Conference fun (NKFUST)

It was time again for a conference, this time the "2008 Conference on Technology Enhanced Foreign Language Instruction". It got an excellent kick-off with a MS Word-created HTML page announcing the conference at the wrong place, but then things stabilised.

For me personally there were two very interesting acts, one being a keynote speech, the other a presentation. The interesting keynote was done by Dr. Hans Werner Hess from Hongkong. Surrounded by all the forced optimism regarding e-learning and all, he dared to criticise that concept. He has a very interesting similar paper on-line.

Why would I find such criticism interesting? Because I have to say that I share his views. Yes, I consider myself a "geek", and there even was a time when I would have called myself a "hacker" ("hacker", not "cracker", mind you that), something I'm missing a bit now. 

Exactly because I understand these devices I am dealing with, I know that they are not the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. I am not blinded by the light, as so many seem to be. Let them get used to the light (may take a year or two), and they too may notice that gadgets can be really nice and shiny, but that they are just that: gadgets. They can help, but they will not replace you.

The interesting presentation was by Dr. Mark Lim (oh, transcription...), who indeed hacked two bash scripts to automatically retrieve news from the NHK website and strip them off text and video. Just bad the NKFUST network didn't like his Knoppix live CD.

And then there were two things I couldn't really understand: One was a product presentation, done by a publishing house. It was indeed a nice gadget that they introduced, but still... I thought this was a scientific conference, not Computex. I would have expected such products being demoed outside in the foyer.

And the other... May I just say: I know how to use iTunes, thank you very much! Maybe I should write a paper on how to use AdiumX and call it "Language skill improvement through interaction between students and teachers by synchronous internet communication using AdiumX". Then in my presentation I will spend 30 minutes going through the AdiumX manual...

Conference fun (NKFUST)

It's always fun to see a school with "technology" in its name running into problems with said technology, our school (After almost seven years, General Affairs is still unable to let the bell ring on time - or at all...) is no exception. But this time the topic was translation and interpreting (even though they called it "interpretation"), not technology in language teaching, so let's ignore that.

This was the first time some of my students went with me, and although one of them had pretty high expectations and was a bit disappointed later, I still think the day was not wasted for them. I was in fact surprised to see so many students on the list, even from more northern schools. (Though, funnily, they had not put my name on that list...)

There were bits of theory presented that were not too closely related to my job, and maybe next time I should really prepare a camera and snap photos of attendees sunken into deep self-reflections (as long as I am not too busy self-reflecting myself), but there were a few presentations that kept even my students very awake.

Something I really like about conferences at NKFUST: Foreigners are not considered idiots speaking only their native language, and people do not care what language is used in presentations, questions and answers. If you want to attend such conference or a certain presentation, you have to be able to understand more than one language, otherwise you're at the wrong party, period.

No more "English names", please

So you are teaching English. And of course you have given all of your students "English names" - if they didn't already have one. I would like to ask you a question, if you don't mind (and actually even if you do): Why?

Why would someone who is not wanted by FBI, CIA and NBA for something like wearing the wrong t-shirt want a second or even third and fourth name? What is the advantage of that? Running from a marriage?

So you are teaching English. That means you have a certain understanding of English, as well as a certain understanding of language in general, right? Mind if we have a walk? Not through the park, through language. You might want to take your jacket, we may be away for a few minutes...

I'm sure you have heard this example sentence: "The book is on the table." Boring, I know... But let's have a look at some aspects of this sentence which you might not have thought about before. So how does someone know that the book is on the table? Oh, yes, because you said so, of course.

But how does someone know what a book is, and what a table? Talking of that: What is a table? How does it look like? Can we agree that it is (I quote Wikipedia, even though there is no citation for this) "a form of furniture composed of a surface supported by a base, usually four legs"? Sounds sensible, doesn't it? And you noticed that I spoke of "a table", using an indefinite article? So there are a few of them...

For the book we can probably agree on a lot of printed papers bound to one another at one side? So looking back at the example sentence, what we actually want to express with it is "there is a bunch of printed papers being joined on one side, which is currently located on top of a surface that is supported by one to four legs". Sounds pretty complicated, but this is what we mean, what we think of when we say "the book is on the table". (I don't want to dive into the other elements of this sentence now, the nouns are work enough.)

Btw, I think you did tell your students that both "book" and "table" are nouns? And I suppose you remember that nouns are used to name "things". Did I just say "name"? Seems to be: If we can't name something, how do we want to talk about it? However, these nouns seem to apply not just to a single object, but to a whole class of identical or at least similar objects.

