Dispatch #26
Read about the uncertain future of an allotment garden outside Paris, the severely endangered Fiuman dialect spoken across Croatia and the repercussions of Vietnam’s largest stock-market fraud
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
In France, a decades-old allotment in one of Paris’s working-class suburbs is under threat. We summarise a piece about the fight to save it, and why it is more than just a tussle between gardeners and town planners.
We have an article from Croatia, where a doctoral candidate interviewed over 240 speakers of the Venetian-origin Fiuman dialect to understand how it is faring in the Croatian city of Rijeka in which it was once a major language.
And lastly, we summarise a piece from Vietnam tracing the ins and outs of one of the country’s biggest stock-market frauds.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
One must cultivate one’s own garden*
In a working-class suburb of Paris, a decades-old allotment area is under threat. The fight to save the Jardins ouvriers des Vertus is more than just a tussle between gardeners and town planners: it’s an urgent debate about what we expect a city to be
In Aubervilliers, a working-class suburb to the northeast of Paris, an iconic community garden and allotment known as the Jardins ouvriers des Vertus is once again under threat.
Dating back to the 1930s, the Jardins have been whittled away by successive phases of urban development: most recently the building of an Olympic training pool, planned transport hubs and a new metro line to the area. Now just seven hectares remain: around one fifth of an original allotment area that used to supply fruit and vegetables for the major produce markets of central Paris (themselves largely gone). A series of aerial photographs from 1949 to now show just how much the area under cultivation has been reduced, and how.
That process is ongoing. “These gardens are still, as ever, threatened with destruction,” writes the architecture collective ScopFair in a polemic for Le Club de Mediapart, a forum where readers of the independent French news site Mediapart express their views.
These continued threats come, the authors say, “despite the collapse of biodiversity, despite the risks of overheating in the city, despite the precariousness of working-class neighborhoods, despite the dangers [of] flooding or drought, despite the promises of elected officials, the decisions of judges and local protests.”
Since 2020, gardeners have been pushing back against plans to build over parts of the allotments with office developments, shops and hotels. Negotiations and court rulings have saved some of the land. But the threat has never fully disappeared. Activists now fear that an area they fought hard to save could be used for commercial buildings under a vaguely worded urban development plan. The gardeners see this as a quiet, piecemeal erosion of a vital green space under layers of bureaucracy.
During a public consultation on the space, Dolorès Mijatovic of the Collective for the Defense of Workers’ Gardens, wrote to town planners: “These gardens, the Vertus allotments, are a refuge for all living things: animals, plants and humans… a lifeline in the fight against the ongoing climate change. These gardens are a place for our future, and yours too.”
The authors of the Mediapart post echo her comments. But they also point out that the surface area of the allotments that gardeners are battling to protect is, in the wider picture, a “drop in the ocean”. Every day, France builds on the equivalent of 100 football pitches of agricultural or forested land.
A drop in the ocean, but still worth fighting for, they say: as a breathing space in a densely populated, working-class neighbourhood; and as a home for ladybirds, bees, ants, butterflies and humans.
* “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” is a line from the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire’s book Candide, expressing the need to work, above all, on what is under one’s own control.
Original article (“Pourquoi les jardins ouvriers d’Aubervilliers sont-ils encore et toujours menacés?”) by ScopFair was first published in French on 13 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Le Club de Mediapart is a platform for blogs, opinion pieces and discussions, allowing readers of the independent news site Mediapart to publish and exchange ideas.
Summary by TM
And so it flows
Sophia Smith Galer looks at an article, and a doctoral thesis, about the Venetian-origin dialect once prevalent in the city of Fiume/Rijeka, now ever more endangered
Cities where many languages are or have been spoken tend to also bear many different names.
Fiume, as it is known in Italy, is no exception. English speakers might not have heard of Fiume, which they’d be forgiven for assuming is in Italy – the Italian name remains barely changed from flumen, the Latin word it inherited, meaning river. But the city of Fiume isn’t in Italy – it’s in Croatia, where Croatian speakers call it Rijeka, after the Croat word for river.
