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The Independent
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Award-winning Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado dies at age 81, his institute says
Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, known for his award-winning images of nature and humanity, has died at age 81. Instituto Terra, which was founded by him and his wife, confirmed the information Friday, but did not provide more details on the circumstances of Salgado's death or where it took place. The French Academy of Fine Arts, of which Salgado was a member, also confirmed his death. The photographer had suffered from various health problems for many years after contracting malaria in the 1990s. 'Sebastião was more than one of the best photographers of our time,' Instituto Terra said in a statement. 'His lense revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, (brought) the power of transformative action.' 'We will continue to honor his legacy, cultivating the land, the justice and the beauty that he so deeply believed could be restored,' it added. One of Brazil's most famous artists, Salgado's life and work were portrayed in the documentary film 'The Salt of the Earth' (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. He received a number of awards, and was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States in 1992 and to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. Born in the city of Aimores, in the countryside of the Minas Gerais state in Brazil, Salgado moved to France in 1969 as Brazil endured a military dictatorship. He started to fully dedicate his time to photography in 1973, years after his economics degree. His style is marked by black-and-white imagery, rich tonality, and emotionally-charged scenarios. Impoverished communities were among his main interests. Among his main works are the recent series 'Amazonia;" 'Workers' which shows manual labor around the world; and 'Exodus' (also known as 'Migrations' or 'Sahel'), which documents people in transit, including refugees and slum residents. Salgado and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded Amazonas Images, an agency that exclusively handles his work. He is also survived by his sons Juliano and Rodrigo. Brazilian newspaper Folha de which published several works of Salgado over the last decades, said he recently cancelled a meeting with journalists in the French city of Reims due to health problems. He was scheduled to attend an exhibition with works by his son Rodrigo on Saturday, the daily reported. ___ AP journalist Eleonore Hughes contributed to this report from Rio de Janeiro.
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Miami Herald
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Haitian author Laferrière celebrates French language in Miami appearances this weekend
Before he became an offiicial guardian of the French language, the exiled Haitian journalist-turned novelist Dany Laferrière called Miami home. From the colorful vibes and vibrancy of the community, so close to his childhood home in Haiti, Laferrière wrote 10 novels. In fact of his 16 books on Haiti, a dozen were written in Miami, where he encountered people from his childhood in Petit-Goâve and Port-au-Prince. Among them was his mother's seamstress, an encounter he recalled in a piece last year as he reflected on the gang horror in his homeland. It was a rare insight for an author who admits to not taking the expected path and prefers to combat horror by opposing it 'with beauty and tenderness.' Laferrière, 71, is back in Miami this week, celebrating the French language with two public events as part of Francophonie month. Now a celebrated author and one of the so-called 'immortals' with his historic 2013 election into the French Academy — the main authority on the French language — Laferrière is claimed by both Haiti and Canada. Laferrière will mark International Day of La Francophone with a visit at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, 212 NE 59th Terrace, in Miami at 5 p.m. Saturday. While free, registration at eventbrite is required. If you miss him in Little Haiti, where he will be discussing some of his 38 books and celebrating French, which is spoken by more than 300 million people worldwide, you can catch him at 7 p.m. Monday at Books & Books in Coral Gables. An Evening with Dany Laferrière is free and open to the public. The tour is part of an effort to promote intercultural dialogue and is sponsored by the consulate generals of Canada, Haiti and France in Miami, the Office of the Government of Quebec in Miami and the Alliance Francaise. In a piece he wrote last year reflecting on the tragedy of Haiti, Laferrière, whose father was also forced to live in exile, recalled his mother's determination for him to receive an education and how she carried herself with grace despite the problems around her. 'Here we are once again on the edge of the precipice, and it seems that all we can think about is forms of power,' he wrote. He recalled meeting his mother's seamstress in Miami and how she informed him about how his mother, Marie, had made it 'a point of honor to ensure that the inside of her dress was as delicately made as the outside, even if it meant paying double the price.' 