Hey everyone I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season! I was just thinking about ways to help the world l couple of days ago and was wondering if there were any ways we could tie languages into that. Languages are very critical in any charitable work with people from other places that don’t speak their language. I was wondering if there was a way I or we could help with that. Maybe we could work with charities that need help with translation and interpretation. I don’t know any of the details about this sort of stuff and am honestly just throwing ideas out there. I’m not exactly sure how this would work and am just looking to see what people think. If anyone has any input on this concept or is interested in working on something like that, go ahead and reply. Again I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.
Hi Grant! I hope you had a lovely holiday season too.
This is actually something that inspires me to learn languages. I believe we should try to use our skills to make positive difference in the world!
I would love to be able to help people when my languages are at a higher level.
I would be interested to see if anyone has any suggestions or ideas!
I love this idea! I’ve looked into it in the past, but it seems that the languages I’m interested in aren’t particularly useful for such things, sadly (Japanese, French). Here are some links that might be useful, though -
Good luck!
Hey Maisy, thanks for responding! You were wondering about some ideas. I was thinking about either helping ourselves and other people find groups to volunteer with other groups or, if people are willing, we could coordinate these sorts if things ourselves so that we can help as many groups as possible. Essentially we would be creating a separate group that partners with charities to help them. Either idea works for me and if someone has a different idea, then that may work too.
Hey and thank you for responding! Thanks for the links. I personally am not quite at a fluent level in anything other than English so far so it will be a while before I can use them lol, but I believe that other people who see this may use them. Eventually when I am fluent in other languages I’ll definitely consider using them. Thank you! I am better with coordination and planning at the current moment which is why I was considering creating a group of us language learners and enthusiasts that would help multiple groups by coordinating with them to help them with their translation and interpretation needs. Of course this would all be online as none of us can really afford to fly out to these places. I am right now just throwing out ideas and collecting support so that when the time does come. None of this is official and I am open to all of the ideas I can get. Again thank you so much for the links!
Very kind of you to raise the topic, Grant. One thing that I’m always concerned is dying languages/languages that are going extinct.Supporting the research for those or the scholars/speakers who are still involved would be a good way to help, maybe?
Hey Sonja, good idea! Do you have an idea of how we could help with that?
You pose a very important question, Grant. The idea of making a positive impact through languages is both exciting and realistic. You can do this in at least two ways: by raising awareness about and dismantling pernicious language ideologies (accentism, nativespeakerism, racism, etc.) and by learning and/or promoting an endangered language, donating to related projects, etc. With this idea in mind, last year I created the project “The Hyperpolyglot Activist: Learn Languages, Make a Difference”. Here you will find both the conceptual tools and the practical strategies to make a difference through language learning, Enjoy!: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGfgMUzPSAR_hkV6KVLignw