Medical Terminology: Prefixes and Suffixes in English and Spanish

Doctors and other medical professionals communicate information about their patients using medical terminology, the language of health care. A medical term is composed of 1) a root word, 2) a prefix, a group of letters attached to the beginning of the root word, and/or 3) a suffix, a group of letters attached to the end […]

The bilingual brain

Children learning two languages from birth achieve the same basic milestones (e.g., their first word) as monolinguals do, but they may use different strategies for language acquisition. Although bilinguals tend to have smaller vocabularies in each language than do children who know one language, bilinguals may have an advantage when it comes to certain nonverbal […]

Project Management and Translation Vendors

As a Project Manager you will be coordinating multiple projects – each project will have a minimum of two outside vendors (translator and editor) with the possibility of many more. Your vendors will usually work off-site as independent freelance vendors who have agreed to work with your agency on an independent basis. Your agency in […]

Origin of the word Brazil

The name Brazil is derived from the Portuguese word pau–brasil, the name of an East Indian tree with reddish-brown wood from which a red dye was extracted. The Portuguese found a New World tree related to the Old World brasil tree when they explored what is now called Brazil, and as a result they named […]

New Spanish Spelling Reforms from the RAE

Spanish Spelling Rules Get a Makeover Change is coming to Spanish orthographic conventions courtesy of the Real Academia Española (RAE), the organization that defines Spanish language standards. Last week, the RAE announced a number of planned changes prepared by 22 linguists from both Spain and Latin America. If all goes well, the changes to the […]

When was the first Spanish Grammar Book published?

In 1492, Antonio de Nebrija published Gramática de la lengua castellana, the first grammar book of the Spanish language. Works had previously been published on Latin usage, such as Lorenzo Valla’s De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae (1471), but Gramática was the first book to focus on the study of the rules of a Western European language […]

Differences between Spanish and Portuguese

Both Spanish and Portuguese are Indo-European languages derived from Latin, and they developed on the Iberian Peninsula during roughly the same period. Though the two languages are closely related, important differences exist between Spanish and Portuguese, which can create problems for those acquainted with one of the languages when they try to learn the other. […]