India is in the middle of a literacy explosion. Better schooling and the spread of cheap Hindi media outlets has led to a boom in literacy in all Indian languages, and that provides consumers with a growing choice of market languages. Literacy fuels economic growth. According to the latest census in 2011, 74% of Indians, aged […]

Coffee Gets You Up, Breakfast Gets You Going/ How can you argue with that? What if I say, “Yuavtxhawbpabraukojsawv yuavntxivzograukoj mus?” and put it up on a couple of billboards like McDonald’s in St. Paul? Doing that can start an argument. Louis Henry, who posted the ads, owns eight McDonald’s restaurants around St. Paul. He says […]

A few weeks ago, the TranslationGuy Blog and @Translationguy won first prize for best pro language blog and top twitter prize in the 2012 Language Lovers contest. As a double-whammy winner I had a chance to give Lexiophiles a piece of my mind in a (formerly) exclusive interview which I will now share with you. When did […]

Congress is more simple-minded than ever, according to a recent study by the Sunlight Foundation. “Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a Flesch-Kincaid readability test of every […]

I just want to feel pretty. Is that so wrong? Every year the fans of this blog vote Translation Guy the best language blog in the Lexiophile Language Lovers contest, and every year we win the popular vote in all categories by significant margins.  But except for our Twitter win last year, we’re always the […]

On Tuesday night’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart used a clip of Geraldo Rivera’s recent Taliban interview as a kickoff for a new segment called “Hey, That Guy Lives There.” As in, “Hey, Don’t Make That Translator Say That Terrible Thing, He Has To Keep Living In This Community After You And Your Cameras Leave.” Rivera, reporting from […]

The online encyclopedia  has ‘blacked out’ the English-language version for 24 hours today  in protest at the proposed US internet regulation legislation SOPA and PIPA. Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, announced a decision to “black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18. The blackout is […]

Bilingual puns are even lamer than monolingual puns. But don’t the bilinguals love them. And it gets worse. Trilingual puns, which by definition too clever by half, are the lamest of all, but are now the basis for an ad campaign in Hong Kong. Sarah Mishkin reports in the Financial Times: Sina Weibo, China’s leading […]

Z, the translator formerly known as Jost Zetzsche, at least on this blog, is a giant in the translation industry. Literally, from my point of view, he looks like he’s about 6.5 feet tall, which I guess is one of the reasons why I look up to him. That and that he has also undertaken […]

I miss speculative bubbles. Just cuz they always end badly, doesn’t mean they aren’t fun while they last. The key of course is to get out when the getting is good. And according to Irish computer researchers Aaron Gerow and Mark Keane, the herd-speak of financial journalists is a good indicator of when to break […]