Interpreting Mayan Languages.

Rachel Nolan has a New Yorker piece (Jan. 6 issue) about the translation crisis for migrants who speak Mayan languages and the interpreters who are helping them in court; much of it makes for depressing reading, but it handles language unusually well for a general-interest publication, so I’ll quote some of those bits here:

Oswaldo Vidal Martín always wears the same thing to court: a striped overshirt, its wide collar and cuffs woven with geometric patterns and flowers. His pants are cherry red, with white stripes. Martín is Guatemalan and works as a court interpreter, so clerks generally assume that he is there to translate for Spanish speakers. But any Guatemalan who sees his clothing, which is called traje típico, knows that Martín is indigenous. “My Spanish is more conversational,” Martín told me. “I still have some difficulties with it.” He interprets English for migrants who speak his mother tongue, a Mayan language called Mam. […]

One morning in early December, Martín was interpreting for a criminal case in Dublin, east of Oakland. A clerk signed him in—“Buenos días,” she greeted him—and then he met the people he’d be translating for, a Mam husband and wife who had been the victims of an attempted home burglary. […] Martín accompanied the husband to the witness box, while the wife waited in a nearby room. Watching a skilled simultaneous interpreter is a bit like watching someone speaking in tongues. As soon as the judge starts talking, the interpreter mutters along, not waiting for the sentence to be over before beginning to translate. Martín relayed the witness’s answers in a low, steady voice, in American-accented English.

The testimony turned on the layout of the kitchen. There are twenty-two officially recognized Mayan languages in Guatemala; all of them use relational nouns instead of prepositions—Mam uses “head” to say “on top of”—and they have complex grammatical rules to describe bodies in space. The witness pinched his fingers and dropped them down to imitate his wife putting cash in her purse. He worked his eyebrows. He didn’t look up when the prosecutor asked a question. He was telling his story to Martín, the only person in the room who understood. […]

Mayan Guatemalans have a persistent problem: explaining to people that they still exist. The ancient Mayan cities collapsed in the eighth or ninth century, but the Mayan people remained, farming corn in small towns. One archeologist compared it to the fall of the Soviet Union: the structure of life has changed, but the people are still there. All the Mayan languages share a common root, but most of them are mutually unintelligible. Yucatec Mayan is tonal, like Cantonese. K’iche’, the language of the “Popol Vuh,” has six or ten vowels, depending on the dialect. Mam is produced far back in the mouth and comes out softly raspy. The variations are not a mark of being cut off from external influences, the linguist William Hanks told me, but, rather, a sign of development. Mayan languages have had four thousand years to ramify. “Mayans have never been isolated,” Hanks said. In 1990, the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala was formed, and a branching linguistics tree, showing the common origin of all Mayan languages, became a symbol of the Pan-Mayan movement. (Mam emerged from the trunk about two thousand years ago.) There is still debate about which subdivisions should be counted as dialects. […]

“I grew up my entire life speaking Mam, and there is no word for asylum,” Henry Sales, a twenty-seven-year-old immigrant from San Juan Atitán, told me. Sales and Oswaldo Martín were at the César E. Chávez branch of the public library, in downtown Fruitvale, where they met with other Mam speakers to work on a Mam-English legal dictionary. […] Martín had the idea for the legal dictionary when he came across a Mayan health handbook, which listed ailments in English, Spanish, K’iche’, and Mam. […]

Sales and Martín speak different dialects of Mam. Though they understand each other, Martín said that Sales’s Mam sounds more like French—airy, with swallowed consonants—while his is more like Portuguese—choppy and guttural. Even I can hear the difference. […] “What we’ve been doing is try to come up with a definition of ‘asylum’ and translate that to Mam,” Sales said.

Their shorthand translation is “To be held and looked after by the law.” “Qlet tun ley.” A longer, more complete definition that Sales teaches in Mam class is “Jun u’j tun tkleti tij qa xjal aj kyaj tun tkub’ tb’yon ay bix qa tk’awali tu’x txuli / tchmili.” “A paper that saves / protects you from people who are harming / attempting to kill you and your children, your wife / husband.”

I asked Sales and Martín if Mam speakers generally understood their explanation of asylum, and Martín said yes, but he mentioned another problem cited by nearly everyone I interviewed. “A tendency for a lot of indigenous people is to agree to everything being asked of them in Spanish,” he said, even if it’s incorrect and self-incriminating. […]

One Saturday, I attended a Mam class that Henry Sales teaches at Laney College, in downtown Oakland. It was Labor Day weekend, but thirty people showed up, a mixture of social workers and public-school teachers. Dave Rose, a teacher at Fremont High School, said that he has a total of a hundred and forty students. “Sixty of them speak Mam,” he said. The other teachers gasped.

Soon Sales was running us through the alphabet. The letters were familiar but the sounds were not. There were glottal stops (as in “uh-oh”), and apostrophes that made a little popping noise out of the preceding consonant. We could barely get out chjonte, “thank you.” […] Rose wanted to know how to say “You’re late.” Yaj matzuli. “I’m going to use that a lot,” he said.

Nolan not only talked to a linguist, she took a class in the language. More reporters should have that kind of dedication! (We’ve discussed Mayan languages previously at LH, e.g. 2006, 2015.)

It won’t make a post on its own, so I’ll just tack this quote (from the Times obituary of Maurice Platnauer, via Laudator Temporis Acti) on here: “A keen student of language and especially of grammar and syntax, he was one of those rare men who enjoy reading voluminous grammars from beginning to end.”