Translation & Language

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

"What if the Japanese-to-English translation industry were the rocket-science industry? What if instead of clients with dubious English skills "incorrecting" your translations on the authority of high-school English textbooks and long-retired sempai, they used hoary old physics textbooks to correct your equations?" - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

This site is awesome! You enter a phrase in English and it uses Google translate to translate it into Japanese and back again over and over... until "equilibrium" is found. - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

Challenge: Find phrases that generate endless recursion: Here's one "Dogs love Cats" http://translationparty.com/tp... - Ray Cromwell

I gave them a piece of my mind in the "additional comments" section. I blame Facebook for starting this trend. - Shannon Jiménez

I can't believe facebook did that too, and proz.com! - Dallas Cao

The ATA responds in a press release: http://atanet.org/pressro... - Shannon Jiménez

"Usarufa is a language of Papua New Guinea with just 1200 speakers (ISO-639 code "usa"). There's no fluent speakers under the age of 25, so the language must be considered moribund....I played them a recording of the "last words" of the Jiwarli language of Western Australia. After some questioning looks I explained that this language is now dead, and we were listening to its last speaker before he died. As one they all looked down, shaking their heads in disbelief and saying sorry, sorry, sorry…. It was as if I told them a mutual friend had died. They urged me to put that recording on a cassette tape so they could take it back to their village. That way, everyone would surely understand what will happen to the Usarufa language unless there are serious attempts to revitalize it." - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

Useful for reading comments and posts in other languages. - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

"For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world." - Shannon Jiménez

""When quality and price don't matter"" - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet

Good analysis of LinkedIn's idiotic move yesterday. - Shannon Jiménez from Bookmarklet