Author: paige laevy

Military instructors seldom discuss one type of frustration in public: the waiting. Imagine spending eleven months creating a training program for officers from twelve Latin American countries, perfecting the curriculum, and then giving it to a translation team that promises to finish it within a year. The course has already been updated by the time the translation is delivered. The entire process is restarted. At WHINSEC, the Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, that was exactly how things operated for many years. Then LILT appeared. Key InformationDetailsProgram NameLILT AI Translation Platform — Pentagon Combat Translation InitiativeContracting…

Something changes as you stroll along Rye Lane on a Saturday afternoon. It’s not dramatic; it’s not revealed in a single moment. Mostly, it’s the sound’s texture. When two women are comparing prices over a crate of plantains, Yoruba rises and falls between them. With his phone pressed to his ear, a man wearing a deep-blue agbada exits a taxi and immediately switches from English to Pidgin in the middle of a sentence. No one seems to find it remarkable that the street speaks several languages at once. Maybe that’s the point. CategoryDetailsCommunity NameNigerian-British Community, PeckhamPrimary LocationRye Lane, Peckham, Southeast…

Danny Velazquez used to fear this particular moment. Velazquez knew he would have to spend the next few days cold calling lenders one by one, waiting for callbacks, only to find, sometimes weeks later, that none of them could handle the client’s situation, while a qualified buyer sat across from him, paperwork in order, hope visible in their eyes. Perhaps a problem with the visa. No Social Security number, perhaps. Perhaps an unconventional credit file. “Before,” he states, “I had to contact 70 lenders one by one.” That was the way it operated. That is no longer how it operates.…

Usually, the phone calls begin before the bump appears. A more subdued and strategic discussion about lists, deposits, and which side of the river has openings in two years starts around the 12-week scan, frequently before the parents have informed their own mothers. It sounds ridiculous until you hear it happening at the next table in a Tuesday morning café in Chelsea. Over the past few years, the market for upscale bilingual nurseries in London has evolved from a specialized concern of foreign bankers to something much bigger and somewhat different. Walking past the South Kensington converted townhouses with their…

Greater London is undergoing a quiet transition that doesn’t make a big announcement. On a Tuesday morning, if you happen to stroll past a primary school in Holland Park, you might witness a group of seven-year-olds having a cheerful, fast-paced argument about who gets to use the climbing frame. Parents at the school gates a few miles east, close to Chiswick, juggle coffee cups and switch between Mandarin and English mid-sentence. You only truly notice this kind of detail if you live here, but it indicates that something bigger is going on. For more than ten years, bilingual international schools…

You can still hear it if you stroll down Old Compton Street on any weekday afternoon: a delivery rider talking on the phone in what sounds like Polish or possibly Ukrainian, two women arguing amusingly in Spanish outside a tapas establishment, and the soft clutter of French behind a bakery counter. London has always taken inspiration from all over the world. But now something seems different. The borrowing seems to have become more intentional, almost protective, as though the city is attempting to preserve something it only recently realized it valued. SubjectDetailsFocusPost-Brexit language landscape in London and the wider UKTop…

At first glance, the morning school run on Fulham’s Clancarty Road appears to be just like any other in West London. Puffer jacketed parents. Scooters by the gates, abandoned. There are some stray croissant crumbs on the sidewalk. If you stay a little longer, though, you’ll notice something quieter: small groups of fathers and mothers conversing in hushed tones, occasionally switching between French and English in the middle of a sentence. They are not merely conversing. They are planning. The dual-language school at the center of it all, Fulham Bilingual, has been doing something uncommon in British state education for…

When a child first realizes that the word for “water” exists in two shapes simultaneously, she has a certain expression. It can be found in classrooms in Queens, bilingual preschools hidden in Houston strip malls, and the kitchen of a Punjabi grandmother in Sacramento who won’t let her grandson’s first laugh be stolen by English. Even though it’s a tiny flicker, you remember it. Something seems to be opening up in the child’s mind that the rest of us spent years attempting, mostly unsuccessfully, to recover later. It appears that the U.S. Department of Education has finally taken notice. Ten…

Anyone who has spent time with bilingual kids will recognize the moment when the tiny machinery of their thinking emerges. In a Karachi kitchen, a four-year-old asks for water after tilting her head, thinking about her grandmother for a brief moment, and switching from English to Urdu. She was not taught that. She scanned the space. She made a choice regarding the thoughts of another person. She then took action on it almost carelessly. For years, scholars have been debating whether or not this type of moment has the significance that it appears to have. The question is whether children…

Around noon, the soundscape in practically every elementary school cafeteria in Houston, Queens, or East Los Angeles reveals the country. In the middle of a sentence, Spanish gives way to English. Across the room, a Vietnamese grandmother gives a child a wave. Two girls alternate between a Texan drawl and Arabic as though they were from different worlds. These days, none of this is unusual. The curriculum rarely acts as if it is true, which is unusual. CategoryDetailTopic FocusBilingualism and multilingual education in U.S. public schoolsMultilingual Student Share (Past Decade)Risen from 11% to 23% of K–12 enrollmentPrimary Governing BodyOffice of…