Is It Possible to Revitalize a Dying Language? An Examination of Attempts to Halt the Decline of Irish
This paper evaluates the attempts to revitalize the indigenous language of Ireland. It examines how the number of native Irish speakers declined under British rule, and how this trend continued even after independence, when Irish was declared the country’s official language. Successive Irish governments have used two main strategies to reverse language shift. The first was to protect the small Irish speaking areas in the west of the country, the Gaeltacht. The second was to rely on schools elsewhere to produce new generations of fluent Irish speakers. By the 1970s it was apparent that neither policy was working. However since then, somewhat improbably, an increasing number of people have begun to use Irish, both inside and outside the Gaeltacht. This paper examines whether this revival constitutes reverse language shift. In particular, it asks to what extent Irish is now being passed on as a mother tongue to a new generation of children.
The value of language-maintenance efforts which are unlikely to succeed
In the 15 years during which I was constantly visiting the East Sutherland district of the northeast Scottish mainland or living there, actively studying the dying Scottish Gaelic dialect of the region and clearly deeply engaged by its distinctive history and unique flavor, I was asked many times whether my activities or indeed anyone else's could make any difference to the ultimate fate of the dialect. But I was never asked that question by a native of the region. Both academics and laypeople in other parts of the world thought it theoretically possible that the ebb tide of linguistic retreat might turn or be turned. And theoretically of course such a thing is perfectly possible and has in fact happened in the case of a good many languages. The heroic, nearmiraculous example of Hebrew, regaining vernacular status after centuries of more or less fossilized existence, is always to the fore, and the number of other languages once threatened but now perfectly secure is sufficient to make the question reasonable enough. For a compilation of success stories, see Ellis and mac a' Ghobhainn (1971); for examples of enclaved peoples who have survived against all odds, sometimes with their languages as part of the persisting identity, see Castile and Kushher (1981). Nonetheless, at the risk of casting a dark shadow over a subject already rendered gloomy by the sheer number of languages known to have died or acknowledged to be in the gravest danger of doing so very shortly, I wish to deal here with some of the more knotty problems which pose severe obstacles to well-intended and even well-funded efforts to promote the survival (whether in terms of true maintenance or of revival from a barely existing population base) of threatened languages. I will deal first with the East Sutherland Gaelic case and then add examples from the Irish experience. My reason for emphasizing the negative rather than the positive in this paper is not a wish to deny the value of language-maintenance programs in general (see the closing sections of this paper in evidence), but rather an uneasy sense that maintenance programs are too easily and comfortably invoked as a solu-
MT and the Swiss language service providers: an analysis and training perspective
Switzerland is perceived as a highly multilingual country, with four national languages and a solid translation tradition in official, administrative and corporate settings, now even extended to include English. A research case study was set up to investigate the understanding and use of translation and language technologies by Swiss language service providers. This paper highlights some findings, particularly focusing upon the issue of translation automation processes in multilingual documentation production, with a view not only to spot preconceptions or knowledge gaps about MT, but also to 
suggest some training principles. We will argue that training activities ought to present MT systems as 
key aiding components of translator workbenches and, their output, as a valid linguistic resource for further human refining, if necessary. Moreover, in line with the idea that MT can be part and parcel of multilingual content production cycles, we will look at the interaction of MT with controlled language, CAT tools and terminology work. In sum, we will make explicit the usefulness of MT against the 
widespread prejudice that investing in MT does not return any benefits given the ‘low and hilarious quality of its output’, as quoted by most of the interviewees of our case study.