'And yet, she was a poor woman whose husband had lived in exile for decades, and who had to raise two children alone. Situations like this are common in this country,' he said. 'For all those who see no connection between this art of living I'm publishing today and who find me casual and carefree in the face of tragedy, I am a couturier trying to make a garment whose inside is as neat as the outside, to fulfill my mother's injunction about dignity,' Laferrière wrote. Laferrière has developed a large following of his works, which blend humor, reflection and poetry and keeps Haitian culture and French literature alive. He received the 2006 Governor General Literary Award winner for his book Je suis fou de Vava. His debut 1985 novel, 'How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired,' a satirical exploration of race and politics, was made into a film. Born in 1953 in Haiti, Laferrière grew up in coastal Petit-Goâve, south of Port-au-Prince. As a young journalist, he fled Haiti in 1978 for Montreal after a colleague was killed. He went on to become a leading voice in Francophone literature, winning numerous accolades. One of his biggest was his election on the first round into the elite Académie Française. He became only the second Black person and the youngest person to join the academy. Founded in 1635, the elite club is charged with safeguarding the French language, which includes updating a dictionary and advising on usage. Its members serve for life.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
South Korean government fights back as English words invade
Seoul (tca/dpa) - Kim Hyeong-bae, a South Korean linguist, had a problem: how to translate the word "deepfake" into Korean. A senior researcher at the National Institute of Korean Language, a government regulator, Kim works in the public language department. His job is to sift through the many foreign words that clutter everyday speech and bring them to the committee — called the "new language group" — to be translated into Korean. "Deepfake," which is pronounced dihp-PAY-kuh and has been appearing in newspaper headlines with increasing frequency, was a textbook candidate. A word-for-word translation would sound like nonsense, so Kim and 14 other language experts in a video conference last fall began with the essential questions: How could the word's negative connotations be accurately expressed in Korean? And was it necessary to use qualifiers like "counterfeit" or "artificial intelligence?" One participant suggested "intelligent modification," only for another to object: "That makes it sound like a good thing." By the end of the 15-minute discussion, the options had been narrowed to five. Later that month, the institute held a poll asking 2,500 respondents from the public to rate the suitability of each candidate, after which an external committee ratified a winner: "artificial intelligence-manipulated video." Then, by way of an entry into the institute's public glossary of reworked foreign words, it was released back into the world. Since the institute was founded in 1991, more than 17,000 so-called borrowed words - nearly all from Chinese, Japanese or English - have been translated in this way. Other countries have also tried to thwart the encroachment of borrowed words. The French Academy, founded in the 17th century to guard "pure" French, has been railing against Anglicisms for decades. So has the Spanish Royal Academy. Even the British have been trying to swat back Americanisms. All, for the most part, have been losing the fight Likewise for Kim, the mission of tackling five new ones every two weeks can feel, to use a Korean idiom, like pouring water into a bottomless pot. "We can't rework borrowed words as soon as they appear — we have to observe for a bit until it's clear that it's being used widely, after which we can step in," Kim said. "But by then it's already spread everywhere." It also doesn't help that there are already so many of them, reflecting Korea's long history of foreign influence. Until the invention of the Korean alphabet in 1443, the elites of Korea's dynastic kingdoms used hanja, the Chinese script that today still makes up the roots for many Korean words much like Latin does for English. Japan's colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945 introduced borrowed words including gao, Japanese for "face," adapted into Korean as "put on gao," which means to put on airs. Some words have been used twice, including why-SHAT-suh, which means dress shirt and is taken from a Japanese transliteration of "white shirt." Today, English is king. It is widely seen here as the language of cultural sophistication and aWestern education, adopted by corporations, government officials and journalists looking to lend their speech more authority. "The foreign languages that entered the country were always a tool and badge of the ruling class," Kim said. "I think borrowed words can be understood in those terms — as a way to signal your social position, to set yourself apart." The sheer clip at which English words rotate in and out of the vernacular has made it difficult for any statistic to accurately capture the scale of borrowed word creep. But it's clear that the phenomenon is not just the tweedy concern of linguists. Among the recent borrowed words (or locally coined