Photo provided Yuliia Dybka, a Ukrainian now residing in Columbus, helped IU create a Ukrainian phrasebook.
A Ukrainian refugee living in Columbus recently helped Indiana University create a phrase book to help U.S. military personnel understand her native language.
Yuliia Dybka worked on the project this past spring with the Language Training Center at IU.
“I was so excited, because for me, first, knowing that people here care of Ukraine, they want to create such a meaningful project for military partners so they could communicate more effectively with Ukrainians, and to build this kind of relationship, partnership, building in trust, preventing misunderstanding,” she said. “So of course, I said ‘Yes, I’m in, 100%.’”
According to IU, the Language Training Center is an initiative of the U.S. Defense Language and National Security Education Office that offers language and culture training for active-duty military and reserve personnel.
“Within a month of the Russian invasion in February 2022, about one-quarter of Ukraine’s population had fled the country,” university officials said. “They were displaced throughout the world, with the majority relocating to eastern and western Europe. Bridging the language barrier between members of the U.S. military and Ukrainian military partners and refugees became increasingly important, driving the military’s request for IU to create a Ukrainian phrase book.”
Phrase books provide a “range of conversational basics” that can be used between soldiers and their Ukrainian allies, said Nathaniel Lanaghan, associate director of defense and strategic initiatives at IU’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.
The Language Training Center has completed similar projects for military partners in the past, such as a Pashto-Dari phrase book for Camp Atterbury.
The 32-page Ukrainian phrase book includes about 20 sections on different topics, including conversational basics, saying hello and goodbye, food and drink, transportation and directions, and medical and military terms. Each section contains three columns showing phrases in English, phonetic pronunciations of the same phrases in Ukrainian, and the Ukrainian phrases written in Cyrillic.
Dybka’s role was to create and translate content for the book. She said that Lanaghan helped her gather content for the various sections, and Svitlana Melnyk, senior lecturer in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at IU Bloomington, helped with reviewing and editing her work, as well as converting Ukrainian phrases into Latin characters.
According to Lanaghan, the request for the book came in March, and it was finished in late May. Dybka did all the “hard parts” of the project, and he did all of the formatting and “assisted with the more pedagogical elements,” he said.
“Native speakers offer insight into a language that a second language learner just doesn’t have access to,” he said. “They know it better than anyone else because that’s what they speak at home.”
Dybka is from Starobilsk, a small town in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. Her sister, Viktoriia Lavrenchenko, works for Cummins, Inc. and has lived in Columbus for about a decade.
After the initial invasion in February of 2022, Dybka and her parents moved into their neighbors’ basement for safety and lived there for about a week.
“In March 2022, my hometown was fully packed with Russian tanks,” she said.
Once the town was fully occupied, Russian authorities began looking for people who had protested against their presence, meaning that Dybka and her family — who had done so — were in danger.
The family decided to go to Lithuania and stay with Lavrenchenko’s in-laws — however, they had to travel through Russia to get there, which took five days and included interrogations at the border.
Dybka lived in Lithuania for a couple of months before coming to Columbus in May of 2022, and her parents arrived a couple of weeks after her.
Once in the United States, she began to look for jobs where she could use her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Ukrainian linguistics. After hearing about IU’s Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, she reached out to Melnyk, who is also Ukrainian and was already living in the states when the 2022 invasion began.
“When I started working for IU, I expected I would be tutoring,” Dybka said. “But then Nathan, he told me about idea of creating Ukrainian phrase book. And I was so excited.”
Following the completion of the project, Dybka became a part-time instructor in the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies Summer Language Workshop as a Russian tutor. As of mid-August, she was considering taking a part-time position assisting Melnyk, grading students’ work and providing tutoring if needed.
Both Dybka and Melnyk called on the community to show any support for Ukraine that they can.
“As a newcomer and a person who escaped the war, it’s important to feel and to know that people here care for Ukrainians,” said Dybka. “And, for example, this project, it has significant role, especially current context of ongoing war. And as we all know, the United States has a been a strong supporter for Ukraine. And the project like this, Ukrainian phrase book, they’re very valuable tools for building any kind of relationship, not only military partnership. It just shows that people make effort towards Ukraine and towards Ukrainian. And it will lead, I’m pretty sure, I believe in this, it will lead to the happy end that we all need.”
