Written by Victor Hugo Mendevil

Good news: we have another DAILP Team Spotlight to share with you! This November, we had the pleasure of interviewing DAILP’s current linguistic annotator, Melissa Torres. Melissa is a fifth-year student at Northeastern University studying a combined major of Linguistics and Psychology. Currently a one-person department on our core team, Melissa has been working diligently on community commentary documents and filling in any corrections on texts, which included finishing up the Willie Jumper Stories collection over the past summer. 

In this spotlight, Melissa discusses how she learned to annotate and translate the Cherokee syllabary with no previous experience or encounters with the language, aside from an intensive linguistic annotation course that she took over the summer with Dr. Jeffrey Bourns. Despite her short-term experience with Cherokee, Melissa was able to make remarkable strides and contribute to the growing amount of translated texts. Melissa also highlights her career goals as a future social worker or speech pathologist for children, and how she hopes her work at DAILP will carry over in improving childrens’ lives when it comes to an understanding of language. Her insights in this interview illuminate a path to how DAILP showcases their learning tools in an accessible way for beginning speakers and learners of Cherokee, regardless of age and linguistic background.

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How did you get involved with DAILP and when were you introduced to the Cherokee language?

I was first introduced to the Cherokee language in Spring 2022 when taking my senior seminar course with Dr. Jeffrey Bourns, DAILP’s own language specialist. After several months of trial and error to learn the Cherokee syllabary writing system and proper annotation, Jeff suggested that I continue my work throughout the summer. This is when I was introduced to the core team and have been taking on new responsibilities [at DAILP] since.


As a non-native speaker, what challenges have you faced when it comes to learning the Cherokee syllabary? 

The most difficult part of learning the syllabary was distinguishing the characters that differed in only one slight shape or directional change. This, paired with the sheer number of characters used (85!), took days of practice and frequent refreshing to memorize.


As a first-time learner, what are some of the positives and negatives to having no background in the language prior to your intensive course?

A positive was my lack of knowledge in the language’s structure. This made the morphemic segmentation of words much simpler because I was not trying to fit words into a type of “structure” that was common to the language. Negatively, I had no mental vocabulary bank when translating individual words, so I had to rely heavily on the Cherokee-English Dictionary, which was very time consuming.


Do you speak (or have studied) any other languages?

English is my only fluent language. However, I have gone through four years of Spanish classes and two years of American Sign Language (ASL), which I feel moderately proficient in. Growing up, I was introduced to a handful of simple words in Portuguese and Polish by my parents, but the full languages were unfortunately not passed down to my siblings or me.


What learning tools or techniques have helped you overcome the challenges you mentioned before? Do you have any tricks, tips, or advice for those visiting our site who would like to start learning the Cherokee language and syllabary for the first time?

As suggested during my seminar course by Jeff (Dr. Bourns), mnemonics! During the first week of the course, we were instructed to pair mental images with names that corresponded to the phonetics of the Syllabary characters. Jeff exemplified this by pairing a picture of Lady Gaga with her arms out to represent the character /Ꭶ/ ‘ga.’ This, combined with drilling a long Quizlet flashcard set, made the characters much easier to differentiate.


Is there anything you would like to incorporate or contribute to DAILP’s interface before your time with us has come to a close? Moreover, are there any ways you think would improve the site in becoming more accessible to first-time learners of Cherokee?

I would love to spend my remaining time working on publishing new Cherokee texts. It means a great deal to me that my efforts are making these materials more accessible while also preserving the language for years to come. 

“…I believe DAILP to be widely accessible in terms of different ages and skill levels due to its various resources under the Tools and Teaching tabs. I would love to incorporate the idea of mnemonics (and that Quizlet set!) to ease learning.”

As someone who will work with kids in the future, how would you go about introducing the Cherokee syllabary to a child without any background in the language?

Lots of pictures! When I first learned the English alphabet in my Kindergarten class, we did coloring worksheets where each letter was paired with an animal whose name began with that letter. Developing similar worksheets with animal pictures whose Cherokee names begin with each Syllabary character could be a first step.

With my potential future career options and my current job as a childhood educator, children are at the heart of what I want to do.  Conveniently, mnemonics are excellent educational tools, especially in situations where a child might not have the means to communicate verbally. Using pictures, actions, symbols, or even ASL will help me to better understand their needs and requests wherever I may end up.


Do you feel that you contribute to the persistence of people or community as an annotator? What do you think is something others in your field may not realize is important when it comes to translating another community’s language? 

I feel that others do not recognize the importance of culturally-specific words or plays on words. During my work, I have picked up on how many Cherokee terms do not have exact equivalents in other languages. You cannot gain fluency from study alone; you must immerse yourself in the language or culture to gain full knowledge.

“As an annotator, I also get to incorporate commentary that comes directly from Cherokee speakers and community members. To me, this is the most worthwhile part of what I do, since the annotation not only introduces the language, but adds depth. DAILP gathers direct feedback that teaches the audience about unique cultural terms and generational language change.”

Melissa continues to work as a teacher at Bright Horizons and is currently working towards earning a teaching certification through online lectures, which she is expected to complete by the end of December 2022. Looking to the future, Melissa has registered for her final courses at Northeastern and will be graduating in May 2023! She is excited to be finishing her education at Northeastern and looks forward to becoming a full-time certified teacher at Bright Horizons while exploring new career possibilities.