So when I hear the word "table", I'm sure that the table I imagine has a colour different from yours. Mine is really shiny, btw. But still, both are tables. So a noun has a semantic component, a meaning, something we think of when we hear that word.

You may have noticed that also here in Taiwan they have tables and books, though they name them slightly differently: "zhuozi" (桌子) for tables and "shu" (書) for books. And this is where dictionaries enter the game: A dictionary basically lists the words used in two different languages for the same things, having the same meanings. So a dictionary is basically just a table pairing words with identical meanings, but belonging to different languages.

And what has all this got to do with names? Well, I would like to ask for your name now, but since that is slightly impossible, let us assume please that your name is "Mike" - a nice, typical "English name". A question: What does it mean?

You never asked yourself that question? I'm sure you will be filled with pride when I tell you the meaning: Who is like God. There are however a few problems with this...

First, Mike is short for Michael, which is a name that comes from Hebrew. So much about the typical "English" name. And second, while some of them were nice fellows, I have not met a single Mike in my life who made the impression he would be in any way related to a God.

So, let's suppose we want to translate your name into another language. Translation means we will transfer a meaning, and the meaning here would be "godlike". (You don't play Quake, do you?) No, wait, if the meaning in English is "godlike", why are you called "Mike" then? Your name should already be the English translation of a Hebrew word!

Confused? Naturally. You may have noticed that names too are nouns, but they are somewhat "special", in English called proper nouns. And these may have a meaning, but that meaning is usually not related to the person a name is assigned to. Doubt? I am not into golf, but the last time I saw an image of Tiger Woods he did not quite look like either a cat or some shrubbery.

Another question: Have you ever met someone from France or have you perhaps been there yourself? How many of the French you met have an English name? Or perhaps Italians? Or Germans?

I am German, and when I tell people that I don't have an "English name", their next question usually is "So what is your German name?" Unfortunately, I don't have such either. My name comes from Scandinavia, is pretty popular in Norway or Sweden. So is it a Swedish name? Or a Norwegian one? Or better a "Scandinavian name"?

Do you understand Chinese? Then you should know that the term used in Taiwan for "English name" is "yingwen mingzi" (英文名字), which means a name written in English. You will never hear the term "yingyu mingzi" (英語名字), which would mean a name spoken in English - this term simply does not exist.

And when Taiwanese speak about "German names" they will call them "dewen mingzi" (德文名字), not "deyu mingzi" (德語名字). So the whole "English name" business is not about the language, it's about the letters the name is written in. I never needed a "Russian name" when I visited the Soviet Union, neither did I need a "Japanese name" when I was living in Japan. (Though I had one, for "special" situations.)

I had just one name until I started to study Chinese. And why did I need a "Chinese name" then? Two reasons: One is computers (Our school's administrative system is even in 2008 unable to process my real name.), the other is the strange phenomenon that Taiwanese can handle thousands of Hanzi, but are often unable (lack of practice, I'd say) to remember the few Roman characters needed for a European's name.

You see, my name is Olaf (Please don't apply English pronounciation to it, OK?), and if I went to Russia now I would just write my name as Олаф - same name, just a different script. In Japan it became オーラフ, and here in Taiwan it could be written as 歐拉夫. (But it isn't.)

It is the same name every time, just in a different script. There is no translation, only transcription. This is how names should be dealt with, and this is how names are dealt with in most parts of this planet. But there is a small island, 394x144km "large"...

And why are things so different on this small island? Quite a few people probably do not like to hear this, but many (most) Taiwanese got a few concepts regarding language wrong, and the really sad thing is that even most of the "language experts" you may encounter are following those wrong concepts. So the people who are supposed to teach language actually teach a few (basic) things incorrectly - and that is not restricted to English, it applies to Chinese too...

One concept that people here in Taiwan do not like to accept is that there is a spoken language and there is a script (characters) chosen for that language. These two are separate items, not a couple married for eternity.

A lot of countries have changed the characters they are using through the course of history. I could not quite read my grandmother's handwriting, because she only wrote partially in Latin script. Vietnam and Korea used to use the same characters as China. Vietnam now uses Latin script, while Korea developed its own.

