Linguistique Ingénierie et Didactique des Langues
Type d'événement
Conférence

Study day "AMTEALM: The contribution of multimedia to translation and the teaching and learning of minority languages".

Thursday 15 December 2022

A study day on the contribution of multimedia to translation and the teaching and learning of minority languages, to take stock of current projects, the pooling of resources, new tools, etc., with participants from the field.

Study day poster "AMTEALM"

Presentation

The axis DiLeM and TRASILT are organising a study day on the contribution of multimedia to the translation and teaching/learning of minority languages, in order to take stock of three main questions with people working in the field who are not involved in university research:
 

  1. What are the current projects based on digital technologies, and what contribution are they making, or will they make, to the tools, translation and visibility of these minority languages?
  2. Is it possible to share teaching resources? If not, why not?

  3. What new tools have been or will be introduced for teaching minority languages, and what are the educational implications?

     

 

Programme

  • 9 h – Welcome of participants

  • 9 h 15 – Opening of the study day: Marie Varin and David ar Rouz (LIDILE)

     

  • 9 h 30 > 10 h 30 – Lecture by Luc Deheuvels: ‘MOOC de langues orientales à l'INALCO: bilan et retour d'expérience’ Session chaired by Marie Varin

     

  • 9 h 30 > 11 h – Break

     

  • 1 h > 12 h 15 – Round table "Numérique, langue et traduction: projets en cours? "with Gwenn Meynier and Pêr Morvan (An Drouizig, displeger. bzh), Bèrtran Ôbrée (Chubri), Fulup Travers (Office public de la langue bretonne) Moderator: Ronan Stéphan

     

  • 12 h 30 > 14 h – Lunch

  • 14 h – Lecture by Annie Foret: ‘How to help learners of a language like Breton in the digital age’ Chair: David ar Rouz 

     

  • 15 h > 15 h 30 – Break

  • 15 h 30 > 17 h – Round table ‘New tools, resource sharing and educational implications’, with Morwena Audic (Skol an Emsav), Fulup Kere (Deskiñ d'an Oadourien, DAO), Catherine Pinon (IREMAM, IFPO), Alexandra Vella Moderation: Luc Deheuvels

     

  • 17 h 00 – Closing of the study day Download the programme in PDF form

Biographical notes on the participants

Morwena Audic

Morwena Audic has been a Breton language teacher for fifteen years and a pedagogical coordinator for the past two years with the Skol an Emsav association. She develops training programmes, including the new hybrid course, provides pedagogical support for new trainers and coordinates various training courses with external service providers. She holds a Master's degree in ‘e-learning training engineering’ from Rennes 1 University, a Master's degree in ‘Breton-Celtic’ and a Master's degree in ‘Sociology, Language Sciences’.

Luc Deheuvels

Professor Emeritus of Arabic Language and Literature at INALCO and ‘Digital Pedagogy’ project leader Title of speech: ‘MOOCs in Oriental languages at INALCO: assessment and feedback’

Annie Foret


Senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Rennes 1. Title of speech: ‘How to help learners of a language like Breton in the digital age’ She carries out her research at IRISA, in the D7 ‘Data and Knowledge Management’ department. Her research generally concerns logic, knowledge representation and automatic language processing, with a particular interest in logical grammars (seen as information systems) and languages with few resources, such as Breton. Her professional page can be found at  http://www.irisa.fr/prive/foret/.

Fulup Kere

Director of Deskiñ d'an Oadourien (DAO) He will present the DAOdaf' digital kit created in 2015 for teachers of Breton for adults by DAO (Deskiñ d'An Oadourien), the federation for teaching Breton to adults.

Gwenn Meynier et Pêr Morvan

Title of speech: ‘DVB, history of the project and future development’ Biographical details: Both members of the An Drouizig association, we initially worked on translating software, video games and websites (Mozilla, Qwant, Common Voice, VLC Media Player, Minecraft, etc.). Then we launched the idea of a verb conjugator for Breton verbs. The aim behind DVB is to create a tool that can help learners of Breton as well as more experienced speakers by offering an open source Breton verb conjugator.

