Archive for the 'English Language' Category

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10 Free Online Resources for English Language Learners

Published on January 7, 2010 in English Language and Languages. 1 Comment

Studying English can open all sorts of doors – it’s no wonder that there are an estimated one billion people currently learning the language! Fortunately, the English language resources you’re in search of are right at your fingertips. Explore the following 10 free online resources for English language learners:

ESL Instructors and Students The OWL at Purdue The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) delves into English grammar and mechanics and provides practice exercises and business writing tips. The OWL’s writing tutors even serve up individualized help online.

ToLearnEnglish This site features a placement/leveling test, reading and listening exercises on a range of topics, over 7,000 lessons for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners, and free, printable grammar and vocabulary worksheets. ToLearnEnglish also features chat rooms and forums that add to a sense of community.

BBC Learning English For those keen on British English, the BBC’s Learning English site offers up interesting features such as “Words in the News” and “Keep Your English Up to Date,” plus 200+ episodes of an award-winning English language teaching soap opera called “The Flatmates.”

SharedTalk Owned by the well-known language-learning software company Rosetta Stone, SharedTalk offers you the opportunity to chat live (either text or voice) with native English speakers from around the world.

WordReference This site offers an extensive set of bilingual dictionaries for translating terms to and from English and valuable user forums where you can pose questions to native English speakers regarding grammar and vocabulary usage.

About.com: English as 2nd Language About.com’s ESL pages provide comprehensive grammar lessons, vocabulary lists, idioms and expressions, and strategies to improve your English communication skills.

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab Randall’s listening activities for English language learners at all levels focus on improving comprehension of the spoken word.

Merriam Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary Merriam Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary, geared specifically toward those studying English as a second language, is an excellent resource for intermediate to advanced students. The site offers up 3,000 must-know words with the ability to create personalized, virtual flash cards, as well as quizzes and pronunciation exercises.

Antimoon The site aims to “provide advice and inspiration to learners of English as a foreign language.” Rather than vocabulary drills and grammar exercises, what you’ll find here is an overall approach to studying English that differs in some ways from conventional methods. Antimoon’s lively discussion forum focused on language learning is the site’s most compelling feature.

International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) IDEA is a site for those English language learners interested in listening to and comparing the recordings of English accents and dialects from around the world. This site is a great tool for training your ear to hear the differences among accents.

Will Slang Be the Ruin of the English Language?

Published on December 19, 2009 in English Language and Languages. 0 Comments

The answer, according to some detractors, is yes.  But is slang really damaging the English language or is it just a natural part of its evolution?

Though colloquialisms have long been a part of the richness of the language, experts say that slang-filled “multicultural English” is overtaking proper English as teens’ preferred method of communication. Concerned parents and educators worry that their children’s inability to differentiate between slang and more formal speech could result in serious setbacks for them in the work world. As a result, some schools have gone to such lengths as to ban the use of slang; however, others disagree with such a hard-line approach. They argue that “slang is…a natural human tendency,” and they favor teaching youngsters about the appropriate uses of informal language as well as its origins, rather than trying to impose an outright ban that they say just won’t work.

Read more on the debate here at BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8388545.stm

Google Adds Dictionary to its offerings

Published on December 7, 2009 in English Language, Languages, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 2 Comments

Google adds another language tool to its arsenal with the introduction of Google Dictionary.  Google’s new dictionary offers up results in close to 30 languages, including the major Western European languages, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi.  Notable exceptions from the line-up include Japanese and Persian (Farsi), though surely Google will work to support these languages at some point in the future.

Dictionary results in English show the main definition with pronunciation, synonyms, related phrases, and “web definitions” pulled from various sources throughout the Internet.  Users can also star words for future reference.  Google Dictionary features a minimalist design that makes it ideal for mobile devices and those with slow Internet connections.  The absence of ads makes for a simple, distraction-free user experience.

Both monolingual and bilingual, bidirectional dictionaries are available.  While the results provided by the English dictionary and the Spanish<>English dictionary were fairly comprehensive, the monolingual Spanish dictionary only returned a few sketchy web definitions.  Many users would probably be better off sticking with an academic dictionary such as the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española for Spanish definitions.

Indeed, while Google’s new dictionary feature will be useful to some, it won’t be a solution that meets everyone’s needs.  “Alex Zudin is the owner of Paragon Software, which works closely with Merriam-Webster, Oxford and other renowned keepers of language to build applications based on their data.  Zudin says that Google could provide a service in the low-level consumer market, but higher-ed students and professionals would still buy the unabridged versions.” [1]

Google previously returned links to web definitions by entering “define:” plus a search term; however, Google Dictionary offers a more elegant solution with extra features.  In addition, many users were unaware of this search trick, even though it existed for some time.

