tagged w/ bilingual
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"This is gonna be a carousel ride..."
Welcome to the first instalment of The Inland Sea: An Australian Odyssey. Over the coming weeks and months we shall visit a number of locations throughout Australia. This first episode is an introduction to what is to come and it sets up the premise of our ten-week marathon through the outback.
Our trip started in Melbourne on November 28, 2008. The first interviews were done in Aldinga Arts EcoVillage, south of Adelaide, one day the following week. From there we headed north, all the way to Darwin, via Uluru. After Darwin we travelled west, to Port Hedland before cutting through the desert to Carnarvon. From here on, we more or less followed the coastline back to Melbourne. We returned on February 7, 2009, perhaps better known as Black Saturday.
We visited a number of ecovillages and housing co-ops, including Somerville Ecovillage near Perth, and the Pinakarri community in Fremantle. Some of these communities were successful and longstanding projects. Others were in different stages of the process of being established; of beginning to build homes; and, of being accepted and acknowledged by their local councils. A couple of people we met had tried to build an ecovillage, but at some stage in the process, and for different reasons, their projects had crumbled and no longer existed.
In the west, we also visited Prince Leonard I and his micronation, the Hutt River Province. Prince Leonard has claimed sovereignty since 1970, and has not paid any tax to Australia since his secession. Despite only having about 20-30 full-time residents in his self-declared state, His Royal Highness claims to have more than 13,000 citizens worldwide.
There will also be episodes of other stories and interviews we picked up along our way. We'll talk to an old lady of the outback, encounter some wildlife, go scouting for UFOs, talk to visual artist Dida Sundet about her work on the road, and ponder the trials and tribulations of the project..
Stay tuned for the next chapter of our odyssey!"This is gonna be a carousel ride..."
Welcome to the first instalment of... more
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A moment in history where over two-hundred and fifty thousand people gathered in downtown Los Angeles, California to protest the injustice of immigration reform. Also in attendance local radio personallity Piolín por la mañana, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Kate Del Castillo, Reverend Eric Lee,Demián Bichir, ACLU president, actor and activist Alan Toy, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Arturo S. Rodriguez, second president of the United Farm Workers of America and many more.
Short: 13 minsA moment in history where over two-hundred and fifty thousand people gathered in... more
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Sheeva
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added this
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2 years ago
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Luck and The Virgin (La Suerte y la Virgen), an internet telenovela series, filmed exclusively in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, will premier at the LA Web Fest March 26-28th at The Stage 52 Theater at 5299 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016-1340.
http://www.blindlylefilms.com/luckandthevirgin
Writer and director, Jaime Byrd, of Blind Lyle Films, took on a large Latin endevour with this Mexico based webisode "Luck and The Virgin (La Suerte y la Virgen)" - a comedy crime series about of a young women who takes her boyfriends drug money, goes to Mexico, and gets caught up with all the wrong people including a very tired hit man from Spain.
"We wanted to make a movie in Mexico, and once we got to the beautiful town of San Miguel de Allende, it just started to make more sense to produce a web series similar to a telenovela, but for the internet", said Byrd. "We hadn't seen anything like this out there before, so it felt like the right thing to do at the time."
What sets this series apart from anything else out there, is that every single episode is no longer then 60 seconds long. That's right, it's a 60 second soap. In those 60 seconds, not only is the story told with new developments emerging in that time, but we follow what has already happened in short recaps.
"It's like a cross between a Guy Ritchie movie and Destinos," Byrd says, "except it's only 60 seconds long. That means it's a very fast-paced-ride soap opera with some humor."
"The 60 second idea came much later after we shot the series," said producer, Adam Cohen, "we didn't know it at the time, but months later after cutting different versions of the show, it just felt natural that each episode only be one minute long".
Both Byrd and Cohen made sure to use as much local Mexico talent and crew as possible.
"We posted ads at the library and spread the word around town that we were looking for actors," said Cohen. "We were surprised at how many people wanted to participate, including the use of music from local musicians and bands that were placed in the series which we hope will help promote those artists."
All episodes are translated in Spanish or English with subtitles respectfully.Luck and The Virgin (La Suerte y la Virgen), an internet telenovela series, filmed... more
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Babies who hear two languages regularly when they are in their mother's womb are more open to being bilingual, a study published this week in Psychological Science shows.
Psychological scientists from the University of British Columbia and a researcher from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in France tested two groups of newborns, one of which only heard English in the womb and the others who heard English and Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines.
To determine the babies' preference for a language, the researchers studied the newborns? sucking reflex; increased sucking by a neonate indicates interest in a stimulus.
In the first experiment, infants heard 10 minutes of speech, with every minute alternating between English and Tagalog.
The English-only infants were more interested in English than Tagalog -- in other words, they "exhibited increased sucking behavior" when they heard English than when they heard Tagalog being spoken.
The infants exposed to two languages, on the other hand, showed an equal preference for both English and Tagalog, suggesting to the researchers that prenatal bilingual exposure prepares infants to listen to and learn about both of their native languages.
The researchers also tested the newborns to see if they could tell the differences between two languages -- key to becoming bilingual.
The infants listened to sentences being spoken in one of the languages until they lost interest, and then heard sentences in the other language or heard sentences in the same language, but spoken by a different person.
The infants exhibited increased sucking when they heard the other language being spoken, but their sucking did not increase if they heard additional sentences in the same language.
