UN's International Day
With so many horrific conflicts in the world at the moment, we wanted, in this month’s article, to highlight 16th May, which is the UN’s International Day of Living Together in Peace.
Education in general, and one might say, language education in particular, is an important tool in fostering peace. It promotes tolerance, understanding and respect for diversity. The more people who speak another language, the more opportunity there is for dialogue and the more opportunity there is for people to share experiences and for bridges to be built between different cultures.
Poetry
Basingstoke Music and Arts Festival has a class in which children can enter a poem they have translated from one language into another. The poem below, was translated by a Linguatastic child from French into English. It not only illustrates the way culture can be shared and dialogue increased by it simply having been translated from one language into another, but the content of the poem itself is very poignant when thinking about peace in humanity.
The original poem is called Ton Christ est juif and is by Julos Beaucarne. Here is a part of its translation by 9-year-old Matteo: