When 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 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 […]
Continue ReadingGoogle Translate 2.0 is a long-overdue re-do of Google Translate, now primed for the slick, new Apple interface on iPhone and iPad. The language list continues to grow with an additional seven languages including Bosnian, Cebuano, Hmong, Javanese, Khmer, Lao and Marathi, and the endless pull-down list of over 70 languages that goes with it. […]
Continue ReadingFlipper, say it ain’t so! Oh, sorry, I guess you can’t… Dolphins aren’t as smart as you think, and their language skills are way overrated, says self-described “dolphin scientist guy” Justin Gregg. Gregg, a researcher with the Dolphin Communication Project in Old Mystic, Connecticut, claims that scientists have been overrating dolphin intelligence and linguistic ability […]
Continue ReadingᎭᎴᎾ ᏗᏓᏴᎳᏛᏍᎩ ᎬᏗ Gmail ᏣᎳᎩ (Get started with Gmail in Cherokee) Gmail is now available in Cherokee. Apple’s iPhone and iPad apps have supported Cherokee since December 2010. So this Native-American language, spoken by only 8000 oldsters and fading fast, has now crossed the digital divide. The language once spoken the length and breadth of […]
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