Following up on our latest article, I would like to ponder further on the idea of thinking about linguists as if they were poets, storytellers or even artificers of some sort, given the intricate nature of their craft. The so called wordsmith, as we’ve mentioned before, is someone so skilled in the art of manipulating […]
Science Fiction and Fantasy are literary and film genres renowned for the fanaticism of their followers. Take for instance the opening of a new Star Wars movie, or the release of the last Harry Potter book: children, teenagers, and even grown-ups, clad as their favorite characters, wishing wholeheartedly to be a part of the stories […]
Last week was the 400th anniversary of the death of one of the world’s most famous playwrights: William Shakespeare. Why are his plays and poems still read, analyzed and performed so many years after they were originally published? Anyone who has read Shakespeare can certainly not claim his work is overrated. His peculiar style is, […]
Last Monday the literary world mourned the death of two famous writers. In the southern hemisphere, at the age of 74, Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano passed away after a long battle with lung cancer. Thirteen years older and an ocean away, German writer and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass also parted due to a lung infection. The […]
Cinema, literature and television have, each in their own way, the ability to grant cultural standing to the various figures that comprise them. Before delving deeper into the figure in question here, let’s go over certain other representations that culture makes of the different actors that comprise it, from movie and theater directors, writers and […]
Similar to what happens with comic strips, literature and cinema that is suitable for all audiences, pornography (whether illustrated, written or filmed) resorts to translation to broaden the horizons of its audience. Since porn films constitute a genre that is very much oriented toward the effect it produces in the viewer, the specific localization of […]
After hearing the sad news last week about the death of the great author Gabriel García Márquez, I began to think about how difficult it must have been to translate his work. After doing a little research on the Internet, I found out that his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (in Spanish, Cien años […]
In linguistics, code-switching refers to the simultaneous and syntactically and phonologically appropriate use of more than one language. It is fairly common to hear multilingual people use elements of the different languages that they speak when conversing with others that speak the same languages. This mix may occur almost unconsciously in people who have a […]
Imagine a world… That’s it. Just imagine a world. In this world, you can construct things however you want them to be. There will be people and culture. How do the people communicate with each other? Through language. And what better way to reflect this fantasy world than by constructing a new language. Creating a […]