Bèrtran Ôbrée

Director of Chubri, Institute for the Inventory and Linguistic Study of Gallo Title of speech: ‘Online tools for Gallo, localised translation and cultural rights’ Biographical details: Bèrtran Ôbrée has been interested in Gallo for some forty years. He has designed several lexicographical databases, firstly for the Bertègn Galèzz association in 1993-1995 to prepare the first bilingual Gallo-French dictionary, and then for Chubri, an association which he has headed since 2007. Since defending his master's thesis in language science at Rennes 2 University in 1998 on the phonology of Gallo, he has been particularly interested in the orthographic codification of Gallo and in creating tools that respect and provide access to the dialectal diversity of the language.

Catherine Pinon

Associate Professor of Arabic Title of speech: ‘Teaching Arabic with digital technology: software constraints and hardware realities’. A few biographical details:

  • double degree in language sciences and Arabic language up to thesis (2012)
  • certified (2007) then agrégée in Arabic language (2009)
  • associate researcher IREMAM (since 2013) and IFPO (since 2015)
  • secondary school teacher since 2007 (currently working in collège and lycée professionnel)
  • Arabic courses given at the University and IEP of Aix-en-Provence

  • areas of research: 1) didactics of Arabic as a foreign language; 2) descriptive linguistics of contemporary Arabic (syntax, semantics and pragmatics), from a variationist perspective, based on corpus linguistics and textometry; 3) epistemology and transmission of Arabic linguistic and grammatical knowledge.

     

Recent publication: publication in 2022 of an Arabic method written with Frédéric Imbert,, L’Arabe dans tous ses états. La méthode. Niveau A1-B1. Ellipses, online . HAL page : https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/catherine-pinon IREMAM Page (not updated) : https://www.iremam.cnrs.fr/fr/pinon-catherine

Fulup Travers

Head of the Office public de la langue bretonne for Ille-et-Vilaine. Title of speech: ‘New tools for Breton speakers and learners’ The OPLB, a public body for cultural cooperation, has as its main missions the promotion of the Breton language and the development of its use in all areas of language use, particularly digital and new technologies.

Alexandra Vella

Alexandra (k/a Sandra) holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. She is an Associate Professor with the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta. Her area of expertise is Phonetics and Phonology, with a focus on prosody. She continues to work on describing the intonational phonology of Maltese, its dialects, and Maltese English (the variety of English of speakers of Maltese). More recently she has been contributing to work on improving human language technologies such as g2p, text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems for use in the Maltese context. She is the lead researcher on projects involving the compilation and annotation of spoken data of the languages and language varieties of Malta.  

Scientific Coordinators

  • Ronan Stéphan, doctoral student in linguistics and language didactics
  • Marie Baize-Varin, senior lecturer in Arabic linguistics and contemporary corpus linguistics, seconded to the Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan Military Academy
  • David ar Rouz, senior lecturer in translation studies

