Monthly Archives: May 2010
Translating disaster and disastrous translations
In this podcast, Carol Hills and I pick a few stories that had previously passed us by. We dust them off and turn them into out Top Five Language Stories of the month. 5.Translating Iceland’s economic collapse into English. Iceland … Continue reading
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Translators working overtime, silverfin aka Asian carp, and counting in Chinese
Translators are proving their worth twice in this week’s podcast: in New York, where they’re helping elderly Russian speakers fill out forms from the US Census Bureau; and in Louisiana and Mississippi where they’re interpreting for Vietnamese-American fishermen whose livelihoods … Continue reading
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A language speed-dater gets serious, and a cross-dressing, cross-linguistic singer
A language-learning marathon is over, as the author of a blog called 37 Languages decides which language to learn for real. The first time I talked to Keith Brooks he’d speed-dated 13 languages: he read up on each one, learned … Continue reading
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Census-taking, volcano-pronouncing, and why Thais win at Scrabble
The U.S.Census Bureau is firing on all linguistic cylinders to ensure that non-English speakers are counted in this year’s census. It has been getting the word out via ads, PSAs and handbills translated into 28 different languages (compared to 17 … Continue reading
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