LOST IN TRANSLATION? IT’S THE L.A. WAY

UCLA International Institute, CA
Feb 7 2007

Three students, under the aegis of the Center for World Languages,
part of the International Institute, launched a monthly online journal
Feb. 1 that celebrates L.A. and its astonishing linguistic diversity.

I still have ties to my heritage, but I also feel like L.A. is my
town.This article was first published in UCLA Today.

With more than 54% of Angelenos speaking a language other than English
at home, Los Angeles is a modern-day Babel, where a profusion of more
than 100 languages flows fluidly across neighborhood boundaries and
zip codes.

In Chinatown, you see signs in Spanish as well as English and
Vietnamese. In Glendale, the din of public conversation can turn
instantly from English to Armenian. In Long Beach, you might be
surprised to hear … Dutch?

In this multilingual metropolis, immigrant families strive to
simultaneously communicate in an English-dominant society and still
retain the language of their homeland. It’s a city where biracial
marriages prove challenging to communication between offspring and
their grandparents.

To tell these stories, three students, under the aegis of the Center
for World Languages, part of the International Institute, launched a
monthly online journal Feb. 1 that celebrates L.A. and its astonishing
linguistic diversity.

In "LA Language World: a Global City Speaks," readers meet a couple
who came to Los Angeles from Armenia six years ago. While they can
barely speak English, their 4-year-old daughter prefers it, to their
dismay. Her sentences are in English, with only a sprinkling of
Armenian words.

"Her parents cannot understand why this has happened," said Margarita
Hirapetian, a fourth-year English major who speaks Armenian and
Russian and wrote about the family’s linguistic struggle.

In "Love’s Labors Considered," UCLA alumna Julia Robinson Shimizu
writes about her and her son’s struggle to speak Japanese, the
native language of her husband, Ichiro. "As a family, we have done
our best to communicate in Japanese – to respect Ichiro’s language
and culture and to align with the bicultural compass of our lives,"
Shimizu writes. "When our small family sits down to dinner, and our
son relates an adventure or opinion in his halting Japanese, I often
nod or disagree and interject my own opinions while Ichiro sits back
and scratches his head, utterly unable to understand our truncated
Japanese jibberish."

"Every story we write has two elements in common – Los Angeles and
language," said Kevin Matthews, senior writer for the International
Institute and the journal’s editor, who came up with an idea
for a linguistic journal last October. Then Susan Bauckus, staff
researcher for the Center for World Languages, suggested: Why not
look at language – the way people learn it and use it – from a human
interest perspective?

To unearth these stories, the three students, who learned to
speak their parents’ native language while growing up at home, came
forward without promise of class credit, only a desire to reveal this
oft-overlooked aspect of L.A.

"I still have ties to my heritage, but I also feel like L.A. is my
town," said Hirapetian. "I want to tell these stories about all the
different people and cultures that are here" because of "what has
happened to me personally."

Stephanie Tavitian, a third-year international development studies
major, was raised by an Arab-Armenian father and Salvadoran mother.

While she speaks fluent Spanish, she has experience in and out of
the classroom with Armenian, Arabic and Japanese.

Tavitian sat in on a class at El Sereno Middle School in East Los
Angeles to watch a teacher help students who speak Chicano-English
learn standard English.

Her story opens a window on LAUSD’s Academic English Mastery
Program that helps youngsters who speak non-standard English succeed
academically without demeaning their language.

Senior April Girouard, who grew up learning French and Dutch, takes
a look at a linguistics mystery: Why do Hollywood celebs give their
offspring such other-worldy monikers as Moxie Crime Fighter and
Audio Science?