The reality for me is that knowing two languages has opened up new worlds for me in terms of human interaction, cultural awareness, vast business opportunities, and just an expanded way of thinking.
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, […]
We’ve spoken on other occasions about how certain dead languages, such as Latin, actually aren’t so dead after all, and in fact have continued to develop even after having been declared vanished. However, there is a group of languages that have effectively disappeared from the face of the Earth, and in this post we’ll briefly […]
Until the 18th century, the language of cultural and scientific expression in Europe was Latin. For this reason, many Latin phrases continue to be used until today in scientific, philosophical, technical, religious, medical, and legal language. We frequently come across these phrases, and in general, if we are translating between European languages, where in most […]
The Internet serves as an infinite source of translation resources. In addition to the everyday online tools such as dictionaries, grammar forums, encyclopedias, academic publications, and the like, occasionally one can discover other very useful tools. For example, this week I visited for the first time the European Union’s termbase search tool: IATE. IATE (Interactive […]
Anyone who has ever translated or taken part, in any capacity, in a legal proceeding can attest to the fact that there is a multitude of phrases and expressions that are pure Latin and yet are used in documents in many languages without translation. They remain unchanged to maintain uniformity throughout the world in various […]
The map of Europe posted above is an excellent example of why localization is so important. Translators and companies who are looking for translations should not use this as a hard-and-fast, exact representation of where the dividing lines are drawn for the languages of Europe. Instead, take a moment to consider what it is really […]
The present global economic scenario is looking pretty dire, and companies all over the planet are looking for clever new ways to maintain their customer base and expand it in new directions. The necessity to reach out into new markets is underscored by the fact that many traditionally solid markets (such as the United States […]
Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, the bloodiest and most atrocious armed conflict of the 20th century. European leaders gathered in the small coastal city of Gdansk to mark the event, this being the town where German aggressors first opened fire on Polish defenses, setting off six long […]
As we saw in the last article that in different countries Christmas is celebrated differently, New Year’s is similarly celebrated differently in different countries. In Germany, they say goodbye to the year with a toast in honor of St. Sylvester, and they receive the New Year with fireworks in order to ward off bad spirits. […]