Texts have been translated between languages empirically, by hand. This doesn’t mean that people have not spent time reflecting and theorizing on the art of translation or that the great translators of history have stopped proposing their own theories.
However, only recently have linguists elevated translation to a scientific category by creating a branch of applied [...]
Posts Tagged ‘linguistics’
Translation Studies
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Book Club Meeting #2
Saturday, December 19th, 2009Just in time for Christmas, I have found “On the Death and Life of Languages” by Claude Hagege is now available at my favorite bookstore and I must say that I am intrigued.
Here is a description from the publisher:
Twenty-five languages die each year; at this pace, half the world’s five thousand languages will disappear within [...]
The Newest Grammar Hounds
Friday, July 17th, 2009Grammar hounds, and I include myself in this list, are those who are so obsessed with proper presentation of a language that even the slightest mistake or oversight in a sentence invokes a twitchy reaction and a move to whatever “Edit” button is available. The Internet is a bastion of poor grammar and spelling mistakes [...]
Adjectives: Differences in English and Spanish
Friday, April 3rd, 2009In English, adjectives are always spelled the same and, syntactically, are almost always placed before the noun. In Spanish, there are a few that are generally unchangeable, but the majoirty aren’t, and nearly all of them denote the number of the subject (singular or plural).
Its expressive value differs depending on if it is placed before [...]
Different Types of Calque
Friday, March 13th, 2009Paronymous calque or loan word: is the result of an incorrect correspondence between two words that have similar forms or etymologies but that have evolved differently in their respective languages to the point that they now have different meanings (semantic transfer).
At times it happens because, between two words etymologically related in English, but with a [...]
What is a calque?
Friday, March 6th, 2009 It is a class of loan in which phrase is borrowed from another language, but each of the elements of the phrase are translated.
This type of loan is known as a “calque”. It involves respecting the syntactical structures of the target language (week-end, “fin de semana”). There is also “structure calque” in which the [...]
What is a Linguistic Loan?
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
This type of word is one that is taken from one language and used in another without translation, demonstrating a lexical vacuum in the latter.
What is the difference between a foreign word and a loan word? A foreign word tends to, at first, remain unchanged and then undergo a phonetic and morphological adaptation. With [...]
Language Change and Technology
Friday, December 12th, 2008Following up on my last blog, it is worth discussing another important cause of language change: technology. While technological innovation and dissemination have always influenced language change, some speculate that the scale of such influence today may lead to more rapid and significant changes than in the past due to the nature of contemporary technological [...]
