These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Hailin Wang is gamifying climate conversations across cultures. This 29-year-old from Vancouver and her friend, 25-year-old Junhua Qu, have invented North South Climate Dialogue, a web-based game to help Mandarin and English speakers understand each other better when they talk about climate. 

Tell us about your project.

North South Climate Dialogue (NSCD) borrows from technology used in popular language-learning applications like DuoLingo and merges it with other technologies used in Climate Cardinals, which allow for multicultural story sharing. The result is a platform where people can be in a safe space to learn each other’s approaches to the words and concepts that will shape our future. 

For example, Chinese farmers divide the year into 24 solar terms that reflect seasonal and ecological changes. One of these terms is Guyu (谷雨), literally translated as grain rain. To an English speaker, it makes no sense. But embedded in these two characters is the livelihood of an agrarian society, and it tells them that late spring is the best time to plant beans and........

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