Integration: An Unstoppable Force
Countries are rarely monolingual, and not only due to the effects of globalization on cross-border movement. Nearly every country of the world counts at least one, and often many native languages among those spoken within its borders. Nonetheless, each area maintains one dominant, modern-day language that is used for government, commerce, industry, education, etc. While […]
Linguistic Diversity in the U.S.
Diversity in North America has essentially been on the upward trend since the continent was first colonized. It’s natural, then, that the region’s linguistic diversity would be increasing as well. But while linguistic diversity in the U.S. in particular has undeniably been rising in recent decades, according to a report by the Census Bureau, these […]
Language Professionals and Students: So Many Careers, So Little Time
The claim that speaking one or more foreign languages increases your job marketability has almost become cliché in recent years. However, in an ever-globalizing world, it is truer than ever. For those who attain fluency in one or more languages beyond their native language, translation is an obvious option, with a variety of directions to […]
Did a bad translation put horns on Moses’ head?
Many translators are familiar with the controversy surrounding the horned Moses and his sometimes-amiss translator. Although that translator, commonly known as Saint Jerome, concerned himself with biblical analysis, theological debate, history, correspondence and translation, he earned his place in history mainly through his translations and revisions of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. […]
Language Proficiency Testing Among Doctors and Hospital Staff
An EU directive allowing doctors from member countries to work anywhere in the European Economic Area has come under fire recently. Following the case of a 70 year old British patient who was killed by an incompetent German doctor, critics of the directive have begun pushing for competency tests as well as language proficiency tests […]
Translation: It’s History and Trends
The term “translation” hails from the mid-fourteenth century with an etymological base in the Latin word translationem, a noun of action from the stem of transferre. It also shares roots with the word from Old French meaning “the rendering of a text from one language to another.” The verb form in English, translate, is from […]
Aesthetics and Meaning: The Balancing Act of Literary Translation
Words carry more than just their meaning. They also possess an aesthetic quality that can derive from their meaning, their sound when being pronounced, or even the appearance of the word if it contains symmetry. While these are purely subjective and personal preferences, translators can find themselves faced with the task of trying to decipher […]
Do children really learn languages faster than adults?
Traditional knowledge has been that children are better at learning languages than adults, along with a whole host of other abilities like playing a musical instrument. Heavyweights like Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have supported this assumption with theories regarding the critical period of human maturation, among others. Essentially, […]
Frankenstorm: The Perfect Storm with a Perfect Name
Can a new word become part of a language before the event it refers to officially happens? That seems to be what happened with “Frankenstorm” — the storm currently terrorizing cities and towns along the East Coast. Paul Payack, the president and chief word analyst of Global Language Monitor, which tracks word usage in the […]
Communicating for Life: The Language Barrier in Health Care
Learning a foreign language for the purpose of living in another country goes beyond mastering the basic conversations one might have on a street corner. With the complexity of life, comes the wide variety of situations that a person must know how to navigate in their new language in order to get by. But even […]