Conference Background

The LIDILE (Linguistics - Language Engineering - Didactics) research unit at Rennes 2 University deals with applied linguistics, language didactics, translation, language engineering, terminology and technical communication. In order to ensure that the research carried out within the group is “applied”, it is important to regularly take stock of the needs felt by speakers, any dispersed actions that seek to respond to these needs and any difficulties that may arise. This helps to guide future research and to make it immediately useful to society once it has been completed. The LIDILE team is also multilingual, with researchers working in languages as diverse as Chinese, Arabic and Breton, alongside German, English and Spanish, for example. But not all these languages are equally well equipped. While a large number of corpora are available for English (see, for example, the website English Corpora[1] by Mark Davies), there are far fewer for Spanish (see, for example, the Corpus de l’español[2], again by Mark Davies, or , again, the website of the University of Leipzig[3], which provides access to corpora compiled automatically from the Internet) or French. For languages such as Breton, which is nevertheless very well equipped in terms of dictionaries and grammars, we can only find online a corpus made up of Wikipedia pages[4], as well as a parallel corpus syntactically annotated by Francis Tyers[5]. So-called classical/literary/literary Arabic (ACLL), meanwhile, is served by numerous written corporaالمكتبة الشاملة[6]. Dialectal varieties (AD), initially under-represented, are beginning to be the focus of sites such as About[7], Arabic Dialects: A Database Of 25 Cities From Rabat To Baghdad | Arabic For Nerds[8], or online corpus-based dictionaries (IFAO - Egyptian Arabic Verbs[9]). However, corpora are only one digital resource among many. For languages such as English and Spanish, audiovisual resources are abundant, but this is not the case for Breton or dialectal Arabic, which, like so many other languages, are in a minority. Arabic is a minority language in France for two reasons. As a polyglossic language (Dichy 2020), its different varieties/glosses can be taught according to learners' needs. In fact, the communicative competence of a schooled Arabic speaker is a continuum in which the same speaker can use different varieties/glosses synchronously depending on the communication situation, the interlocutor and other extralinguistic factors. The teaching of this global competence has long been advocated (Al-Batal 1992, Girod 1994, Aguilar 2014, Younes 2013 and 2015, Dichy 2020, Pinon 2017) and could be the subject of a MOOC with an integrated approach (Deheuvels 2020), but it is difficult to apply in France, for two reasons. On the one hand, the teaching of the official vehicular standard variety (ACLL) is less important in public secondary education than that of other modern languages. On the other hand, vernacular dialect varieties are taught less than ACLL, which is considered to be a standard that has not been updated by both Arabic speakers and Arabic teachers. Unlike Arabic, which has a large number of speakers, Breton is numerically very weak, with some 200,000 speakers in a region of almost 4.7 million inhabitants (historic Brittany). This difficulty, combined with a marked ageing of the population of speakers and their dispersal (Wakeford & Broudic, 2018), adds to the social undermining that the language has suffered for centuries. For the third language of Brittany, Gallo, we can add a certain invisibility, despite its recognition in the linguistic policies of the Brittany Region (Brittany Region, 2004 and 2012). This is why we are proposing a one-day workshop on the contribution of multimedia to the translation and teaching/learning of minority languages, such as Breton and Arabic, which we are working on together. The day is also open to contributions on other languages, in particular Welsh, and aims to provide an opportunity to discuss three main issues with people working in the field who are not involved in academic research:

  1. What projects are currently underway using digital technologies, and what contribution are they making, or will they make, to the tools, translation and visibility of these minority languages?
  2. One of the difficulties in teaching this type of language lies in the need to create, often by translation, resources that can be used in the classroom (or elsewhere). This is a colossal task for beginner teachers, not only in bilingual classes but also in long courses, for example. The need to pool existing resources has already been pointed out for Breton (Broudic, 2011, p. 200). Attempts have been made for this language: the DAO Daf' suitcase for evening classes, websites created by bilingual educational advisers, etc. However, the question of whether this pooling is possible remains. Are these resources used? To what extent? Are they fed by the teachers themselves?  If not why not?
  3. Finally, the existence of corpora, for example, does not mean that teaching has been turned upside down and is now essentially based on this resource. At the very least, it allows for innovations in teaching and learning. But its absence and the absence of resources in general undoubtedly encourage innovation just as much. So what new tools have been and are being introduced for teaching minority languages, and what are the pedagogical implications?

To answer these questions, it would seem particularly appropriate for researchers and practitioners to come together to identify future research objectives. As a result, the presentations will take different forms: plenary lectures will be held alongside round tables where speakers will be free to describe projects, tools and so on, alongside academic papers.