Google Dictionary is a natural complement to the company’s other language tools.  The dictionary joins Google Translate, Google Translator Toolkit (which includes a basic translation memory (TM) tool and offers the ability to share glossaries), and a newly integrated search feature called Google Translated Search that makes it easier to search for results written in other languages. 

[1] Los Angeles Times, Google quietly rolls out Dictionary

Globalization and Its Effect on the World’s Languages

Published on November 19, 2009 in English Language and Languages. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

“Globalization is a social process characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, linguistic and environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant.” [1] As the process of globalization expands its reach in the 21st century and linguistic barriers begin to fall, what are the possible implications on the world’s languages?

»Impact on Minority Languages
As mentioned in this recent blog post here at Transpanish, one of the greatest casualties of globalization is the loss of some of the world’s more obscure languages. Dialects and regional languages are becoming more marginalized as they succumb to languages such as English that wield greater perceived social and economic value.

Although the future admittedly looks grim for some minority languages, globalization doesn’t necessarily spell the end for all of them. Indeed, globalization can bring to the forefront the plight of some of these endangered languages, sparking attempts to revive them. In Andean nations such as Peru, there is increasing awareness that indigenous populations require special support if their minority languages are to survive.  The Peruvian government now sponsors Educación Intercultural Bilingüe, a program that benefits speakers of the indigenous language Quechua as well as other minority languages.

»Loss of Uniformity among the Big Languages
Major languages such as English and French will likely “become victims of the Babelisation process” as these languages take on more and more local flavor in the various regions where they are spoken. Some researchers speculate that this phenomenon could lead to eventual non-comprehension between the variant forms of English. [2]

»Taking Grammar for Granted
Without a doubt, one of the driving forces behind globalization has been the Internet. With the ease of communication through digital means such as email, IM, and chat, it seems that many users across the globe have traded in style and form for speed. Use of SMS shorthand and the informal style pervasive in emails and the like have prompted some to say that good writing is gradually becoming a lost art.

» Decline in Foreign Language Learning among English Speakers
While today there are almost two billion people learning English and more bilingual individuals than ever before, the globalization of languages means that there’s even less motivation for English speakers to learn a second language.  Despite the many benefits of picking up a second language, foreign language learning in both the U.S. and the U.K. is on the decline.

Sources:
[1] Globalization 101
[2] Languages in a Globalising World, p.28-9

Demystifying Internationalization and Localization

Published on November 12, 2009 in English Language, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Internationalization and localization are two buzzwords that are often bandied about with respect to translations and global commerce.  Internationalization and localization are actually two complementary phases of globalization, a critical process for companies with an international presence.  While these terms can apply to a pure text translation, they are most often used in reference to software development, web sites, and video games, where the user interface and images must be considered in addition to text.

The internationalization phase of globalization is integrated with the design process of a product.  The product is “neutralized” during internationalization, meaning that cultural references, language and country-specific information are removed.  Internationalization is a forward-thinking process that makes the product more easily customizable to the specific markets that the company is targeting.  According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “Internationalization significantly affects the ease of the product’s localization.  Retrofitting a linguistically- and culturally-centered deliverable for a global market is obviously much more difficult and time-consuming than designing a deliverable with the intent of presenting it globally.”

The second phase of globalization is localization.  In the localization step, the product is adapted for the unique needs of a specific market.  It is important to note that localization is much more than mere translation.  Localization of software, web sites, etc. involves an intimate knowledge of not just the language but also the culture of the company’s target market.  Usually, this level of understanding comes from someone with a native command of a language and culture.

Although text translation is an integral part of the process, localization goes deeper to address more complex issues and differences such as:

1)    local currencies

2)    weights and measures

3)    format for the date, time, addresses, etc.

4)    cultural preferences regarding color and aesthetics

5)    adaptation of graphics to remove potentially offensive or culturally-inappropriate symbols or images

As the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) notes, “All these changes aim to recognize local sensitivities and to enter the local market by merging into its needs and desires.” [2]

Remember that in both the internationalization and localization phases, it is important that the product pass through a testing and quality assurance step to ensure that the end result meets the client’s needs and expectations.

[1] W3C, FAQ: Localization and Internationalization
[2] LISA, Answer Archives

Internationalized Domain Names Officialy Approved

Published on October 31, 2009 in English Language, Languages, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 3 Comments

An Article from NY Times reports:

By the middle of next year, Internet surfers will be allowed to use Web addresses written completely in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other languages using non-Latin alphabets, the organization overseeing Internet domain names announced Friday in a decision that could make the Web more accessible.

