By Kazuaki Nagata. Kyoto, Kyushu schools to hire more foreign nationals in bid to boost graduates' competitiveness. In an effort to accelerate the internationalization of their institutions, Kyoto University and Kyushu University are looking to drastically boost the number of classes taught in English and educators who are foreign nationals over the next few years.
Kyoto University plans to hire about 100 foreign instructors to teach a half of its liberal arts classes in English. Currently, only about 5 percent of roughly 1,100 liberal arts classes are taught in English.
About 5 percent of classes at Kyushu University are also presently taught in English, but the institution, located in Fukuoka Prefecture, aims to raise that to 25 percent over the next few years by increasing the number of foreign teachers and Japanese instructors who have overseas teaching experience by about 30. The two national universities both have received five-year subsidies from the education ministry to achieve their goals. Read more...

Today more and more university courses are being offered in English but not everyone's happy about the development, which is seen as undermining Finland's official languages. "It's hard to say what will happen if English continues to take over," said Taina Saarinen, who researches languages in higher education at Jyväskylä University.
Saarinen calls the phenomenon—which is also being seen in the other Nordics—"anglophone asymmetry".
"We're small countries who want to use attractive English-language programmes to draw in foreign students and researchers," she explained. Read more...

Brussels will host International Language Days on 8 and 9 March 2013 at the Square-Brussels Meeting Centre.
It is well known that learning a foreign language opens the door to more job opportunities. Successful events have been held in Italy and Spain and now, for the first time, International Language Days will take place in Brussels on Friday 8 and Saturday 9 March 2013.
During these two days, you can get information on living, studying or working in over 40 destinations in four continents. You can find out about traineeship and work opportunities abroad, opportunities to learn a foreign language or how to improve your language skills.
You will get the chance to speak to professionals who deal with stays abroad, and to people who employ foreigners and organise traineeships. You can also find out about the visas that students and workers need to study or work abroad, as well as language exams such as TOEIC and Cambridge ESOLS. There will be interesting seminars and workshops on topics such as how to write an international CV and traineeship opportunities in foreign countries.
If you are interested in learning a foreign language, improving your language skills or staying abroad for some time as a trainee or employee, do not miss International Language Days this weekend!
More on International Language Days.

By Karen Seidman. That was the reaction from some university officials to the recent public charge that English universities in Quebec are getting more than their fair share of funding.
The allegation, made by a group of nationalist academics in an open letter in Le Devoir, left some university officials wondering why this issue keeps arising.
After all, this is an age where a francophone student can study at an English university and write all papers and exams in French, where HEC Montréal offers courses in English and where McGill University’s new principal-designate is a francophone for the first time. Read more...

English cannot be the only acceptable language of scholarship, says Toby Miller. It’s arrogant, impractical and anti-intellectual.
The signs are all there: the future domination of English as the major language of international diplomacy, business and education seems assured. Safely positioned in the top three internet languages and the top two Twitter languages, it is the preferred mode of communication for international airline pilots, corporate engineers, university physicists and medical researchers, inter alia.
In academia, English has long been the sine qua non for publishing in the sciences and medicine. The social sciences and humanities remain partial holdouts, perhaps because of the spread of the two other principal imperial languages, French and Spanish, the wealth of their sponsoring nations and the localism of their discourse. But even these areas are changing - for example, Latin American universities clearly favour work published in English over the languages of their own countries.
All this looks just fine and dandy for Anglos, doesn’t it? We can remain in our English shell, confident that anything worth translating will duly be brought before us. Read more...

By William Germano. I’ve recently discovered Google’s Ngram Viewer. If you haven’t found and played with it yet, you will. The Ngram Viewer takes a corpus of just over five million library books digitized by Google and, within that arena, instantly searches for terms or phrases you may want to explore, tabulating the frequency of their occurrences over time.
The Ngram algorithm might let you visualize, for example, 20th-century deployments  of the words nitpicker, caviller, and momus—to choose more or less at random three epithets that might be applied ungenerously to a writer on language. You may already use nitpicker in this sense. (If you have grade-school children you may have another—more visceral—sense of the word, as well.) Read more...

