It was tragic enough that Susana Rivera-Mills’ girlhood was visited by war. It was frightening enough to flee her hometown of San Salvador on a dark night bundled in the backseat of the family Fiat with her little brother Fabio. And yet, as improbable as it seems, the hardest part was still ahead.
The early findings from Independence reveal a community that is holding onto Spanish for five and six generations.
What became the state of Oregon, an area stretching south from the Columbia Gorge to the Siskiyous, and east from the Pacific over the Coastal Range and Cascades to the High Desert, was a land of many languages, each one encoding information about the land and how to survive on it.
Words and language have always fascinated Michael Goodman. Growing up in Florence, Oregon, he liked tracing the roots of words that most of us take for granted, and at Oregon State University, he has minored in Japanese. But it is his affinity for computers that is propelling the senior in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Combining his interests, he has created software that overcomes a barrier in translation.