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.
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.
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.