Contents

By Christopher Daradics, CASLS Language Technician

This month InterCom is focusing on self-care. Julie kicked us off by revisiting and expanding on last year’s treatment of this same topic. And last week, Mandy reminded us of the importance of staying true to our biggest yeses. This week we are focusing in on intention, specifically on cultivating our own intentions and supporting others in finding and maintaining theirs.

The challenges we face in setting our own clear intentions are many and include the following:

• Genuine self-knowledge is difficult to achieve and does not necessarily manifest as the wisdom to know how to act.
• Being sensitive to our own needs is not nurtured by the cultural mainstream nor mass media.
• It is rarely obvious, from the vantage point of our moment-by-moment experience, how to practically implement our intentions.
• Learning how to hold one’s own line while maintaining grace, compassion, and presence for others is challenging and there is no one “right” way to do it.
• Our desires and our contexts are ever unfolding and changing, and life is in a constant state of flux.

Fortunately, as language experts we have two key pieces of wisdom that can be leveraged to become more adept at cultivating and manifesting intentional lives and communities.

First, we are good at languaging. This is to say, we are good at using language. We know at its core it is functional and “can-do” things in the world. If we can quiet the noise and chaos in and around us for long enough to find our own signal and put words around our experience and feelings, we will very quickly find ourselves with clarified and concrete intentions. As Jack Kerouac says, "something you feel will find its own form."

Second, we are all experts at "The Coco." Although you may not realize it yet, you are already a master of this exciting and vivacious dance! As functional language experts, we know that human experience is always dynamic, always in flux. All communication, as we understand it, is hyper-contextual, it is always emergent, and it is always on the move. As we participate with others we co-construct experience together. Every day in class by taking questions, redirecting students’ attention, and acknowledging success we are all co-constructing the unfolding of (classroom) life together. Similarly, this co-construction is mutually regulating. Our students’ bad days become our bad days—and vice versa. Likewise, our amazing lessons become the bedrock (we hope) of our students’ worldviews and ultimately their brilliant adult lives. This co-constructed, co-regulated dance is something we have already unconsciously mastered in our L1, L2, and beyond.

By taking the time to let our feelings find their own form in language, and by consciously focusing on the co-constructed and co-regulated nature of our lives together, we will naturally begin to graciously dance our way into the syncopated equilibrium of intentional, vivacious life and community.

This week’s Activity of the Week is an invitation to nurture yourself and others by setting some time aside to practice feeling and clarifying your intentions and to explore how you can consciously apply your expertise in "The Coco" into other domains of life.

From https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.147

The Neurocognition of Translation and Interpreting
By Adolfo M. García
Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company

This groundbreaking work offers a comprehensive account of brain-based research on translation and interpreting. First, the volume introduces the methodological and conceptual pillars of psychobiological approaches vis-à-vis those of other cognitive frameworks. Next, it systematizes neuropsychological, neuroscientific, and behavioral evidence on key topics, including the lateralization of networks subserving cross-linguistic processes; their relation with other linguistic mechanisms; the functional organization and temporal dynamics of the circuits engaged by different translation directions, processing levels, and source-language units; the system’s susceptibility to training-induced plasticity; and the outward correlates of its main operations. Lastly, the book discusses the field’s accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, and requirements. Its authoritative yet picturesque, didactic style renders it accessible to researchers in cognitive translatology, bilingualism, and neurolinguistics, as well as teachers and practitioners in related areas. Succinctly, this piece establishes a much-needed platform for translation and interpreting studies to fruitfully interact with cognitive neuroscience.

Visit the publisher's website at https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.147

From https://benjamins.com/catalog/ata.xix

The Evolving Curriculum in Interpreter and Translator Education: Stakeholder perspectives and voices
Edited by David B. Sawyer, Frank Austermühl, and Vanessa Enríquez Raído 
Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company

The Evolving Curriculum in Interpreter and Translator Education: Stakeholder perspectives and voices examines forces driving curriculum design, implementation and reform in academic programs that prepare interpreters and translators for employment in the public and private sectors. The evolution of the translating and interpreting professions and changes in teaching practices in higher education have led to fundamental shifts in how translating and interpreting knowledge, skills and abilities are acquired in academic settings. Changing conceptualizations of curricula, processes of innovation and reform, technology, refinement of teaching methodologies specific to translating and interpreting, and the emergence of collaborative institutional networks are examples of developments shaping curricula. Written by noted stakeholders from both employer organizations and academic programs in many regions of the world, the timely and useful contributions in this comprehensive, international volume describe the impact of such forces on the conceptual foundations and frameworks of interpreter and translator education.

