Siraya update

[MJ Hardman]

Indeed, and even worse.  If the languages are close then it might be
intelligible, but for the languages I work with the very particles that make
the sentences grammatical were labeled 'adornments' because they have no
translation, so the materials were not even grammatical.  And vowel dropping
was considered 'sloppy' though in these languages the dropping carries
important grammatical information.  The result was non-intelligibility --
which led to the Tupe revolt -- the kids in school were telling the teachers
that what they were teaching was not Jaqaru!  And there were more problems,
of course.

I would say that translation itself is inappropriate for primers -- *all*
primers should be original materials.

MJ

On 4/23/09 5:27 PM, "William J Poser" <wjposer at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

> Even if the materials are culturally appropriate, another problem
> with simply translating materials made for one language into another
> is that, if the languages are fairly closely related, it is all too
> easy to fail to translate completely. I've seen literacy materials
> where all but one version was based on the initial version and in
> every case there are bits of the initial version that were inadvertently
> left unchanged.
> 
> Bill
>