When the world turns completely upside down

The students in my class were arguing a question of semantics: is a hamburger a sandwich? One student noted that the menu designer at the restaurant where she worked couldn’t decide if a Chicken Burger should be listed under Hamburgers or Sandwiches.

Catherine Sangster brings us up-to-date with this year's Geek Dictionary Corner suggestions and reports back on the progress of past years' contributions:

One of the courses I teach is individual pronunciation tutoring for international students who are going to be teaching assistants here at Ohio State University. One of the resources I use a lot is…

superlinguo: The Swadesh list is a classic set of 100 vocabulary items that are collected by linguists in different languages to compare the similarities and differences of those languages. The Swadesh list is by no means perfect, but it’s a generally recognised set of basic vocabulary. For different languages you may find that there’s one of two things that don’t quite work, maybe there aren’t many animals with horns, or maybe there are several different words that are used for ‘all’. So what happens when you try and do a Swadesh list of emoji? Well, if you needed even more proof that emoji aren’t language, here it is. Firstly, I was relatively fussy, but not too fussy. Some are great, some are not. For things like ‘bark (of a tree)’ I could have just put tree up again, but the part-whole relationship gets difficult. Colours are there, but on particular objects. There are also very few emoji of people just standing, full-bodied? And verbs… well verbs are tough. Adjectives are difficult as well, because they’re pretty abstract until applied to something (we know what a ‘good dog’ is, but what’s a ‘good’?). Pronouns are a challenge for emoji because they require context for ‘me’ to mean the particular person speaking at the time, very easy to do with language, difficult to do with emoji. Emoji updates might fill a few gaps. You might also think I missed some things? If so, you can leave a comment on the Google Sheet I used to make the list (bit.ly/emoji-swadesh). I was very pleased to help @superlinguo a little bit with this Emoji Swadesh List!  It seems like “feather” would be a good candidate for inclusion in a future emoji update, as well as some more of the body parts. 

From New York to Los Angeles, people everywhere develop speech patterns unique to their region; however, these varied dialects are discriminated against at

What’s a translator to do when the word just doesn’t exist? How do you handle translating invented terms?

A new study of K-12 STEM educators demonstrates how adding linguistic information into classroom teaching can help remove barriers to STEM achievement for African-American students. The article, 'Balancing the Communication Equation: An Outreach and Engagement Model for Using Sociolinguistics to Enhance Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining K-12 STEM Education,' by Christine Mallinson (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) and Anne H. Charity Hudley (University of California, Santa Barbara), will be published in the September, 2018 issue of the scholarly journal Language.

In episode 62 of #GloballySpeaking, Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, Founder and CEO of Archetype Discoveries, discusses how the meanings of words can deeply affect business, especially when multiple cultures are involved.

In the 17th Century, when the kingdom of Bohemia was under Habsburg rule, the Czech language almost disappeared.

The fascination with words that lack a single-word English equivalent has a downside.

By integrating your interpreter into your team, you can get deeper, more valuable insights in international and cross-cultural research. Here's how.

A few years ago, there was no American Sign Language sign for "verb," "prototype" or "Jay Gatsby," so a small team at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf created one, and hundreds more.

Have you been following our five-part series on how to assess your readiness to become a successful translator, inspired by ATA’s Self-Evaluation Questionnaire for Translators? If so, we hope your …

Be sceptical when it's claimed that a language has 'no word for X' or '50 words for Y'.

The Hamsa symbol, a hand with five fingers, is believed to bring good luck and keep away the evil eye. In Arabic, hamsa is the number five, which just happens to be the number of years we've been making our Streetwise Hebrew podcast!

Note: This article was published in the October 2016 issue of the Translation Journal Punctuation is generally seen as trivial by many people. It is not usually taught when learning a foreign langu…

Metropolitan State University graduate Tony Velasquez is on his way to Oxford to study socio-linguistics.

The following is Arundhati Roy’s W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, commissioned by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the National Centre for Writing. It was delivere…

Congress needs to know what Trump "promised Putin on our behalf," says Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

If nothing is done to preserve African languages and knowledge online, they will die and be non-existent online writes Wesley Diphoko.

Oldies and goodies: From ancient languages such as Hebrew to Tamil. Check out our list of the ten oldest languages in the world.

Last week I finally managed to get to see the amazing Mundolingua - the language museum in Paris founded by Mark Oremland a couple of year...

The New York governor recently repeated a common, but dubious, explanation for the epithet.

The word has a globe-trotting history particularly appropriate for the World Cup.

PHOENIX (AP) — As word spread that the Trump administration was separating migrant families, urgent calls went out across the internet: Interpreters were needed at the U.S.-Mexico