Let’s celebrate European Day of Languages together again! Throughout Europe, 800 million Europeans are represented in the Council of Europe’s 47 member states. All are encouraged to discover more languages at any age, as part of or alongside their studies. The Council of Europe is the continent’s leading human rights organisation and is convinced that linguistic diversity is a tool…
As English takes over the world, it’s splintering and changing – and soon, we may not recognise it at all This article is excerpted from the new book, “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English” from Farrar, Straus and Girous. No language has spread as widely as English, and it continues to spread. Internationally the desire to learn it is…
What do you get if you cross a kangaroo with an elephant? You’ll have to wait for the punchline, but you should already have shards of meaning tumbling about your mind. Now, jokes don’t have to be all that funny, of course, but if they are to work at all then they must construct something beyond the simple words deployed.…
When it comes to texting, the period, full stop, point – whatever you call it – has been getting a lot of attention. People have begun noticing slight changes to the way our smallest punctuation mark is deployed, from declarations that it’s going out of style to claims that it’s becoming angry. What they’re actually noticing is written language becoming…
The people of the United States continue to learn how polarized and divided the nation has become. In one study released in late October by the Pew Research Center, Americans were found to have become increasingly partisan in their views. On issues as diverse as health care, immigration, race and sexuality, Americans today hold more extreme and more divergent views…
Chinese is known as one of the most difficult languages to understand and interpret, and the struggle can clearly be seen from the many public signs with hilarious English mistranslation. However, China has finally unrolled a plan to eradicate “Chinglish” before the 2022 Winter Olympics and is working on improving the quality to standard English in 13 public areas like transportation, entertainment and medicine.
If you follow this blog, or any other blog that covers localisation and internationalisation, you probably already know that localisation is super important for expanding overseas. But that’s all just talk unless you’ve seen exactly what happens when you fail to localise successfully. It shouldn’t be difficult to see that marketing blunders can be disastrous for your brand. They can…
A visualisation of a fake vs real news distribution pattern; users who predominantly share fake news are coloured red, and users who don’t share fake news at all are coloured blue When Mark Zuckerberg told Congress Facebook would use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect fake news posted on the social media site, he wasn’t particularly specific about what that…
Have you ever worried in your student years or later in life that time may be starting to run out to achieve your goals? If so, would it be easier conveying this feeling to others if there was a word meaning just that? In German, there is. That feeling of panic associated with one’s opportunities appearing to run out is…
