Once a month, Carol Hills and I sift through a huge pile of language-related stories – stories that we otherwise wouldn’t cover. We select five to talk about. Here they are:
5. Google Translate gets to work on the virtual streets of Teheran: Google released a tool that translates Persian blogs into English and vice versa. [...]
Entries from June 2009
June 25, 2009
Iran and translation, a search engine is sick in Chinese, and a drug ring’s Arabic dialects
June 19, 2009
Bilingual romance in Paris, “whatever” in Mexico, and the fog of Pentagon acronyms in Afghanistan
In this podcast I talk with novelist Vanina Marsot whose new book “Foreign Tongue” is about French, English, being bilingual, and most of all, translation. Marsot’s protagonist moves from Los Angeles to Paris, becomes a translator, at which point she starts living and breathing idioms. The novel includes more false cognates than you can hurl [...]
June 12, 2009
Linguists trash English word count, speaking Uighur in Bermuda, and steady lah! The delights of Singlish
A nice linguistic fight to start with this week: a Texas organization called The Global Language Monitor is claiming that the English language has just gained its millionth word. President and chief world analyst Paul J.J. Payack has dubbed this the Million Word March. This generated a lot of headlines (“English acquires its millionth word”) [...]
June 5, 2009
Obama dubbed, microblogging in China, bilingual politics in Belgium, and Bangla hip hop in NYC
This week, how President Obama’s big speech to the Muslim world was translated, officially by the State Department, and less officially by various news outlets. Obama’s carefully worded speech was broadcast live with simultaneous voiceover in dozens of countries. The State Department’s translators received copies of the speech nearly 24 hours in advance. [...]
