting immigrants, instructs officers who sift through non-English social media posts of refugees that “the most efficient approach to translate foreign language contents is to utilize one of the many free online language translation services provided by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.”

October 1, 2019 | WIRED
If you rely on YouTube’s captions, good luck. In a recent random sample, the common phrase “You’re on your own” was captioned “You won you’re wrong.” “Ethan has to leave” came out “ether nice to leave.” “Met” became “wet”—and “wedding,” somehow, “lady”—until finally the videos collapsed into unintelligibility . In this bizarre and silent version of YouTube, people don’t ask you to “subscribe and turn on notifications.” They ask you to “subscribe and turn on other patients.” It’s dark.

For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, making sense of videos online can be deeply frustrating, even if the video is captioned, which is now the norm (if not the law) on most platforms. YouTube’s captions are often garbled, because, unless YouTubers themselves intervene and manually type out the correct words, they’re auto-generated, the best efforts of a closed-captioning algorithm the company has been tweaking for years. Appreciative of the effort but unconvinced by the results, activists have dubbed them “craptions.”

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Registration for Language Advocacy Day 2020 is now open! Join the Joint National Committee for Languages and language advocates from around the country to let representatives know that  " multilingualism is the future ."  Register now for early bird pricing and save!

To learn more about  sponsorship opportunities , please contact Trey Calvin (tcalvin@languagepolicy.org)

October is National Arts & Humanities Month (NAHM)—a coast-to-coast collective recognition of the importance of culture in America. President Barack Obama declared October 2016 to be National Arts and Humanities Month (NAHM). First established by President Bill Clinton in 1993, NAHM highlights the importance of the arts and humanities for all Americans .

The National Humanities Alliance invites you to take part in their social media challenge to promote the value of studying the humanities. Visit their Twitter or Instagram to participate in the challenge.
PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

Deadline: October 14th

An accurate count is essential to our democracy. Census data determine congressional representation for the next ten years and ensure that each community receives its fair share of federal support, including funds for hospitals and schools. To support the Census Bureau’s effort to make sure everyone is counted, the MLA will award ten grants of $50 0 each to instructors across the United States who propose a language-based project related to the census.

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Solicitation Number: 36C24820Q0030
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Location: Department of Veterans Affairs No. Florida/So. Georgia Healthcare System
Response Date: October 7
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THURSDAY, October 3 , 2019 ISSUE
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