Visit the publisher's website at https://benjamins.com/catalog/ata.xix

From https://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2678.html

The 9th bi-annual conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition ‒ North America (GALANA 9) will take place at the University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland on August 21-23, 2020. Although this is the first time that GALANA is hosted outside North America, it will still take place on the North American tectonic plate, where the University of Iceland campus is located. 

The GALANA conference features theoretically informed research on all types of language acquisition scenarios, including (but not limited to) monolingual first language acquisition, bilingual/multilingual first language acquisition, second language acquisition by children as well as adults, third language acquisition, acquisition of signed as well as spoken languages, language disorders, language acquisition in the presence of cognitive impairment and autism, the development of pidgins and creoles, and language attrition. 

The deadline for call of papers is January 15, 2020. Further information about invited speakers, the conference venue, website, etc. will be available in the fall. 

View the full call for papers at https://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2678.html

From https://naerjournal.ua.es/announcement/view/8

Call for Papers: Intercultural education from Pre-School to Secondary education: new approaches and practices

This special issue expects research and experiences from different voices and contexts that take into account not only the prevailing monocultural perspective but also diverse worldviews than can support cultural understanding about the symbolic systems articulated both in schools and societies. Therefore, this issue has as its purpose to generate new knowledge and to inform about recent advances that can guide educational processes in cultural diversity contexts. To do this, the editors call for diverse approaches and methodologies to present studies, experiences, and good practices in intercultural education that rely on robust empirical evidence and offer a more comprehensive view of education from early childhood to secondary education.

This special call seeks papers based on empirical research where studies must be described in sufficient detail to be potentially replicable using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.

Deadline for acceptance and delivery of authors´ proposals: July 30, 2019

View the full call for papers at https://naerjournal.ua.es/announcement/view/8

From the SEELANGS listserv:

The Ukrainian Studies Organization at Indiana University has the honor to convene the first Taras Shevchenko Conference, which will take place at Indiana University, March 6-7, 2020. This conference aims to bring scholars from all disciplines to explore the ways in which Ukrainian studies is presented and shaped in the current political and cultural contexts. The year of 2014 is a turning point in how Ukraine is discussed and positioned as a political and geographical body, as well as a topos of imagination. The conference intends to open an interdisciplinary space where scholars whose work focuses on an array of inquiries related to the Ukrainian studies (of any time period) present their findings and discuss how and what narratives are established to locate and discuss Ukraine locally and globally.

Submissions from any academic discipline are welcome, including but not limited to history, literature, memory studies, linguistics, translation, music, film, religious studies, political science, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, mass media. Graduate students are welcome to submit proposals. We also invite professionals in nonacademic settings to submit proposals. Please include with your abstract: your full name and your academic or professional affiliation and rank (graduate student, professor, translator, artist, etc.). Abstracts should not exceed 300 words. All submissions will be peer reviewed. The deadline for submission is October 1, 2019. Please direct inquiries about the conference to Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed (nshpylov@iu.edu) and Ani Abrahamyan (aniabrah@iu.edu).

Shpylova, N. [SEELANGS] Taras Shevchenko Conference at IU. SEELANGS listserv (SEELANGS@LISTSERV.UA.EDU, 9 Jul 2019).

The International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT) is soliciting proposals for a new book tentatively titles "Language Center Handbook 2021." This volume, with chapters double-blind peer-reviewed by an editorial board, is a follow-up to the Language Center Handbook published in 2018. Its chapters will address current best practices in managing and developing a language center, language center design and redesign, and other areas related to language centers. Editors are Betsy Lavolette and Angelika Kraemer.

The proposal submission deadline is September 20, 2019. 

View the full call for chapters at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q1Gk3d_mICnREMgxp2E7oEwVJZ8xnPGM/view

From https://slrf2018.ca/slrf-2019/

The Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) 2019 will be hosted by Michigan State University’s Second Language Studies program in East Lansing, Michigan from September 19-22.

The goal of SLRF 2019 is to foster dialogue among disciplines within Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Since SLA is a relatively young field of scientific inquiry, the SLRF 2019 theme, Advancing Transdisciplinary Research, places specific emphasis on diversity and bringing together different disciplines, methodologies, and epistemologies.

For full details about this event, go to https://slrf2018.ca/slrf-2019/