Bibliography AGUILAR, Victoria. « At-taʿlīm al-muzdawiğ li-l-ʿarabiyya al-fuṣḥā (fuṣḥā al-ʿaṣr) wa-l-dāriğa al-maġribiyya ». In Victoria AGUILAR, Miguel Ángel MANZANO, Luis Miguel Pérez CAÑADA, Waleed SALEH et Paula SANTILLÁN GRIMM. Arabele 2012. Enseñanza y aprendizaje de la lengua árabe. Murcia : Editum. 2014, p. 31-43. AL-BATAL, Mahmoud. « Diglossia proficiency: the need for an alternative approach to teaching ». The Arabic language in America. Detroit : Wayne State University Press. 1992, p. 284-304. BROUDIC, Fañch. L’enseignement du et en breton. Rapport à Monsieur le Recteur de l’Académie de Rennes. Brest : Emgleo Breiz, 2011. 286 p. DEHEUVELS, Luc-Willy. « MOOC d’arabe et variation linguistique : quels choix ? ». In Gilles FORLOT et Louis OUVRARD (dir.). Variation linguistique et enseignement des langues. Le cas des langues moins enseignées. Paris : Presses de l’Inalco, 2020, p. 79-99. DICHY, Joseph. « Qu’entend-on par arabe(s) moyen(s) ? ». Lettre SELEFA. 2020, n° 9. GIROD, Alain. « Le Nil et l’océan : du dialecte égyptien vers l’arabe écrit contemporain ». Bulletin d’Études Orientales. Damas : Institut Français du Proche-Orient. 1994, tome 46, p. 43-52. PINON, Catherine. « Intégrer les variations dans l’enseignement de l’arabe langue étrangère : enjeux et méthodes ». In Heba MEDHAT – LECOCQ (dir.). Arabe standard et variations régionales. Quelle(s) politique(s) linguistique(s) ? Quelle(s) didactique(s) ? Paris : Édition des Archives Contemporaines, coll. PLID (Pluralité des Langues et des Identités en Didactique, dir. Geneviève ZARATE, INALCO). 2017, p. 99-112. RÉGION BRETAGNE. Une politique linguistique pour la Bretagne. Décembre 2004. http://www.bretagne.fr/internet/upload/docs/application/pdf/2008-12/plan_de_politique_lingusitique.pdf, téléchargé le 17/06/2010. RÉGION BRETAGNE. Une politique linguistique pour la Bretagne. Rapport d'actualisation. Mars 2012. http://www.bretagne.fr/internet/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-04/rapport_dactualisation_de_la_politique_linguisique_2012.pdf, téléchargé le 14/06/2012. WAKEFORD Pascale & Fañch BROUDIC. Les langues de Bretagne. Enquête sociolinguistique. Sondage 2018 : les principaux résultats. Rennes : Région Bretagne, TMO Régions, 2018. https://www.bretagne.bzh/upload/docs/application/pdf/2018-10/etude_languesbretagne.pdf, téléchargé le 03/06/2019. YOUNES, Mounther (dir). Arabiyyat al-Naas (Part One): An Introductory Course in Arabic. Londres : Routledge, 2013. 408 p. YOUNES, Mounther. The integrated approach to Arabic Instruction. Londres : Routledge, 2015. 74 p. [1] www.english-corpora.org, consulté le 21/10/2022. [2] www.corpusdelespanol.org, consulté le 21/10/2022. [3] https://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/, consulté le 21/10/2022. [4] https://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/en?corpusId=bre_wikipedia_2021, consulté le 21/10/2022. [5] https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Breton-KEB, consulté le 21/10/2022. [6] https://shamela.ws/, consulté le 24/10/2022. [7] https://database-of-arabic-dialects.org, consulté le 24/10/2022. [8] https://arabic-for-nerds.com, consulté le 24/10/2022. [9] https://www.ifao.egnet.net/bases/verbeseg/?id=4, consulté le 26/10/2022.