Laney College's Legal Community Interpreting Program

This page keeps all those involved in Laney College's LCI Program in touch. Here we can share job and volunteer opportunities, resources, and connections.

Operating as usual

13/02/2025

For my students. We were just talking about Sócrates last night…

“Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels and Stories
A Library of America Boxed Set:
https://amzn.to/42UHXSW

05/02/2025

La magia del español

01/02/2025

Bay Area Rapid Response numbers.

28/12/2024

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=997487762251747&id=100059715961024&mibextid=wwXIfr

An estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings—speak English, making it the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Like other colonial tongues, it spread first through “conquest, conversion, and commerce,” Rosemary Salomone writes in her book “The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language,” but its spread today is powered by a fourth process, what Salomone calls “collusion.” Around the globe, people pursue English and the opportunities it promises. “Korean mothers move their children to anglophone countries to learn in English,” Salomone observes. “Dutch universities teach in it. ASEAN countries collaborate in it. Political activists tweet in it.”

Some researchers worry about the erosion of various cultural identities that the expansion of English may bring. Just as daunting is the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, some researchers argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu voiced a common concern when, in 2001, he wondered if “it is possible to accept the use of English without the risk of one’s mental structures being anglicized, without being brainwashed by linguistic patterns.”

At the link in our bio, Manvir Singh surveys recent linguistic and cognitive studies to assess what might be lost with the expansion of English. Illustration by .