Guide to Translating with Inclusive Gender-Neutral Language in English
While English doesn’t tend to gender its nouns, in contrast to many other languages like Spanish (which has its own approaches to inclusivity, see this article in Spanish), gender still subconsciously plays a key role in the language. From mankind to kingdom, countless words in the English language are charged with gender associations without speakers […]
The Schwa: A Native Speaker Feature
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text c_id=”.vc_1479224444507″]The schwa sound is a revelation that comes to learners of English as they progress to higher levels. Considered as a ‘native speaker feature’, it helps both pronunciation and understanding by changing the stress of words and sentence. Often referred to as a reduced, weak or unstressed sound, the schwa doesn’t involve the lips […]
Is the comma on its way out?
It’s probably one of the most difficult forms of punctuation to get to grips with and, for some, it’s starting to be more and more unnecessary. The question is, will the comma will eventually die out completely in the future? Let’s take a look at the arguments… Linguist and Columbia University professor John McWhorter is […]
Longest English Word
When an English Rule Deserves to be Broken – Part I
Unlike Spanish, which has the Royal Spanish Academy that – together with the other twenty-one national language academies in Spanish-speaking nations – ensures a common standard for Spanish, English has no such body. Instead, there are a number of rule books or “style guides”, each with its own set of rules and guidelines. The Oxford […]
Spanish Takes First Place as the Happiest Language
Are humans naturally positive thinkers? Does human language reflect this positivity? Are some languages more positive than others? The Pollyanna Hypothesis suggests that humans enjoy socializing with each other and that their communication reflects this. This idea was first posited by University of Illinois psychologists in 1969. Their research found that human languages exhibit a […]
Italianisms in Lunfardo – Part I
The Lunfardo dialect of Spanish arose in the last quarter of the 19th century among petty criminals living with immigrants and native Argentines in the conventillos – sheet metal tenements – of lower-class neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Because so many of these immigrants (some ten million between 1821 and 1932) were poorly educated or illiterate […]
Which language is most “important”?
To determine which language is the most “important” globally, we first must define the term “important”. Does it mean the language spoken by the most people, or the language spoken in the most countries, or the language of the most economically-developed nation, or…? MIT Assistant Professor César Hidalgo and his team have come up with […]
Bad translations are not always a laughing matter
A professional translator is far more than someone who speaks a couple of languages; a professional translator not only has native-level skills in both languages; he or she will consider both the terminology and register of the message to be interpreted (the text), and also the target audience to which it is directed. Errors in […]
New dictionary words for 2014
New words are born and become part of the English language all the time. Sometimes these words are entirely new, though it is more common for already-existing words to morph into new ones, often by adding a new definition, or through processes such as clipping (the shortening of a longer word), blending (the combination of […]
