Bilinguals tend to be nastier in their second language, say researchers, without all that mother-tongue emotional baggage. Marta Gawinkowska and her Warsaw University team suspect that’s why second languages are a preferred medium for bilingual taboo talk. Past research has shown that language switching for bilinguals often occurs when things start to get emotional. This […]
Continue ReadingWhat do you get someone for International Mother Language Day? It’s this Friday, the 21st. For Mother’s Day, I used to go around and pick neighborhood flowers for my Mom. But I don’t think that’s appropriate for International Mother Language Day, (or really appropriate for Mother’s Day either, as my Mom pointed out at the […]
Continue ReadingWhen too many languages is not enough. In this year of the XLVIII SUPER Bowl, America’s greatest pageant, now with far too many Roman numerals to count, two Sunday’s ago we celebrated the first “pot bowl” in the history of the National Football League, dude, as two awesome stoner-state rivals met to decide football fate […]
Continue ReadingJapanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was accused of trying to start a war with China after he compared the two countries to WWI enemies. In a press conference at the World Economic Forum press conference in Davos last month Abe was quoted in the press describing current Japan/China’s tension as a “similar situation” to that […]
Continue ReadingThe best way to get babies talking is to talk to them using baby talk. Researchers recently listened in on parent-child “conversations” to discover the best techniques for parents teaching children to “use their words”. Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut discovered that it wasn’t how many words babies heard, […]
Continue ReadingAt 1-800-Translate, we are only as good as our last phone call. Sure, the linguistic competence of our telephone interpreters is job number one, but that’s not the only factor that makes for effective telephone communication. Naomi Harte of Dublin’s Trinity College recently gave a presentation on all the different ways communication can go bad. […]
Continue ReadingIn the course of planning for a new (and very interesting) project from one of our clients we took a look at all the different ways we translate and adapt advertising and marketing content for our clients. We also took a a look at the efforts of our competitors, which were disappointing as usual. We […]
Continue ReadingIs a second language for East Africa linguistic tyranny or regional solidarity? That’s the question Ugandans are asking about Swahili, or Kiswahili. Kiswahili means “language” in Swahili, and has been the lingua franca of East Africa for centuries. Now, as regional integration heats up, the East African Community (EAC), which includes Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania […]
Continue ReadingWhat exactly are language preservationists preserving when they preserve an endangered language? Cultures with their own language have staying power, preserving human cultural diversity and a particular way of looking at the world. Language preservationists concentrate on those languages most imperiled. These are the languages spoken in cultures already experiencing massive disruption from contact with […]
Continue ReadingFor most interpreters, the harshest professional feedback they will ever see is an irate email. Not so for Afghan interpreter Janis Shinwari who went out to his car one morning to discover the words, “Judgment Day is coming soon,” scrawled across the hood of his car. Shinwari got the message. “I’m sure somebody is watching […]
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