November Newsletter

December 1, 2023 / By

Linguistics News

Zoom supports Sign Language Interpretation

LJL learned recently (Nov. 3 blog post) that Zoom added a new feature to make its video communication platform more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing users by providing a specialized view for sign language interpreting on their meetings and webinars. The meeting host can arrange for a designated interpreter and participants can opt in to view the sign language interpreter in a separate viewing box.

Zoom introduced its live transcription and automatic translation features earlier this year and LJL applauds them for making these important accessibility enhancements to their offering!

Edulang is on IOS!

We spent a numerous hours this month trying to get EduLang published in ios. We are super excited to let you all know that EduLang is now available in Apple app store!

We need your support by downloading EduLang on your iOS/android devices! Please share any feedback or questions you have with us!

EDULANG Revews​

LJL is super excited to share that we received reviews from the users around the globe. Below is a selection of some of our reviews!

EduLang Newspaper image (1)-min
2-min
EduLang Newspaper image-min
Previous image
Next image
trophy, award, winner-1300039.jpg

Linguistics Justice League Challenge

Results!

Linguistics Justice League partnered with creAItivity to host an event to gather ideas that help bridge the gap between low and high-resource languages through Artificial Intelligence!

Special thanks to our sponsors: Taskade, Interview Cake and Balsamiq

Winning Team: Sanskriti Negi

More details
We are excited to announce the winners of the LJL x CreAItivity event!

Winner!

Sanskriti's Project Abstract - Oftentimes children of immigrants don’t know the language of the place they move to. In many places this leads to children not being able to perform as well in school, especially when no language-immersion classes are offered. Furthermore, even when language-immersion type classes are offered, they sometimes try to take out the native language of the student in hopes to fully assimilate them into a new culture.

Honorable Mentions

Team Cyber: Basil Friday Ovu, Janeth Oluebube Eni, Philip Oghenesuowho Ekiugbo

Paridhi Ramtani 

Team Cyber's Abstract - Bajaphil is a gaming app that will teach basic concepts in low resource languages while combining visuals, audio and text through multi-scenario building. It will have Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa as its kick off languages while subsequently adding other widely spoken low resource languages of the world. The App will feature different game levels and rewards for completing each game level. There will be options for choosing different languages to learn and play from.
Paridhi's Project Abstract - Our idea includes building a platform that caters to the interests of a person. When we're interested in what we're learning, we pay closer attention; we process the information more efficiently. This app will help people learn English by focusing on topics that they like.

Thank you to our sponsors!

New Team members

Vanessa is a recent graduate of the University of Washington in Informatics, Software Development. Since a young age, she has taken an interest in drawing and designing, especially technology. Thus, with the combined passion for both, she has pursued being a front-end developer with strong knowledge in React, React Native, Javascript, HTML and CSS. However, her goal is to be able to master all levels of development, languages and frameworks. Thus, she also is experienced in mobile development, backend development and more.

Talal Younis is a high school student in Jordan interested in linguistics, specifically computational linguistics. Talal speaks Arabic, English, French and is currently learning Italian. Learning languages is something that Talal is passionate about. Talal is also interested in the connection between computer science, mathematics, and languages. Living in Jordan, the refugee crisis allows Talal to realize that many individuals do not have access to the resources they need simply because they speak low-resource languages. Luckily, emerging fields like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing both offer hope. LJL is super excited to onboard Talal!

business, commerce, cooperation-1297601.jpg

Interview with Dr. Ali, LJL board member!

We are excited to interview Dr. Ali,  one of our Board members for this month’s newsletter! 

As part of the interview we asked multiple questions to know more about Dr.Ali's background and his interests and passions!
pyramids, egypt, egyptian-2371501.jpg
Background? Dr. Ali was born in Alexandria, Egypt and got my bachelor degree from the University of Alexandria.
translation, holidays, visit-4620781.jpg
Interest in Linguistics? After getting my BA Dr. Ali worked as a teacher of English as a foreign language. Through my teaching of English, he realized the relevance of many areas of Linguistics to the teaching of foreign and second languages. For example, the distinction between first language acquisition and second language learning, Contrastive Linguistics, first language interference etc are only a few areas that are extremely important in second language learning.
welcome, words, greeting-905562.jpg
Any Language barriers? Dr. Ali faced language barriers problems when he went to the United Kingdom for graduate work. He found out that people in England spoke differently from what he learned at school. He did not know how to do the small talk which barred him from socializing with native British. He had to overcome subject matter difficulties, like any native, and also the linguistic barrier. Dr. Ali encountered this also when he moved to the US.
Number of languages? Dr. Ali is a native speaker of Egyptian Arabic and also studied English, French, German and Latin.
Why volunteer at LJL? LJL has a noble cause which is empowering people from linguistic minorities and enabling them advance academically, socially and professionally. That is what excited Dr. Ali about LJL

Dr. Ali, LJL is honored to have you as our board member!

Submit an Article

We are pleased to present our monthly newsletter! Every month, we will feature an editorial article relating to linguistics and latest NLP innovations in this space. Please contact us if you would like to submit an article

Email us - info@linguisticsjusticeleague.org

Join LJL's Research Lab

Multiple Volunteer positions and Research opportunities available. Fill out the form