Translation & Language

“Languages of the World” provides language-by-language information. This section steps back from the detail to offer a summary view of the world language situation. Specifically, it offers numerical tabulations of languages and number of speakers. Tables by world area, by language size, by language family, by country. - Amira from Bookmarklet

What's the criteria to be listed as an "Indigenous language"? - Eivind

What happened? - Shannon Jiménez

That's great! - Shannon Jiménez

Thank you for liking my post Shannon and Denis. - Dallas Cao

"In the burgeoning world of translators and interpreters (translators deal with written documents, interpreters with the spoken word) it's all about the niche. "It's not just having the language skill. It's also having the expertise in the subject matter," said Dahlberg, whose story was striking enough that Nicholas Hartmann, president of the American Translators Assn., retold it during the group's 50th convention in New York last month." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

Shannon, nice to see what you are doing in print! - amelia arapoff

Fascinating article! - Eyoki from FreshFeed

Twitter jumps on the crowdsourcing bandwagon. Idiots. - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

translatorscafe.com starts its crowdsourcing project too. - Dallas Cao

"Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi delivered a rambling address to the United Nations in New York City on Wednesday morning, calling Barack Obama "our son" and railing against the U.N. Security Council. He spoke not in Arabic, Libya's official language, but a local Libyan dialect. Does the United Nations have an interpreter for every dialect in the world? No. Speakers at the United Nations are supposed to deliver their speeches in one of the organization's six official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. U.N. interpreters then translate the lecture into the other five languages. If the speaker doesn't use an official language—either as a political statement or because he doesn't know one—the speaker has to bring along his own interpreter. That interpreter then translates into one of the official languages—usually English or French—and the other interpreters translate from that interpretation." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

Google's beta translation toolkit is nicely built (http://translate.google.com/toolkit), but we have concern about TOS: "You may not modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on this Content (either in whole or in part) unless you have been specifically told that you may do so by Google or by the owners of that Content, in a separate agreement." and... more... - τorƍue

"The respected international news agency Reuters published a story on Tuesday reporting that the penis of a large giraffe model at Berlin's Legoland Discovery Center had been stolen four times. The 12in appendage, which is made out of around 15,000 bricks, had been repeatedly targeted by souvenir hunters since the statue was installed in 2007, it said. But a few hours later the news wire corrected the story to clarify that the part that had proved so attractive to thieves was actually the giraffe's tail. The Lego giraffe, it turns out, does not have a penis." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

I'll start. I translate Spanish > English and specialize in science (mostly biology). - Shannon Jiménez

English to Turkish turkish to english -french to turkish turkish to french- english to french-french to english - Dilara TAN

"This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym bans to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodneess, and Size"). Similarly, sometimes its easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it becomes necessary, we can search through our minds -- or an encyclopedia -- and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

"Do bilinguals have an internal switch that stops their two languages from interfering with each other, or are both languages always "on"? The fact that bilinguals aren't forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there's some kind of switch. Moreover, in 2007, brain surgeons reported evidence for a language switch when their cortical prodding with an electrode caused two bilingual patients to switch languages suddenly and involuntarily. On the other hand, there's good evidence that languages are integrated in the bilingual mind. For example, bilinguals are faster at naming an object when the word for that object is similar or the same in the two languages they speak (e.g. ship/schip in English and Dutch). Now Eva Van Assche and colleagues have provided further evidence for the idea of bilingual language integration by showing that a person's second language affects the way that they read in their native language." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

"Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet