Anybody that uses a  language with a future tense is a loser, says economist  Keith Chen of Yale Business School, more or less. Because in a language with a future tense, “I will do it,” actually means, “I will do it in the future.” And we all that what that means. It ain’t gettin’ done. […]

It’s tough to buy a translation when you don’t speak the language. Correction. It’s easy to buy, its just tough to know what you bought. Now you can always hire someone else to check it for you, like another language service provider, or do a language managment thing for youself to tell you if its […]

Bingerville, Cote d’Ivoire, July, 1947: Cola nut merchant Solomana Kante’s paper is rustling under the breeze from the ceiling fans. He reads a line written by a Lebanese living in West Africa.  “Black Africans are not interested in writing their languages.” Kante is surprised. “Why not?” he asks himself and decides to be the first […]

Since my French spelling has always been exécrable, I was delighted to discover this week that the French can’t spell French either. Why not? Because the Académie française, defender of the French language, simplified the spelling. Which is big news in France these days, even though the spelling changes were mandated back in 1990. Dropping […]

View the vodcast version of this post on the Translation Guy YouTube channel. I haven’t been able to find any hangul cards at Hallmark, and for that matter I’m not even sure how you celebrate this Korean holiday (October 9) that marks the invention of hangul (한글) the native alphabet/syllabary of the Korean language. Maybe […]

The swanky restaurants here in the neighborhood of the UN come with an elegant price tag, but the atmosphere is more like that bar scene in Star Wars, full of all these residents jabbering away in their own rapid-fire lingo. Foreign languages just sound fast. And as any language student knows, once you start studying […]

There is more to “I” than meets the eye. You are leaving a trail of pronoun crumbs that reveal your deepest thoughts and attitudes with everything you write. And James Pennebaker, UT psychologist, can read those hidden psychological meanings in the way you use words. Pennebaker got started with his word analysis when he and […]

It’s the Vikings who trashed English. Not just the English people, with all that raping and pillaging back in the day, but the actual language itself, says Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, author of What Language Is and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. As languages go, English is pretty simple minded. No T-V distinction (polite pronouns […]

Last time we watched CSI Translation Guy, he had made the outrageous claim that Lewis Carroll discovered the origins of the first human tongue in the furrowed brows of readers puzzling over his nonsensical verse. Call it word-feel, a sense of the rightness of a word, or a feel for what that might mean even […]

Some people get hooked on animal attraction. All stance and glance and scent and posture, because when it comes to love, those base instincts can get you pretty far, maybe all the way. But is that any way to build a lasting relationship with that certain significant other? Surely there is more to the chemistry […]