When communicating a message to a listener or reader whose mother tongue is not the same as our own, especially when that person does not even understand the language, we must use different ways or methods to get the message across as clearly as possible. While we can use gestures, signs, or noises in order […]
Imagine a large organization with locations around the world. Their corporate culture must transcend into each country. And much of their success would stem from consistent employee training. One way companies accomplish this feat is through e-learning tools. At a glance, you might think the direct translation of the e-learning modules is the only item […]
As we saw in the post, “Translator Problems I: How to Translate Food,” translating the language of food is one the many difficulties faced by translators. But this difficulty isn’t limited only to the translation. Rather, when publishing a recipe, it is important to be aware of in what country it will be used, since in […]
Heraclitus was an ancient Greek philosopher. He wrote in cryptic verse, purposely obscuring his philosophy in almost riddles, so as only the initiated could fully understand what he was on about. He was the guy who saw the world as being in a constant state of flux, constantly changing. He’s also the guy who started […]
Punctuation marks may be hated or even ignored by some people when it comes to writing. Nevertheless, they are sometimes crucial in order to avoid ambiguities. If we take for example the sentence: I know you know. A comma placed in the middle of the sentence “I know, you know” changes its meaning entirely. When we […]
Is there a relationship between the Amazons and the Amazon River? They have the same name, although, our knowledge of the ferocious warrior women that amputated their right breasts in order to be able to shoot their bows better, goes back much further than our knowledge of the famous Amazon River, which contains a fifth […]
In my last post “Translating…The Future” I wrote about one possible aspect of the future of the English language; the probability that it will become more and more simple over time. As I mentioned in that post, it is a natural phenomenon for complicated grammatical structures to be progressively and slowly discarded from widely-spoken languages, […]
Language is a massive, intangible, ever-changing palimpsest that arguably exerts one of the strongest influences over our daily lives. Due to its ability to easily adapt to changing cultural norms and incorporate new ideas and words, we could say that, basically, it does what it wants. So, then, how do we ensure that speakers of […]
In my last post, “Are We Just a Product of the Languages We Speak?,” I wrote about how the linguistic structure of a language can impact the way we think and understand the world around us, based on how different languages express the same ideas in linguistically distinct ways.In this post I will highlight two […]
Can you imagine having a conversation in Elvish with the supermarket cashier in the not-so-distant future? Or going to buy cigarettes from the convenience store clerk in Klingon? For years the languages created in literature, film and TV were reproduced solely by a limited amount of hardcore fans. However, these days the languages such as […]