In an action billed as one of the biggest changes in the Web’s history, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — or Icann — voted Friday during its annual meeting, held in Seoul, to allow such scripts in Internet addresses.

The decision is a “historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

This change affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, including .com, .cn or .jp. Domain names have been limited to 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits and a hyphen. But starting next year, domain names can consist of characters in any language. In some Web addresses, non-Latin scripts are already used in the portion before the dot. Thus, Icann’s decision Friday makes it possible, for the first time, to write an entire Internet address in a non-Latin alphabet.

Initially, the new naming system will affect only Web addresses with “country codes,” the designators at the end of an address name, like .kr (for Korea) or .ru (for Russia). But eventually, it will be expanded to all types of Internet address names, Icann said.

Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But Icann said it was ready for the challenge.

“I do not believe that there would be any appreciable difference,” Mr. Beckstrom said in an interview. “Yes, maybe some additional potential but at the same time, some new security benefits may come too. If you look at the global set of cybersecurity issues, I don’t see this as any significant new threat if you look at it on an isolated basis.”

The decision, reached after years of testing and debate, clears the way for Icann to begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names Nov. 16. People will start seeing them in use around mid-2010, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand for the new “internationalized” domain name system has been among the strongest, Icann officials say.

Internet addresses in non-Latin scripts could lead to a sharp increase in the number of global Internet users, eventually allowing people around the globe to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts, they said.

This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.

Hong Jong-gil, an Internet industry analyst at Korea Investment and Securities in Seoul, said the new names would help children and old people who had not learned the Latin alphabet. But he did not foresee any major increase in the number of Internet users because Internet penetration has less to do with whether one has to type in English-alphabet domain names and more to do with “whether you can afford a PC and your community has broadband access.”

Agencies that help companies and individuals get Internet domains welcomed the Icann decision, noting it would be good for their own businesses.

“This is great news for us. This opens a new demand for domain names,” said Yang Eun-hee, an official at Gabia.com, an Internet domain agency. “There will be a rush among businesses to get new local-language Web addresses to protect their brand names. These days, a big company typically has dozens or hundreds of domains for their products, and it will be quite a cost to get all the new names.”

Observers agree that the change could make a difference for many businesses. “A lot of companies will end up having double domains — the existing one in English and a new one in the local script,“ said Choi Kyoung-jin, an analyst at Shinhan Investment. “A Korean domain name may be useful for Koreans but it’s not for foreign customers.”

Users who do not use the Latin alphabet can now reach Web sites by asking search engines to provide their links.

But a change in the domain name policy has become inevitable, Internet industry officials said. For example, there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use, they said.

“Today’s decision opens up a whole new Internet territory,” Ms. Yang said. “The Internet will become more multi-lingual than before.”

Crowdsourcing Translations: A Loss for Both Translators and Businesses

Published on October 28, 2009 in English Language, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The use of crowdsourcing to harness the power of the masses to translate web content has become all the rage at behemoth social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  In an attempt to make these sites accessible to a broader user base, the sites are asking users, rather than professional translators, to collaborate on the translation of site content.  Though it’s a noble goal to expand the reach of sites like Facebook to an international audience, turning to crowdsourcing for translations hurts translators and businesses alike.

LinkedIn, a social network that aims to promote and support professionals, recently polled those members who are professional translators in order to gauge their potential interest in translating the site “for fun” or in exchange for nothing more than a profile badge.  The site generated a great deal of controversy and managed to offend quite a few members, since LinkedIn was clearly looking for something for nothing.  What LinkedIn failed to realize is that asking translators to work for free further devalues a profession that already struggles for recognition.  In fact, many translators deleted their LinkedIn profiles following the incident, as they felt that their professional needs were no longer in line with the site’s priorities.

While the idea of tapping into the collective wisdom of a community has its merits – after all, translators reach out to each other all the time to debate issues in translation, terminology, etc. – websites must acknowledge that their image, content and reputation are at stake when they turn to anyone other than a professional to translate their content.  Interestingly enough, after receiving numerous user complaints about the quality of localized translations, Facebook did turn to professional translators to edit flubbed translations and improve the consistency of translated terms across the site.  Indeed, if websites insist on employing crowdsourcing to cut costs, they must acknowledge that at a bare minimum, professionals should be involved to provide quality control to avoid alienating their user base through poorly rendered content.

At the end of the day, there’s really no substitute for a professional; perhaps crowdsourcing will demonstrate that to companies the hard way.

English Words with a Spanish Pedigree

Published on October 22, 2009 in English Language, Languages and Spanish Language. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Over the centuries, Spanish has made a significant contribution to the English language.  When American settlers began exploring the west in the early 19th century, they crossed paths with an established Mexican culture that supplied the English language with a number of everyday words.  Merchants conducting trade in the Spanish-influenced Caribbean brought back not only goods but new words as well.  Novel foods introduced to us through exposure to Hispanic cultures have expanded both our menu options and our vocabulary.

