Recently a panel of British experts has discussed the issue of medically enhanced education. Could ‘smart drugs’ be the needed and wanted solution to language learning? Would you take a ‘smart pill’ if it was offered to you? Would it be ethically acceptable to do so? These and many more questions were discussed during a recent debate hosted by the British Academy and the Guardian.
In the previous news item we looked at what languages are popular in the real life. But what happens in the virtual world? What languages tend to dominate the scene on the Internet? Are there many differences? Although English came second in our most popular world languages chart, it is still dominates virtual world with over 565,000,000 Internet users, although it must be noted that it is becoming more and more difficult with an increasing number of people being bilingual or even multilingual.
According to various researchers, there exit over 7 thousand languages in the world today, although it must be pointed out that some of the known minority languages have less than 9 users. The most widely used language is Mandarin Chinese which counts over 1,000,000,000 speakers and the rarest is Taushiro, one of the Peruvian languages. It does not appear to have any evident resemblance to any other known...
Dan Jurafsky from Stanford University took a new linguistic look at the origins and history of words that we use to describe everyday food in his new book The Language of Food – A linguist reads the menu. Travelling through time, he presented historic reasons for the change of many well-known recipes. The book will appeal to linguists and food lovers alike and contains a lot of surprising facts and historic evidence that will certainly challenge food stereotypes and perceptions.
When a company plans to enter an international market, its priority should be to ensure that the brand is accepted and liked by its foreign customers. As we have said before, translating idiomatic and slang expressions can be quite tricky and just to prove our point here are some examples of poor translated slogans that lost businesses thousands and thousands of pounds.
Today we are looking at idiomatic expressions in other foreign languages. And the first one is a Spanish idiom ‘‘no tener pelos en la lengua’’ or ‘not to have hair on the tongue.’’ When someone does not ‘‘have hair on the tongue’’, he/she always speaks his/her mind and always tells how it is. Another Spanish idiom with hair is ‘‘tomar el pelo’’ or literally translated ‘‘to take the hair’’.
Carrying on with an insect theme, here are a couple more insect idioms: ‘to have ants in one’s pants’ and ‘to have butterflies in one’s stomach.’ ‘To have ants in one’s pants’ means that the person is very anxious or impatient while ‘to have butterflies in one’s stomach’ means that a person experiences tension or excitement. Their translation into other languages differs a great deal.
Hand on my heart, I do not like fleas. Even more, I absolutely detest them; in my opinion, they are nasty little insects who survive by drinking blood of mammals and birds. On the other hand, I love keeping fit and exercising as it gives you positive mental and physical energy, but why would anyone put fleas and being fit together in one sentence, never mind the same expression?
Translating is a complex, intellectually demanding and creative process; we can confidently say that translating idioms and idiomatic expression is a form of Art. This week we are going to have a look at idioms in different languages and find out what they really mean. The word idiom comes from a Latin word ‘idioma’ – ‘special property’. Idioms have a special figurative meaning separate from their literal meaning and reflecting a particular type of mentality, culture or traditions.
Bilingual learning has been the topic of many research projects. What difference does it make if a child is brought up speaking more than one language? According to various studies, bilingualism or multilingualism can help develop many cognitive functions and enhance social and emotional development of a child. But can babies be given a head start at learning languages before they are even born? According to one of the professors at Columbia University...
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