Mongolia had to get along with Hanzi when it was part of China, now they use Cyrillic script, the same as Russia. And here comes another problem with most people in Taiwan: While they may have heard some of these, they do not actively know. What they know is this:

"I have learned Chinese. The characters I use to write Chinese are therefor 'Chinese characters' (zhongwenzi 中文字). I have learned English. They use different characters. Those are ‘English characters' (yingwenzi 英文字). There is a country nearby called Japan. I have not quite learned their language, but they use different characters. Those are 'Japanese characters' (riwenzi 日文字, sometimes also ribenzi 日本字 - characters of Japan). And there is another country nearby called Korea. They too use different characters. Those are called 'Korean characters' (hanwenzi 韓文字 - or hanguozi 韓國字, characters of Korea)."

Just look at how most people in Taiwan call the language they speak: "zhongwen" (中文). That is "written Chinese". I don't know about you, but I don't speak written text, I only write it. Funnily, there is usually a pair of names for each language, like "fayu" (法語, spoken French) and "fawen" (法文, written French), "riyu" (日語, spoken Japanese) and "riwen" (日文, written Japanese), but this does not apply every time.

There is no "zhongyu" (中語) as someone might expect to accompany "zhongwen" (中文). So, basically, people here in Taiwan only speak a written language... Yes, I know, there is "guoyu" (國語), but what is that? It's the "national language". There are classes with the same name in Japan, teaching - yes, Japanese.

The word used for Taiwanese however is "taiyu" (台語), and there is (Surprise, surprise...) no "taiwen" (台文). The same applies to "American English", now all the rage in Taiwan: There is "meiyu" (美語), but no "meiwen" (美文). (Hmm, does that mean Taiwanese think Americans can't write?) If you should happen to go to the PRC, you may notice that people there care a bit more about correct terms related to language. Though, fortunately, MoE recently decided to call the Mandarin used in Taiwan "huayu" (華語), so at least we finally have a spoken language.

Anyway, in language classes in Taiwan, the message is that there is a language and that language is intrinsically tied to its characters. And that's just not true. Latin script, the characters I am using right now, is the most widely used writing system on this planet. Lots of languages rely on this script, just look at the map.

So why would Taiwanese want an "English name"? Because foreigners can not read their name the way they usually write it: in Hanzi. So, wouldn't it be OK then if Taiwanese knew how to write their name in Latin script? Yes, that is exactly what is needed, but...

You see, due to all the misunderstandings regarding language I mentioned above, transcription systems are not seen as such in Taiwan. "Transcription" would mean that I write the same word (in this case a name) in different characters. For most Taiwanese, Latin script is "English" (since that is the only foreign language using Latin script they learned), so for them a transcription becomes a translation. This is incorrect, but very widely believed in Taiwan.

And unfortunately, nobody really wants to learn any romanisation system. In Japan, people learn Hepburn, so they know how to write their names in Latin script. In the PRC, people learn Hanyu Pinyin, so they too know how to write their names in a writing system many people will understand.

In Taiwan however, the government does not only need to invent their own "system" to emphasize their uniqueness, they do not even bother to teach it at any school. If you do not teach it, who will be able to use it then? So it will be business as usual: Students will still ask "The new foreign teacher can not read Chinese. Can you give me an English name?"

OK, so far I have tried to show you the "scientific evidence" for the whole "English name" game being wrong. Confronted with these facts, the answer I usually get from Taiwanese (and some foreigners) is that it doesn't really matter and that "it's OK if we know it" (我們知道就好。) - so it does not matter if others do not know those names. It seems however, that none of those people ever had to do a certain amount of interpreting.

I am an interpreter, teaching interpreting now and I can torture my students easily with "English names". Even if someone knows who is behind "Twinhead" (and only few know), they usually never have heard of "Powermax". And although they should know a bit about universities in Taiwan, almost nobody knows where exactly "Formosa university" is located. And I didn't even start with people's names...

Let's assume that of the 23m people roaming this small island only ten per cent have an "English name". If your name is indeed Mike, could you please use your divine powers to tell me the English name of Xiao Wanzhen? You don't know? Why?

Oh, no problem, just look it up in a dictionary! After all, dictionaries are there to help you with translations, aren't they? OK, my heaviest dictionaries only hold close to 100,000 records, so I wonder how the 2.3m "English names" (plus their equivalent "Chinese names") should fit in there, but how should I know, I'm just a foreigner living in Taiwan...

But even if there was such a dictionary (or better: a directory), it would need to be updated constantly. Did you notice how quickly people switch their "English names"? What you probably did not know: Even companies and other organisations can relatively easily change their "English name", while it is quite a hassle to change the "Chinese name". The message here: That "English name" is crap anyway, only needed for foreigners, let them guess...

