Spanish speakers around the world, take heart; you don’t speak incorrectly, just differently. The Real Academia Española (RAE), Spain’s language authority, is finally acknowledging the diversity of grammar and vocabulary among the Spanish language’s nearly 500 million speakers in some 20 countries. The language mavens at the RAE just released a two-volume set detailing the [...]
Archive for the 'Spanish Language News' Category
CNN published an article explaining the different approaches from Google and Facebook to translating their webs. Below you will find some highlights:
Facebook aims to translate the Web using an army of volunteers and some hired professional translators. Meanwhile, Google plans to let computers do most of the work. [...]
Argentine Spanish is peppered with words and phrases from Lunfardo, a vast slang vocabulary developed on the streets of Buenos Aires around the turn of the 20th century. Criminals and other shady characters looking to keep their activities under wraps developed Lunfardo by borrowing and twisting words from the melting pot of languages that surrounded [...]
¿HABLAS ESPAÑOL? Officers practicing Spanish to improve communication with Hispanic residents
24Aug09The language barrier in St. Joseph between English- and Spanish-speaking communities is being broken down in small steps.
St. Joseph Police Department training officer Marla Wilson said in an effort to bridge the cultural gap, 15 officers, as well as other officials and members of the community, recently participated in a three-day Spanish language training course [...]
Delicate work in translation
02Aug09A letter to the New York Times Book Review complained that Gerald Martin, the biographer of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, had not given due respect to Marquez’s translators. Martin raves about Marquez’s “gorgeous sentences,” but the letter writer complains that he “neglects to mention whether he read those sentences in Spanish or English.” I have often [...]
LACMA learns to tweet en Español
23Jul09Today, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art officially went bilingual on Twitter.
The museum launched a Twitter account, @enLACMA, that will provide Spanish-language tweets to online users. “We were looking for new ways for Spanish speakers to engage in the museum, and this is the next natural step,” said museum spokeswoman Allison Agsten.
LACMA’s tweets will [...]
The popularity of dual-language classes in Ventura County schools continues to grow, with three schools starting programs this fall.
Ventura Unified School District started a two-way immersion kindergarten class at Montalvo School about a decade ago. Five more dual-language programs have since come online at elementary and middle schools in Camarillo, Rio, Hueneme and Ventura.
In the [...]
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–The White House is preparing to launch a Spanish-language version of its Web site, Whitehouse.gov, by the end of the year, according to the company doing its recruiting.
Earlier this week, Rock Creek Strategic Marketing sent out four job postings that, when filled, will expand the first White House Office of New Media by [...]
In the basement below United Educational Credit Union’s lobby on Riverside Drive, nine employees commit to memory the phrases, “This is a deposit slip,” and, “How can I help you?” in Spanish.
Some of its credit union tellers, asset managers and maintenance staff were learning a few banking-related phrases to help bridge language and cultural barriers [...]
MasterCard Preps Hispanic Push
20May09PURCHASE, N.Y. MasterCard is launching a Hispanic marketing and education initiative promoting the use of its debit and pre-paid products. While the Hispanic population and its buying power has been rapidly on the rise, the segment is still a relatively untapped market for the card issuer, as Hispanics tend to prefer using cash and checks [...]
