A high-tech translator clarifies a dying tongue (fwd)

Sun Mar 4 03:26:30 UTC 2007

Posted on Sat, Mar. 03, 2007

A high-tech translator clarifies a dying tongue
Handheld device lets a Prairie Island elder's voice teach his Sioux
dialect

BY DAVID HANNERS
Pioneer Press
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/16823961.htm

WELCH, Minn. — With his white hair and a face as deeply lined as a
contour map, 71-year-old Curtis Campbell hardly seems the picture of
cutting-edge technology.

But as he sits in a recliner in his living room, headset and microphone
perched on his head, he is using digital recording gear to preserve an
endangered language.

"They don't really teach these kinds of things in college. Maybe someday
they will," Campbell says as he and Wayne Wells, a Dakota language
consultant, get set to record on a laptop computer.

Campbell is an elder in the Mdewakanton Sioux tribe that makes up the
Prairie Island Indian Community, and he is one of a small number of
Minnesotans fluent in a particularly old dialect of Siouan. He is a key
part of a tribal project, overseen by Wells, to record the Dakota
language so it can be programmed into an instant electronic translator
that seems like something out of "Star Trek."

Known as the Phraselator P2, the handheld device already is being used
by U.S. soldiers in Iraq to help them communicate with Iraqis. A person
can speak into the Phraselator P2 — a unit just slightly bigger than a
paperback book — and a pre-programmed voice repeats the phrase,
translated.

For example, say "What is your name?" into the Phraselator P2 that Wells
uses, and it responds with the Dakota equivalent, "He toked eciyapi he?"

The device can carry different chips for different languages. The
military, law enforcement and medical personnel have used it for a
while, but American Indian tribes recently have begun using it to
preserve their native tongues.

Many of those languages began dying out last century as a result of
federal efforts to force Indians to speak English and a younger
generation's reluctance to learn the tongue from its elders, said Don
Thornton, who started Thornton Media, a California firm that produces
language and translation tools.

"Originally, there were about 300 languages spoken in the U.S., and now
there's about 200, and in 20 years, it'll be down to 20," said
Thornton, a soft-spoken Cherokee who started the company. The former
Los Angeles filmmaker traveled to the Prairie Island Indian Community
this week to help tribal officials with the project.

"That's how quickly the language is disappearing," he said. "We're in a
real race here. And it's not just a language. It's how they view the
world."

Preserving A Tradition / Anthropologists aren't sure when humans first
developed language, but most believe it was at least 40,000 years ago.
Language communicates thought, but some idioms and dialects do it
better than others.

That fact becomes apparent while Campbell sits in his chair and works
with Wells, a 2003 graduate of the University of Minnesota who works
for the Prairie Island Indian Community.

On his laptop, Wells has a list of common phrases or concepts in English
that Campbell will translate into his Dakota dialect to record onto the
computer. Often, word-for-word translations aren't possible, Campbell
explains.

"Some (words) take a few words, some take a whole paragraph," he says,
adding that, as a language, Dakota tends to be much more descriptive
than English.

For example, one of the concepts on the list to be translated is "to be
strong-hearted."

"It's not like English, where you can say things in one word," Campbell
says. "When they come up with words like that, it needs some
explanation."

Thornton has helped other tribes preserve their languages. To build the
Phraselator P2 database, contributors record up to 800 translated
phrases a day onto the computer.

He says few of them complain of overwork.

"What you find is, a lot of times, elders are anxious to pass the
language down," he said. "They want to preserve the language. They
don't just want to have it in a museum."

Thornton said that when Campbell is done — perhaps by the end of the
week — the database he's helped create can be used to teach others to
speak Dakota. Students will be able to use the Phraselator P2 as an
around-the-clock tutor so they can become proficient enough in the
language to teach others.

"A lot of elders we find spend too much time teaching basics," Thornton
says.

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