"These results suggest that bilingual infants, along with monolingual infants, are able to discriminate between the two languages, providing a mechanism from the first moments of life that helps ensure bilingual infants do not confuse their two languages," the authors of the study said.Babies who hear two languages regularly when they are in their mother's womb are... more
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"Well before its opening on Broadway, the revival of “West Side Story” now playing at the Palace Theater had been touted for the fact that some songs and dialog performed by its Puerto Rican characters would be delivered in Spanish. But on Tuesday, publicists for the musical said that some of these sections have been changed back to English, as they were originally performed on stage and in the well-known “West Side Story” film.
In a news release, publicists for the Broadway production said that “slight changes have been implemented” to the show, adding: “ ‘A Boy Like That’ is now predominately sung in English to the original lyrics and selected dialog and lyrics in ‘I Feel Pretty’ have reverted to English.” The release said that the changes went into effect last Thursday.
In a statement, Arthur Laurents, who directed the revival and wrote the book for “West Side Story,” said, “From the outset, the Spanish in ‘West Side Story’ was an experiment. It’s been an ongoing process of finding what worked and what didn’t, and it still continues.”""Well before its opening on Broadway, the revival of “West Side... more
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basically the title...really interesting to me as a monolingual person with lots of bilingual friends.basically the title...really interesting to me as a monolingual person with lots of... more
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Retail giant Wal-Mart will open its first Hispanic-focused supermarkets this summer in Arizona and Texas. The stores will feature Spanish speaking staff and new layouts, products, and signage that will be "relevant to local Hispanic customers."
The stores, dubbed Supermercado de Walmart, will appear in converted Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market stores in Phoenix and Houston. Separately, the company also plans on converting a Sam's Club warehouse into a Hispanic-themed Más Club.Retail giant Wal-Mart will open its first Hispanic-focused supermarkets this summer in... more
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Britny
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added this
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3 years ago
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"In areas ranging from politics to food to music to literature, suddenly we want to hear as much as possible from people who grew up in two worlds at once. The trend is especially noticeable in literature, where plenty of the best new writing in English seems to meld two languages and two ways of thought—the farther apart and more exotic, and the more seamlessly combined, the better. Obama himself has written a border-crossing memoir that leaps from Hawaii to Kenya to Chicago.
If a collection of stories about China written in English gains attention, or a memoir about growing up half-Kenyan, then you might think a translation of a work by a major Chinese writer or a leading Kenyan novelist would sell out. But the reverse seems to be true. Translations are rarely bestsellers; it can be hard to find a newly translated book at a megabookstore, even if that book was hugely important in its home country.
It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all. It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting required to make a cultural connection. As the Peruvian-born writer Daniel Alarcón observes, Americans would rather read stories by an American about Peru than a Peruvian writer translated into English. “There’s a certain curiosity about the world that’s not matched by a willingness to do the work,” Alarcón said in a phone interview from his home in Oakland, California. “So what happens is that writers of foreign extraction end up writing about the world for Americans.”
Perhaps it’s not laziness or insularity, but just being overwhelmed by a barrage of information. We are now expected to keep up with what’s going on in China, Russia, and India, just to keep our jobs. The work of writers in smaller or low-profile countries, like most of Africa? Well, we just don’t have the time to hear from them directly. And we’ll survive—or so we think.
A writer who chooses English today chooses to be both read more and paid better. But though she may gain the world, she stands to lose the chance to speak directly to family and community in a home language, in my case the holy language of prayer and Torah and Isaiah’s screams. By encouraging a writer to move to a dominant tongue, we forgo the chance to listen in on intimate communication, with a home community.
There’s another risk, too. Trusting bicultural writers to be the sole transporters of the rest of the world also means that that we are losing different ways to conceive of story. International fiction doesn’t always follow the traditional American and British structure of beginning, struggle, climax, and ending, which also governs the average U.S. television sitcom and the standard Shakespearean play. Latin American magical realism, for example, usually works differently. Borges would probably sneer at the idea of plot as a triangle, with action rising and then descending. Too simple, too angular, too Anglo, he might laugh. How we tell our stories matters almost as much as our stories themselves. Story structure affects how we see history, and, of course, ourselves.""In areas ranging from politics to food to music to literature, suddenly we want... more
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A study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that language cues specific frames, that change peoples behaviors.
"The authors studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification. They found significant levels of "frame-shifting" (changes in self perception) in bicultural participants-those who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture. While frame-shifting has been studied before, the new research found that biculturals switched frames more quickly and easily than bilingual monoculturals."
This is interesting to me, because when I speak Spanish, I sound like a used car salesman, and then sometimes I act like a used car salesman....
¿Quieres un coche?"A study in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that language cues specific... more
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13:17 25 June 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Reuters and New Scientist staff
Bicultural people may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a US study on bilingual Hispanic women.
It found that women who were actively involved in both English and Spanish speaking cultures interpreted the same events differently, depending on which language they were using at the time.
It is known that people in general can switch between different ways of interpreting events and feelings – a phenomenon known as frame shifting. But the researchers say their work shows that bilingual people that are active in two different cultures do it more readily, and that language is the trigger.
One part of the study got the volunteers to watch TV advertisements showing women in different scenarios. The participants initially saw the ads in one language – English or Spanish – and then six months later in the other.
Researchers David Luna from Baruch College, New York, US, and Torsten Ringberg and Laura Peracchio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, US, found that women classified themselves and others as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.
"In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted," they say.
For example, one person saw the main character in the Spanish version of a commercial as a risk-taking, independent woman, but as hopeless, lonely, and confused in the English version.
Journal reference: Journal of Consumer Research (DOI: 10.1086/586914)13:17 25 June 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Reuters and New Scientist staff... more
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