Let’s explore some of the Spanish loan words that you probably use all the time but never gave a second thought as to their origins.

Chocolate – When the Spanish conquistadors took their first sip of xocolatl, a beverage made from the pods of the cacao tree, they knew the Aztecs were on to something.  The Spanish returned to Europe with their newfound chocolate, a word they derived from the Aztec language Nahuatl and later passed on to English.

Hurricane – With the constant threat of these severe storms looming over the tropics, it’s no surprise that the English word “hurricane” comes from huracán, a word picked up by the Spanish explorers from Taino, an indigenous language from the Caribbean.

Aficionado – Aficionado came into the English language from Spanish in the mid-1800s.  While the word was initially only used within the context of bullfighting, it later came to mean a “practitioner or enthusiast of any sport or activity.”

Rodeo – The word “rodeo” is derived from the Spanish verb rodear, which means “to surround.”  In the past, rodeo was used to refer to the pen where cattle were corralled and eventually to the informal events involving horses and livestock that took place there.  Related words like lasso, rancho, hacienda, bronco and even buckaroo passed to English from Spanish back in the days of the Wild West.

Tomato – This vegetable’s (or is it a fruit?) moniker comes from the Spanish word tomate, a corruption of the Nahuatl word “tomatl”.  A number of other fruits and vegetables that may grace your plate such as banana, papaya, jicama and potato have their roots, so to speak, in Spanish.

Will 90% of the world’s languages cease to exist?

Published on October 17, 2009 in English Language, Languages, Spanish Language, Tips for Translators and Translation Buyers. 1 Comment

A program in BBC radio reveals the following:

  • An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades.
  • In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world’s languages would have ceased to exist.
  • According to Ethnologue, a US organisation that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.

What is lost when a language dies?

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

“What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people,” says French linguist Claude Hagege.

“It´s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.”

For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are a living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

Cross words

The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?

One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers “have changed to points of no return”.

As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists’ sake than for the communities themselves.

Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. Because of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well.

This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost.

“There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something,” he says.

What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own.

An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages.

Babbling away

Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Mouri in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.

Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say “I love you” and “pass the salt” – the French linguists’ criteria for detecting life.

But with the “strong will” of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.

Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.

But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable.

“You’ve got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it,” says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

“We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation.”

Some Statistics

  • 6% of the worlds languages are spoken by 94% of the world’s population
  • The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
  • The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
  • 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people

SOURCE: Ethnologue

British companies relying too much on the English Language

Published on October 13, 2009 in English Language, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation and Translation Buyers. 0 Comments

English may be the leading international business language and UK companies may still have a head start in the 53 Commonwealth countries where English is spoken, but the National Centre for Languages says that three-quarters of the world’s population speak no English and 94% of English speakers do so only as their second language. Chinese is the most widely-spoken language, followed by Spanish and then English.

When the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) asked almost 3,500 of its members for reasons why they did not export to Europe, 11% cited language barriers and 5% cultural barriers.

Isabella Moore, former president of the BCC and managing director of Leamington Spa-based Comtec Translations, says the survey showed that on average small businesses were losing up to £250,000 a year in orders due to a lack of language skills.

“You have a school of thought that you manage in English. But when you look at our export successes, we do best where English is spoken widely,” she says. “Then you look at countries like Spain and Italy, where we don’t do as well proportionately. Look at South America and it’s only a fraction of our overall export figures.”

Prof Foreman-Peck also found that British exporters are not benefiting from others’ willingness to learn English to the extent that they may believe. Analysis in the US found that online buyers with poor English were six times less likely to make a purchase than those with good English. The research also showed the customers were willing to pay more if the website was in their native language.

The BCC research found that the main reason why companies choose a particular export market is because they know there is
potential demand and feel able to secure sales, but 14% said they were attracted because of linguistic and cultural similarities to the UK.

However, businesses in the same survey did not see securing better language skills as a priority. Only 5% of the companies polled said they would welcome subsidised language training.

Similarly, demand for an “Export box” all-in-one starter package launched by UK Trade & Investment in June, which included translation services, has been slow.

The package included subsidised website translation and redesign to target a foreign-language market, a Google adwords campaign, logistics from Royal Mail and subsidised banking services from HSBC.

Mr Wheeldon says there were plenty of inquiries, but a “much smaller number” had actually then bought the service, which costs £3,000. “I knew that we were not great at exporting, but I didn’t appreciate the fear and anxiety and the time it takes for people to do it,” he says.

source: Telegraph.co.uk

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