The Language Laboratory

Foreign language instruction has long been a staple of a Mount Holyoke liberal education — and international students greatly strengthen the College’s language initiatives. The Language Laboratory Program, established 1946, enlisted native speakers as department assistants — in exchange for a stipend, room, and board. The first language fellows hailed from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, France, and Italy.

A student tutor smiling and gesturing as she explains something to her tutee, who holds a book.
Lindsay Hopson, class of 1964, (left) and her tutee, 1963

Pictured above, Lindsay Hopson (Peru), class of 1964, (left) explains a problem to her tutee in 1963. In 1964 Hopson helped Spanish professor Joan Ciruti in the creation of a new Spanish textbook.

Emily Dickinson's poem "The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea" sits at the top of the page in three stanzas. Beneath the poem is Osada's Japanese translation of the poem into three vertical structural units of print.
Japanese translation of Emily Dickinson by Yoshie Osada (Japan), MA class of 1958, 1958
Emily Dickinson's poem "This is my letter to the World" sits at the top of the page in two stanzas. Beneath the poem is Osada's Japanese translation of the poem into two vertical structural units of print, arranged in diagonally from one another.
Japanese translation of Emily Dickinson by Yoshie Osada (Japan), MA class of 1958, 1958

Pictured above are Japanese translations of Emily Dickinson by Yoshie Osada (Japan), MA class of 1958, as part of her thesis “The ‘Heft of… Tunes’: A Study of the Problems Involving in Translating Certain of Emily Dickinson’s Poems into Japanese.”

“Translating from Western writings to Japanese was not just a matter of vocabulary, pronunciation and some small grammatical, idiomatic differences, but one of the whole system of ideas and mind.”—Yoshie Osada (Japan),  MA class of 1958.