Thinking of moving your business to China? A word to the wise: hire a skilled translator! As a recent article in the New York Times points out, translating a business name into Chinese requires much more than Google Translate; you also need a deep understanding of the nuances of Chinese culture to a...
Language barriers and mistranslations are fertile ground for comedy. Chinese translations of English seem to be particularly vulnerable to gaffes, possibly due to a shortage of fluent English speakers and a corresponding over-reliance on translation software. As an aside, it should be noted that Eng...
French speakers now have a new option for consuming ebooks and other digital media that speaks their language: Amazon’s Kindle, which was just released in French last week. The French version of the device, which costs 99€ on Amazon.fr, is Wifi only and comes with neither a touchscreen nor a...
We’re all familiar with the term “mother tongue,” but as it turns out, the phrase may be something of a misnomer. Scientists from the University of Cambridge have found that at least historically speaking, it is actually men who most strongly influence language change. The scientists analyzed ...
By now, many scientists are willing to accept that intelligent animals like dolphins may have languages of their own. But what about honeybees? They couldn’t possibly have their own language, could they? After all, they’re just bugs! Not so fast, say scientists from the University of Dundee in S...
Facebook already connects hundreds of millions of users around the globe, and the site itself has been translated into more than 70 different languages. Now, it looks like the popular website may take its efforts to break down language barriers between users to another level by offering automatic tr...
Across the globe, government services are being slashed in the name of austerity. In many countries, language services are not exempt from the chopping block– and in Italy, the damage may go so far as to include the Italian language academy itself, the Accademia della Crusca. The academy was e...
