Berenstain Bears now speaking endangered language

[Rudy Troike]

I strongly agree with Richard and MJ -- the cultural capital of native groups
is eroded and obliterated by this pernicious process. At a more subtle level,
translation can change native mental categorizations even without people being
aware of it. Some years ago I was working with teams in Guatemala developing
materials in four Mayan languages for the national bilingual program. To keep
the curriculum parallel, so that native students would not be behind Spanish
speaking children, the math textbooks in Spanish were being translated into the
native languages. Crucially, in the introduction to sets, the translators were
simply taking the Spanish categories (e.g., 'bush:tree') and substituting Mayan
equivalents. On the surface, this might seem innocuous, but on questioning the
translators, I found that the Spanish distinctions did not always correspond
1:1 with native categories, so I suggested, to their surprise, that they NOT
simply translate the Spanish categories, but examine their languages to look
for native categories that the children could conceptually relate to.

To repeat my favorite story from Barney Old Coyote, he visited a THIRD GRADE
class with both Crow and Anglo children, and found that the Crow children were
performing miserably on simple addition problems of apples and oranges. He
asked the teacher if he could take over the class for a short while, and began
proposing probability problems based on the hand ball game. The Crow students
astounded their peers (and the teacher, who considered them hopeless) by
computing the answers at amazing speed. They showed that they were masters of
CULTURALLY RELEVANT MATH, far beyond the level of math taught in the school.

  Rudy

  Rudy Troike
  Tucson, AZ