Friday, January 24, 2003

The Globe reported yesterday that superintendents from 19 of Massachusetts' largest school systems wrote to Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey asking that the administration support legislation to phase in English immersion over a three-year period. But yesterday, Romney press secretary Shawn Feddeman said the governor will fight all attempts to slow the implementation of English immersion, known on the ballot as Question 2. . . .

The 19 superintendents are part of the 22-member Urban Superintendents' Network, representing the Commonwealth's largest school systems. They prefer phasing in immersion, saying possible cuts in education funding will make it more difficult to train teachers.

Thursday, January 23, 2003

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

"Defense counsel admitted that he had no knowledge of Afghan Dari or Middle Eastern languages," Judge Jose Marquez wrote. "He also admitted that he did not question the interpreter about his qualifications to interpret or defendant's ability to understand the interpreter."

Marquez said the lawyer admitted he didn't explain the U.S. justice system to Amini or research Amini's cultural background.

Amini had an Iranian Farsi- speaking interpreter who didn't speak Dari and had never been to Afghanistan or studied Afghan languages, the opinion said.

Without at least a "rudimentary command" of the English language, residents of this state "are unable to make their voices heard in the legislative process, effectively exercise their right to vote, or fully understand the rights" guaranteed them by the Constitutions of Oklahoma and the United States. Persons unable to communicate in English also have more trouble finding gainful employment, obtaining affordable housing, acquiring health insurance, and securing for themselves and their families "the full benefits of American life ..."

Monday, January 13, 2003

[U]niversity communities all over Europe honored the dictum of Aristotelian physics that objects of different weights fall at different speeds. A cannonball of ten pounds, for example, would be expected to fall ten times faster than a musket ball of only one pound so that if both were released together from the same summit, the cannonball would land before the musket ball had gotten more than one-tenth of the way to the ground.

[Galileo] did not succeed in swaying popular opinion down at the base of the Leaning Tower. The larger ball, being less susceptible to the effects of what Galileo recognized as air resistance, fell faster . . . The fact that it fell only fractionally faster gave Galileo scant advantage.

Friday, January 10, 2003

Thursday, January 09, 2003

Hataija Pehlic, a Bosnian woman of 50, suffers from depression. At St. Luke's Hospital in 2000, she was served by a succession of phone interpreters on a squawk box for two hours a day during a month of psychotherapy.

They spoke a common language, "but I felt really bad," Ms. Pehlic says through one of Ms. Brown's interpreters. "They had different accents" -- accents, that is, of Serbians and Croatians, the enemies who had killed her son and driven her husband to suicide during the Balkan bloodshed of the 1990s.

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Hiring linguists qualified in Middle Eastern languages has taken time, especially for jobs that carry national security clearances and require extensive background investigations.

The NSA [National Security Agency] has hired more than 800 people this year, but needs many more and hopes to bring in nearly twice as many in 2003. The FBI has hired nearly 300 linguists, but just over 100 of them are Arabic speakers. The bureau still has only a handful of agents who speak Arabic, probably fewer than 25, officials said.

"It takes 10 people in the front door to get one person out the other end," said Margaret Gulotta, head of language services for the FBI.

Gulotta said that 65 percent of applicants fail the bureau's language test; 20 percent can't pass a required polygraph and and 10 percent are eliminated for security reasons. All told, she said, the FBI has hired 286 translators and linguists since Sept. 11, 2001, in all languages, for both full-time and contract positions.