This seaport of just over 100,000 people has had its ownership contested for centuries. In the last century it was swapped between the (now defunct) Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Yugoslavia and then, on the declaration of its independence in 1991, the present-day republic of Croatia. Just 76 km away from Trieste (which is in Italy), the city hosts not only standard Croatian and a local Croatian dialect known as Chakavian, but the vestiges of il dialetto fiumano, a dialect of the Venetian language continuum that spans the north-east of Italy.
In the grand age of Venetian trade, ships sailing across the Adriatic facilitated constant language contact alongside the movement of people. Words travelled, were adopted, exchanged. As the dominion of other European powers over the city solidified, the dialetto increasingly accrued German and Hungarian words. Fiuman itself stayed prominent in the city well into the 20th century. In 1909, the pedagogist Gemma Harasim wrote that “it is almost a general rule that when Hungarians, Croats and Italians meet, the language of exchange remains Italian.”*
But Fiuman is now severely endangered. In this piece from La Voce newspaper, we learn about Kristina Blagoni’s doctoral thesis on Fiuman. Based on seven years of fieldwork and over 240 interviews, Blagoni makes the case that Fiuman isn’t simply a language spoken at home, or by people of the past – as is so commonly said of Italy’s under-appreciated language diversity. Rather it should be considered a “minority urban dialect”, still emerging in domains like public life, school and in the community more broadly. Speaking at a cultural week in Fiume – as this Italian newspaper calls it – a local Italian Studies professor said that Blagoni’s thesis is “a fundamental contribution to understanding the ecolinguistic and identity dynamics of our city.”
Blagoni lists five different kinds of relationship that exist today between speakers and their dialect: speaking it at home with parents, amongst friends, in general daily life, to children and, lastly and perhaps most existential, in the formation of identity. As in other cities where language shift is taking place, Blagoni has identified a drop in parents passing the language on to young children, with just 121 monolingual Fiuman-speaking families in her study as the city continues its shift to Croatian. Some proud Fiuman-speaking grandparents find that their grandchildren understand what they’re saying, but reply in Croatian. “As many as 80 percent of those interviewed,” Blagoni says, “believe that Fiuman is disappearing.”
Blagoni’s work is more about understanding the linguistic reality of Fiume than providing solutions to maintaining the language. That said, she suggests that a framework across public life reminding speakers of Fiuman’s value and its relevance to daily life would be helpful, as would improved census data on multilingualism.
(That last recommendation is something I hear begged for by linguists all around the globe: we almost never have enough data to draw a robust picture of the true state of most cities’ linguistic diversity. Perhaps – and now this is me talking, as a cartographer of linguicide and journalist who studies language loss – reviving and reclaiming Fiuman in this many-named city is as much about reminding residents of their proud, translanguaging past as much as it is about the specific jewel of Fiuman.)
“What has always distinguished the people of Rijeka,” Blagoni says, “is the ability to move between multiple linguistic universes.”
* Gemma Harasim, „Riječka pisma“, Fluminensia, year V (1993), number 1-2, pp.8-9
Original article (“Dove il dialetto fiumano continua a sussurrare”) by Ornella Sciucca was first published in Italian on 13 June 2025.
It’s available here.
La Voce del Popolo is an Italian-language daily newspaper published by EDIT in the Croatian city of Rijeka.
Summary by SSG
Inside Vietnam’s biggest stock market scandal
Once hailed as a national business icon, Trịnh Văn Quyết built a billion-dollar empire through real estate and aviation. But behind the scenes, he was orchestrating one of Vietnam’s largest stock market frauds
If you had said, fifty years ago, that one day there would be home-grown business billionaires in Vietnam, few would have believed you. Post-war poverty was severe – food stamps, power blackouts, trade embargoes and the struggle to rebuild a shattered nation. On top of that, the government was cracking down hard on the bourgeois class. The idea of ultra-wealthy Vietnamese moguls would have seemed absurd. And yet, here we are: Vietnam now boasts six billionaires, part of a new generation of bold, ambitious entrepreneurs.
