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.…
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to eliminate jobs once considered impossible to automate. One series of papers by Oxford researchers ranks jobs by their estimated susceptibility to automation. Among those most rated likely to vanish – because they involve work that AI can increasingly accomplish less expensively – are real estate brokers, insurance claims adjusters and sports referees.…
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…
On 14th August is World Calligraphy Day Calligraphy is art in a written format, giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious, and skilful manner. This ancient writing technique uses flat edged pens to create artistic lettering through thick and thin lines, depending on the direction of the stroke. Calligraphy’s vast history has impacted many cultures all over the world.…
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…
Talking politics with people who you disagree with is always tricky, but it’s especially hard when those people are your family or closest friends. All too often, problems arise because of how politeness (and impoliteness) operates in interactions.
Everything we do can be more or less polite; the way we move, the way we look at each other and, of course, the words we use.