And guessing (or better resigning) is what you end up with if you are an interpreter. But not only then. Imagine this: When I was working in an electronics company in Taizhong, we had a sales guy who suddenly changed his name one day. "Hey, can you call me Elvis now? I don't like my previous name any more..." I can not remember his previous name, but let's say it was Peter.

So "Peter" was known to a few foreigners at other companies. They exchanged business cards, and two months later one of them wants to call Peter. He changed his name a month ago and right after that a new guy came into the company. Peter/Elvis is not there and the new guy answers the phone. He never heard of a "Peter", so he tells the foreigner after a short check that there may have been a Peter before but that there is none now...

And this goes on and on. So if your students ask you for an "English name", please, just don't do it! If you want to teach your students something, teach them a real spelling alphabet, so people on the phone actually know whether that was a "b" or a "p" or a "d" or... And teach them romanisation of Chinese, preferably Hanyu Pinyin, since this still is the international standard (ISO-7098:1991) for writing Chinese in Latin script and may also help them when they go abroad. Otherwise they sit there in another country and have to use English in their correspondence with their parents...

Sorry, our walk took a little longer, but I hope it was worth it...

Conference fun (NKFUST)

Last week I attended a conference in Gaoxiong. While the topic ("Transcending Borders: Innovations in Language Learning and Use" - a little bit too "Web2.0"ish for my taste) was not that exciting, it was still "fun" - from a certain point of view.

First of all, while most presentations revolved around the use of technology (mostly in the form of computers) in language teaching, most of the presenters encountered technical difficulties using a computer to present their findings. Irony, anyone?

It was fun to see the use of PHP and MySQL (pronounced as "my S Q L" during the presentation) declared to be the "optimal choice" for a machine translation web interface. That's like saying the 8051 is the ultimate choice for all controller needs. Let's say it was the only thing the guy who wrote the code could come up with...

The same interface still lacks user authentication and permission control. I would have suggested to become familiar with the API of a popular CMS and then make the code into a module for that CMS, but at that time I think nobody would have understood what I was talking about. I'll better try to contact the poor guy who has to write the code directly... (Though he would not like my suggestion, as it means work for him...)

Captain Obvious was also attending. He found out that "students prefer the use of technology in language teaching" over the pure use of textbooks. Surprise, surprise, who would have thought that?

I had asked whether the "technology" in that study would also include cassette tapes, since (depending on the point of view) that is a technology that has been around for about 70 years now. Yes, tapes were included in that "technology". Unfortunately I forgot to ask how students like the tapes (and CDs these days) attached to textbooks. Now that would have been interesting... (Or not, from my experience, as Captain Obvious already knows the answer...)

A few publishing houses presented some of their offers outside. I looked through a few books on "simultaneous interpretation". Quite interesting to see people claiming that there is only one way to properly translate a given example sentence and at the same time calling the own profession "interpretation". The title in Chinese was not much better: 同步翻譯...

There was also a book with the title 專業翻譯. However, contrary to most courses with that title, this book deserved it, as it dealt with many aspects of working as a translator. The publishing company is Bookman (書林).

But the real "fun" came later, in the afternoon. As an interpreter, I am naturally concerned about communication (in whatever ways, as you may have noticed), mutual understanding - and misunderstanding, of course. Although there were some "funny" moments spread over the day, this was not one of those "cheap" conferences only held for a few people to be able to say they presented their research on a conference.

People discussed things at that conference that I will probably never hear even mentioned at other (cough, cough...) schools. But even those supposedly highly qualified experts found it absolutely normal that one can not write Chinese without a "special" keyboard, meaning that people moving to the US have to write in English to their friends in Taiwan.

In another presentation regarding the use of both Chinese and English ("code switching") on a BBS in Taiwan it was not even considered that some of the "English" written there could actually be romanised Chinese. (I admit this is not something I would expect to see on a BBS in Taiwan, but nevertheless it should be correctly identified if it shows up.)

In my opinion this is a pretty sad state, but even for those language experts romanisation is not an issue, it seems not to exist at all. Zhuyin is a phonetic system to write Chinese as is Hanyu Pinyin or even Tongyong, just with a different script. But while people here are quite familiar with Zhuyin, nobody regards a word written in Latin script anything else than "English". And this is sad indeed, as it shows a serious misconception regarding writing systems and even language in general.

