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Linguists are studying the last remaining speakers of Afrikaans in far flung Patagonia
A blog about linguistics and language learning.
Listening to someone speaking with a foreign accent makes human brains work harder which can lead to unintentional discrimination against people communicating in languages other than their own, new research suggests. But exposure to foreign accents can also change the way people speak, and over time, the ensuing accents can become new languages.
Benjamin Dreyer’s attention to gusto in language use is magical in a way that resists full explication.
UW professor works to preserve and celebrate Ladino language, a combination of Hebrew letting and Spanish.
A blog about linguistics and language learning.
Some members of the Mayan community see hypocrisy in spreading the term Maya without any focus on preserving the Mayan language.
On the first of February, 1884—134 years ago today—the first installment of the earliest edition of what we now know as the Oxford English Dictionary was published. In 352 pages, it covered words f…
We most often think of indigenous languages in the context of colonisation â languages used by people who originally inhabited regions that were later colonised. These are the languages that the UN had in mind when it stated a deep concern about the vast number of endangered indigenous languages. And rightly so. More than 2,400 …
Do the beliefs we hold about literature add up to something consistent and coherent? Or are they little more than random pieties? Take two crucial notions I heard repeatedly last year. First, that in a fine work of literature, every word counts, perfection has been achieved, nothing can be moved—a claim I’ve seen made for writers as prolix (and diverse) as Victor Hugo and Jonathan Franzen. Second, that translators are creative artists in their own right, co-authoring the text they translate, a fine translation being as unique and important as the original work. Mark Polizzotti makes this claim in Sympathy for the Traitor (2018), but any number of scholars in the field of Translation Studies would agree.
Editor and translator Katy Derbyshire poses the question to ten practitioners and stresses why we need to be talking about it.
If you don't know a perigee syzygy from a hole in the wall, you need to bone up on your astronomy.
Mignon Fogarty won't weep if you forget when to use "whom."
Espresso, latte, macchiato. The coffee bean didn't even originate in Italy, so why do so many coffee drinks have Italian names?
I open the creative writing courses I teach with this vow: “I’ve seen far too many workshops become an indoctrination into an instructor’s taste—a semester-long exhortation to love what the instruc…
Switzerland's government has decided to recognise the dialect spoken in canton Jura as an official minority language.
When Marcel Proust died in November 1922 only The Way by Swann’s, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah had been published; The Prisoner, The Fugitive an…
We are starting a new year and, with it, new projects and goals. What if one your goals is to become a professional translator? What if you already are one and are looking for a way to improve your performance, followed by your income? You can find a few great tips in this article here, which was wr
EDMONTONâWhen Brandi Morinâs kohkum (Cree for grandmother) passed away, her aunties were cleaning her house and found pieces of paper scattered throughout that had short stories and memories on them in their motherâs handwriting. They found the elongated, cursive writings on scrap bits, papers, and even flyers. They compiled all her writings in a mini …
A bunch of South Africanisms have been added to the Oxford Dictionary. We'll tell you about them just now.
From Jenny Holzer to Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner, these artists have taken the written word off the page and into the museum.
A large number of birds received their names through the imitation of their cries. Some bird names, however, have a more intriguing linguistic history.
It was a tough year for deciding on Separated by a Common Language Words of the Year, and so I am very grateful to those who nominated US-t...
Yesterday I announced the US-to-UK Word of the Year (click for details!) , and so today is the turn of the UK-to-US WotY. The 2018 US-to-...
The success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies brought the languages that JRR Tolkien invented for the Elves to the attention of a much wider public. There are now numerous books and websites that allow devotees to learn Quenya and Sindarin.
People who speak languages missing from Google Translate, Siri, and Wikipedia will face future crises—leaving aid organizations scrambling.
As we mentioned in a previous post, cleaning the translation memory (TM) of one of our largest and oldest clients was a task that required the use of Xbench and a consequent report which we imported into an Excel spreadsheet, and finally choosing Olifant to edit the TM. The TM had thousands of segments, and …
David Skinner on why the American Heritage Dictionary closed its usage panel this year—and why it existed in the first place.
The future of work is neither fully human or fully machine. It's something in between.
Brigitte Nerlich and Carmen McLeod at the Synthetic Biology Research Centre at the University of Nottingham have given ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ a new twist, by focusing on responsible language use. As everybody knows by now, words matter in politics as well as in science. Here is a brief account of how this new focus came about and how it led up to a new thematic series now fully published in Life Sciences, Society and Policy.
The English language can be a hard language to grasp fully because it has so many idioms. | Learn how to properly localize and translate marketing content.
People who speak languages missing from Google Translate, Siri, and Wikipedia will face future crises—leaving aid organizations scrambling.
Approximately 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, but only about half are expected to survive this century. One factor contributing to this loss is climate change.
When proofreaders take out their red pens, their main purpose is to get rid of any errors that may hinder comprehension or sidetrack the reader. One aspect of this task is a certain economy of corrections: a proofreader should spend their time on warranted changes. These changes have to do with grammatical errors and with …