Among these, Trịnh Văn Quyết stood out – once celebrated by Forbes magazine as a role model. His company was called “a rare story in the real estate sector.” But achieving extreme wealth rarely comes from hard work alone. In Quyết’s case, it wasn’t a lucky talisman or a sacred monk’s blessing – it was gross manipulation of the stock market. His case would become one of the most high-profile financial crimes in Vietnam’s modern history.
Writing for Luật Khoa, journalist Lê Giang meticulously lays out how the fraud worked and how it all ultimately unraveled. Quyết’s story begins with humble, entrepreneurial roots. At 14, he launched a tutoring company and sold second-hand phones. He later moved into legal consulting. He eventually built a reputation as one of the country’s most formidable businessmen, expanding into securities and real estate. He founded the FLC Group, credited with boosting tourism in central Vietnam and would go on to become a household name.
Among his ventures, none was more high-profile than Bamboo Airways. A symbol of his sky-high ambition, Quyết sought to build Vietnam’s first five-star airline and compete on a global scale. Under his leadership, Bamboo quickly dominated the domestic market, launched international routes and expanded its fleet with top-tier aircraft. For a time, it even appeared to eclipse the national carrier, Vietnam Airlines. And his empire was family-run – a Vietnamese-style chaebol.
But behind the success, cracks began to show. Whispers about questionable finances and opaque business practices turned into hard scrutiny. Authorities began to flag signs of market manipulation – specifically, suspicious stock transactions that appeared to inflate the value of his companies.
This wasn’t Quyết’s first brush with illegality. In 2017, he was fined 65 million VND for unauthorised stock sales. But that was just the surface. A far larger scheme was in motion.
Here’s how it worked: stock prices in Quyết’s companies would be artificially pushed up and shares then sold to other investment groups at a profit, manipulating the market for his benefit. He enlisted his eldest sister, Ms. Huệ, to make trades to bid up the share price. Between 26 May 2017 and January 2022, she executed over 27,000 stock purchase orders – averaging nearly 50 a day.
But the funds she used weren’t unconnected to Quyết’s business, they weren’t just her own investment – rather they had in turn been illegally siphoned off from one of Quyết’s own subsidiaries, BOS Securities Company, with help from his third sister, Trịnh Thị Thúy Nga. What looked like a hungry market for shares in Quyết’s business, was actually the beast feeding itself. To avoid detection, all the trades were placed at the start and end of trading sessions, between 9:00-9:30 a.m. and 2:30-3:00 p.m.
When the stock values peaked, the group then dumped a total of 1.34 billion shares on the open market, earning an estimated 17,000 billion VND. These transactions created fake cash flows and phantom debts on the books of FLC Faros, one of his listed companies. The goal? To legitimise forged financial statements, deceive investors and profit from shares created out of fictitious capital contributions.
On 27 March 2022, rumours surfaced online that Quyết had been barred from leaving the country. Two days later, authorities officially opened an investigation and detained him for “manipulating the stock market” and “concealing information in securities activities.”
Just as his rise had been a family affair, so too was his downfall. On 8 April 2024, the Supreme People's Procuracy issued an indictment against Trịnh Văn Quyết and 49 others, including his sisters and extended family, for their roles in the scheme. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison and pledged to use all personal assets to help repay defrauded investors. At trial, his wife voluntarily contributed 203 billion VND toward the now-massive restitution, which has surpassed 600 billion VND (around $23 million).
Original article (“Trịnh Văn Quyết và vụ thao túng thị trường chứng khoán đi vào lịch sử”) by Lê Giang was first published in Vietnamese on 4 April 2025.
It’s available here.
Luật Khoa is a Vietnamese law journal that pursues independent and high quality journalism. It was founded in 2014 by Trịnh Hữu Long, Phạm Đoan Trang, Trần Quỳnh Vi and Trương Tự Minh. Their maxim is “fear no one, flatter no one”.
Summary by TMH
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team