spinoffs) that have reached the institute's chopping block: skimpflation, bundleflation, finfluencer (finance influencer), upskilling, upselling, cross-selling and value-up. In a survey of 7,800 South Koreans last year by polling company Hankook Research, more than three-quarters said they frequently encounter foreign words in public speech, up from 37% in 2022. A majority said they preferred easy-to-understand Korean alternatives. Even to native English speakers, the transliteration of familiar words into an alphabet with imperfectly matched consonants — lacking, for example, a precise "F" or "R" sound — can be confusing. And in recent years, the oftentimes absurd incursion of borrowed words has become satirized in popular culture, with speech that needlessly shoehorns English in at every turn pejoratively referred to as "voguespeak" or "Pangyo dialect." The former is a reference to Vogue magazine, whose Korean edition is seen as particularly guilty of this, the latter to a city known as South Korea's Silicon Valley, where you might hear a tech worker say a sentence like this: "The pi-pi-tee (PPT, slide presentation) was a little LUH-puh (rough), but the NEE-juh (needs, demands of consumers) were clear and I think it's worth eeshoo-RYE-jing (to raise an issue) AY-sep (ASAP)." Fixing up borrowed words is a dream job for someone like Kim, 59, whose obsession with the Korean language has given him what he describes as an occupational disease: wincing every time he walks down the street and notices all the signage with misspelled words, borrowed words and malapropisms. As a child, Kim enjoyed looking up words in the dictionary and learning their etymology, a hobby that endured into adulthood. For the last 20 years, he has led an online community with about 10,000 members, where he publishes a regular column exploring the origins of words that caught his interest. The latest entry, No. 1,038, examines Korean substitutes for "poncho." After attaining his Korean linguistics PhD, he taught at a university before realizing he preferred being out in the field, joining the institute in 2007. "I wanted to make a difference and bring about change on a policy level," he said. One point of irritation he has developed over the years is the use of borrowed words when the exact Korean word already exists. In some cases — like SIGH-duh (side), the kind on a restaurant menu — the Korean word (gyeotdeuri) has become so neglected it has disappeared from mainstream memory. Others, like "wife," reveal more interesting tensions. A survey the institute conducted in 2022 found that the majority of Korean men in their 20s and 30s described their spouses as WHY-puh (wife), probably because that feels more egalitarian and modern than ahnae, whose roots translate into "domestic person." Although he understands the rationale, Kim sees this as part of a wider trend of abandoning Korean words simply because they feel old-fashioned, fossilizing them even further. And just as words and their meaning can impose a certain reality, the opposite also can be true: A word's connotations can evolve alongside the things it denotes. Etymologies are not diktat. "The underlying treatment of someone doesn't change just because you rename them," he said. "Employers do this all the time. Instead of trying to change working conditions or benefits, they will just change the language in job titles." Kim is aware that some see his work as a little nitpicky and nationalistic — "North Korea-esque," some have called it. Past attempts to expunge borrowed words after Korea's independence from Japan had an element of ritualistic purification. But the institute's current approach is largely about keeping the civic square accessible and fair. "Language is a human right," Kim said. "Our job is about coming up with easier alternatives to foreign words that might be difficult for some people, so that there isn't a class of the population that ends up marginalized." Studies have shown that the elderly and those without college educations struggle with borrowed words, potentially shutting them off from government services or programs that feature them. That makes some battles more important than others. One priority is translating borrowed words that are being used to communicate public policy or important news events, such as "microcredit" or "voucher" as well as pandemic terms such as "booster shots." At the same time, there is no point trying to force out a borrowed word that has already become firmly entrenched, such as inteonet (internet) or dijiteol (digital). Slang words such as billeon (villain, a humorous term for a public troublemaker) sit somewhere in a gray area. Although the institute has recently offered up the Korean word for villain, akdang, Kim acknowledged it may be a tough sell. Such is language: Some of it sticks, some of it doesn't, and nobody can really explain why. "Some things you just have to accept," he said. "Deepfake" might be one of them. The word had been reworked once already, in 2019, to "high-tech manipulation technology." It had then probably been doomed by its wordiness. And in the weeks after the institute's second attempt, "artificial intelligence-manipulated video," was faring no better — "deepfake" still abounded. But by then, Kim had already moved on to the next batch of words.