Communiqué de presse - 7 février 2013
MANUELLE FRANCK, GÉOGRAPHE, PROFESSEURE DES UNIVERSITÉS, EST NOMMÉE PRÉSIDENTE DE L'INALCO.
Manuelle Franck, géographe, professeure des universités, vient d'être nommée au poste de présidente de l'Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco), Grand établissement sous tutelle du Ministère de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, membre du PRES Sorbonne Paris Cité, par décret du Président de la République en date du 7 février 2013.
Elle succédera à partir du 13 mars 2013 à Jacques Legrand qui arrive au terme de son second mandat. Elle sera la première femme à diriger l'Inalco depuis sa création en 1795.
Âgée de 53 ans, spécialiste de géographie urbaine et régionale de l'Asie du sud-est, Manuelle Franck est docteure en géographie de l'Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne et diplômée d'indonésien de l'Inalco. En 1990, elle devient maître de conférences à l'Inalco, puis professeure en 2004.
Parallèlement à son activité d'enseignement et de recherche, elle a occupé successivement à l'Inalco les fonctions de directrice du Département Asie du sud-est, Haute-Asie, Pacifique de 2000 à 2004, de directrice de l'École doctorale « Langues, littératures et sociétés du monde » de 2004 à 2007 et, depuis 2007, de vice-présidente du Conseil scientifique.
L’INALCO - Missions
Grand établissement public à caractère scientifique, culturel et professionnel (EPCSCP) sous tutelle du ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche, l’INALCO, par son décret statutaire du 14 mai 1990, a pour missions:
- d’assurer des formations initiales et continues portant sur l’étude des langues et civilisations de l’Europe centrale et orientale, de l’Asie, de l’Océanie, de l’Afrique, du Proche et Moyen-Orient et des populations de l’Amérique, ainsi que sur l’histoire, la géographie, les sociétés, les systèmes politiques et économiques des pays concernés;
- de développer la recherche dans ces différents domaines, notamment en relation avec d’autres organismes de recherche français ou étrangers;
- de contribuer, par la diffusion de ses productions scientifiques et pédagogiques, à la connaissance des pays concernés;
- de favoriser les échanges universitaires et culturels et la coopération entre la France et les pays intéressés.
Plus de deux siècles d’existence fondent une tradition et créent une expertise sans équivalent. Aujourd’hui, l’INALCO est un établissement unique au monde, accueillant des étudiants venus de tous les horizons. Aucune institution, aucun pays n’offre en un même lieu une telle diversité de cours, une telle possibilité d’ouverture, une telle richesse de connaissances.
L’INALCO en chiffres
L’INALCO, c’est:
- 96 langues et civilisations enseignées,
- 5 filières à vocation professionnelle: Commerce international, Communication et formations interculturelles, Français langue étrangère, Relations internationales, Traitement informatique des langues,
- 3 000 enseignements dispensés chaque année,
- 9 700 inscriptions, 300 doctorants, 300 stagiaires en formation continue,
- 23% d’étudiants étrangers représentant 114 nationalités,
- 20% d’étudiants salariés,
- 14 équipes de recherche: 5 en association avec le CNRS et 9 équipes d’accueil doctoral.
- 100 événements scientifiques internationaux par an (colloques, journées d’études, conférences),
- 6 revues scientifiques, des manuels de langues, dictionnaires, ouvrages, actes de colloques,
- 340 enseignants-chercheurs, spécialistes à la fois d’une aire linguistique et culturelle du monde non-occidental et d’une discipline des sciences humaines et sociales,
- 300 intervenants universitaires ou professionnels des entreprises et des administrations,
- 160 personnels administratifs et techniques.

Very soon, European winegrowers will have access to a language learning programme especially conceived for them and catering to their specific needs.
The project VinoLingua will provide winegrowers with a series of language manuals, focused on their professional needs, which will prepare them to carry out wine tastings, take visitors on a guided tour of their vineyard, present their wine cellar at a wine fair, or just sell their own wine; and, all this, in a different language!
Languages offered are German, French, Italian, and Spanish, and, at the same time, each one of these languages will be represented by a wine-growing region through which students will manage to discover the culture associated to the wine and its region: Lower Austria and South Tyrol, for German; Burgundy, for French; Tuscany, for Italian; and, for Spanish, the Toro region. Each of these four languages is, at the same time, the target language —that is, the language our students wish to learn— or the winegrowers’ mother tongue, which potentially accounts for twelve different language combinations.
From the beginners’ level, this method teaches the language of wine, rather than language in general. Moreover, materials for study are organized following a “spiral” shape, that is, presenting the same communicative situations on several occasions all along the course; firstly, using simpler linguistic structures, and then, progressively, introducing more complex structures as the programme unfolds. Thus, for instance, wine tasting features six times, and work in the vineyard, as well as the description of work in the cellar and wine trading, appear on three occasions. At the A1 level, students learn how to manage themselves in these situations using “chunks”, that is, fixed expressions they can easily memorize (in the mouth, there is …). Later on, a series of customized flashcards are introduced to teach winegrowers how to describe their own wine. Finally, at the B1 level, learning is based on authentic audio/video materials related to wine.
The VinoLingua method, financed by the European Union through its Leonardo da Vinci Program, has been conceived as a set of self-study materials. Nevertheless, we are certain these materials can also be used at professional winemaking schools. In fact, the latter are an integral part of the partnership, composed of winegrowers, linguists, winemaking instructors, and language teachers. Thanks to this project, Europe will likely turn into a crowd of “vinolinguist winegrowers” who will manage to communicate either amongst themselves or with any other wine lover in any language!
More on Vinolingua.

By René Prioux, former Head of Translation, OECD. Translators are at the forefront of global communications and knowledge. Yet their work has not always been helped by the information revolution. Here are the challenges.
If you are reading this article in English, you should bear in mind that it was originally drafted in French. But such is the art of the translator, to do their job in such a masterly yet invisible way, that you would probably never have noticed had I not pointed it out. Yet translation is a highly-skilled and difficult job. Has the work of the translator been improved by innovations in technology in recent years?
When the OECD was established just over 50 years ago, information and communication technologies were in their infancy. The term “computer” had been coined just a few years earlier and neither the Internet nor microprocessors had been invented. And televisions were just beginning to appear in people’s living rooms. Read more...

By Nadia Hausfather. The two-day summit on higher education will end today, and yet even before it started, it appeared the governing Parti Québécois had already decided on the outcome. In recent weeks we witnessed a strange ballet. While higher-education minister Pierre Duchesne said free university education would not be discussed because it is a long-term “ideal,” not “possible” in the short term, Premier Pauline Marois pretended all possibilities would be explored; all along, though, the government was clearly aiming for indexation.
The Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) of Concordia University agrees with Duchesne (and the Liberal Party of the 1960s, which promised it) that free education is the ideal — but we think we should start working toward this goal now. We will be participating in this afternoon’s student demonstration to make that clear. Is free university education fiscally feasible? Read more...