Well, I'm looking forward to the next conference at another school, this one a little bit more related to my official field of expertise. Though... IIRC, they too spoke of "interpretation" - and they are asking for "English names", something NKFUST (Thanks!) did not do...

Sorry, I don't have an English name...

If you are not living in Taiwan, you may not understand why a German would need to emphasize this. The problem is that there is something rotten in the system they call education in Taiwan. Not just something, quite a few things, actually, but this is something affecting my work.

Taiwanese have a pretty weird view towards language. For them, a language and its writing system are one. And even though some of them should have noticed through learning Japanese for example that this is not quite true, they still stick to this view. Actually, Taiwanese themselves are using two writing systems (Hanzi and Zhuyin) for Chinese - but they do not notice that these are two different scripts.

So for Taiwanese, everything they write is "Zhongwen" (中文, Chinese, or more precisely "Chinese writing"), for which they use "Zhongwenzi" (中文字, Chinese characters). And since most Taiwanese learn only one foreign language and since that language is English, the characters used for writing that language are of course "English characters" (英文字(母)). It never came to their mind that one (spoken) language could be written in a number of writing systems, or that one writing system could be used for more than one language.

I know, I know: It's pretty obvious. Japan is using three (or four, depending on your view) writing systems, including those "Chinese characters", which in Japan are simply called "Kanji" (漢字), the characters of the Han. The same term btw. is used in the PRC: Hanzi (汉字). So, it's really Taiwan where the education system is teaching people some strange ideas about language.

Most Taiwanese can not imagine that English could be using a script that is not "English". It is the same writing system used by French, German, Danish, Italian and dozens of other languages: Latin script. This is something I learned when I just started to learn how to write during my first year at school. We were not writing "German letters", but "Latin letters" (Lateinbuchstaben in German).

But for Taiwanese, my name is an "English name", because it is written in the same letters as English. No, wait - he's a German, so he must have a "German name". (德文名字, the term used in this case, actually means "a name written in German", not a name of German origin) Things start to become interesting when I tell them that my name actually comes from Scandinavia, from Norway and Sweden. So what is it now? A name in "Scandinavian writing" (北歐文名字)?

So why would I need to write about this? Because it is causing trouble, and I am not talking about the annoyances I mentioned above. It is causing trouble for foreigners who have to deal with Taiwan or are living in/on it. And it is causing trouble for interpreters. Translators are somehow OK, because they still have time to check, but an interpreter can not afford such luxury. An interpreter needs to deliver a target language version "at once", more or less.

But what trouble would an interpreter experience? Well, when you learn a language, you will usually buy at least one dictionary. You can look up words in that dictionary, so you will know that "table" is called "tsukue" in Japanese or "zhuozi" in Chinese. You can find these, because they are terms used for a certain class of objects. That same class of objects exists in another country too, where people are using another language, so those people too have a word for that class of objects.

But can you find your name in that dictionary? Can you find your neighbour's name in it? Or the name of the company you work for? I doubt. Because these are names, also known as proper nouns. They are assigned to a certain object, not to a whole class of objects. And here the "fun" starts: Most Taiwanese think that they need an "English name". The same applies to companies and even many schools. But how is someone supposed to know what kind of "English name" a certain person/organisation is using?

How is someone who does not know my (imaginary) neighbour supposed to know that his "English name" is "Peter"? After all, until last week his "English name" was "Jack". How often would you want to update a dictionary listing all kinds of names for all people, companies and schools in Taiwan? And why does nobody notice what a crazy scheme this is?

If you think that this does not cause any trouble, ask a Taiwanese where you can buy a "Twinhead" notebook. That is the name written on the notebooks, even in Taiwan. You will find a few who know that name. Most however have never heard of it, even if they have such a notebook. But they know a company called "Lunfei" (倫飛). And no, "Twinhead" is not a translation of "Lunfei". (A name can and should usually not be translated...)

Fortunately, there are exceptions. While they use a strange transcription ("Tatong"), "Datong" (大同) is using the same name whether the communication is in English, Chinese or any other language. That's how a name should be handled. Or why can Japanese companies just use the same name in any language? OK, not quite... "Suzuki" for example is called "Suzuki" everywhere except Taiwan, here it is called "Tailing" (台鈴). You have to admit that "Suzuki" and "Tailing" sound extremely similar...

And why would Taiwanese need an "English name"? Simple: Because they don't know how to write their name in Latin script, since they never learned how to do that. The education system here does not care about romanisation, and even those who should know better seem not to care. But that is another story...