Laurel
A Language Gap: Kurdish and Arabic
Recent reports from the Iraq Programme of the Institute of War & Peace Reporting indicate a continuing language problem between Arabic-speaking Iraq and its...
Bowlingual 2.0
Japanese toymaker Takara Tomy has announced a new and improved version of the IgNobel-Prize-winning Bowlingual “translator” of dog-to-human communication. The device was displayed at...
Invading Italian
Nick Squires in Rome reports for Telegraph.co.uk that Italians are using—and stressing—about the growing incursion of Anglo-Saxon words and phrases into everyday use.
From...
What’s lost? Who will even know? (comment on botkin entry)
Of all that is being lost in turmoil and conflict in the Caucasus right now, this has to break a linguist’s heart. Is there...
More multilingual messaging
Another entry in the on-demand translation category: SpeakLike was introduced this week as “the first instant messaging service for accurate real-time translation chat across...
MADCAT
A new entry in translation technology research for military use: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded BBN Technologies (http://www.bbn.com) of Cambridge,...
Social network, meet social translation, meet semi-homemade
The networking site Facebook has launched a crowdsourced application, Facebook Translations, that “allows people to suggest translations and vote alternatives up and down,” says...
No way to treat our friends, indeed
If we thought the situation was improving for interpreters helping US forces in Iraq, Malou Innocent reports otherwise at Tampa Bay Online. It’s not...
One Iraqi translator’s dilemma
From
The Hill
Timmy - an Iraq we should let in
By David Keene
December 18, 2007
There are immigrants and there are immigrants, and a wise nation distinguishes...
Iraqi translators have a friend in Oregon
The Checkpoint One Foundation was set up earlier this year to assist Iraqi and Afghan interpreters in coming to the United States—a process that...
Learning and growing local languages
The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana is the newest community to begin development of a languagelearning program in partnership with Rosetta Stone, Inc., helping to...
Happy Translators Day!
September 30, St. Jerome’s Day, was International Translation Day. Some of the translation companies and associations that celebrate the occasion scheduled their programs for...
Iraq: It only gets worse for translators
From The Times today (September 14):
Get out or die, security force chief tells interpreters for British Army
Reported by Martin Fletcher in Baghdad
Iraqi interpreters working...
Back to school: New rules for German
Grammar reform is now official in Germany. Andrew D. Blechman writes in The Christian Science Monitor that the reforms are at best unpopular among...
Numbers from Iraq: 310 and $5,000
A report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) by way of ReliefWeb:
The Iraq...
Translators: Numbers from Iraq
Five thousand. Or is it seven thousand?
That’s how many Iraqi translators/interpreters work for the US military forces in Iraq, directly or more likely through...
Is there an interpreter in the house?
Translation and interpreting have been hitting the news lately, and not always in a good way.
In particular, finding interpreters for defendants, crime victims and...
Encouraging news
Social networking sites are doing more than we thought for language! Language expert and author David Crystal says that the internet “through blogs, instant...
Studying Irish at Cambridge
Modern Irish is now on the curriculum at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, along with the medieval version of the language. IrishExaminer.com reports...
MYOOPS and OCW
A recent New York Times story contained this startling statement:
“Lucifer Chu, a 31-year-old from Taipei, Taiwan . . . has become a millionaire by...
“The hottest jobs”
First, the good news: Translation was listed as one of the “hottest jobs” in the annual “what people earn” article Sunday (April 15) in...
Bilingual document to the rescue
Ian Austen reports in The New York Times ("The Comma That Costs 1 Million Dollars (Canadian)” published on October 25, 2006) that a comma...
Enter Cyrillic
The European Commission has recommended admission to the European Union for Romania and Bulgaria. This brings the number of official EU languages to what,...
Arrrr!
Ahoy! Today’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day and we couldn’t let it go by without a salute. Various sources on the web offer...