Posts with tag.: Languages

St Stephen's College opened a Centre for Translations to move academic and cultural texts between India's languages, and to train the translators who would do it.

Georgia placed a thousand native English speakers in its schools to displace Russian as the second language. A decade on, here is what survived and what did not.

Two thirds of Europeans can speak English and it is the first foreign language taught in every school system outside Britain and Ireland, a Eurostat survey found.

A primary school principal in Izmir has recorded 4,500 Romani words from three neighbourhoods, building the first Turkish-Romany dictionary from scratch.

The University of Pune is compiling the first Pali-Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionary, closing a gap that has forced Buddhist scholars to work through two reference books at once.

Three-quarters of UK students skipped French GCSE this year and German entries fell 4.5%. The 2004 decision to make languages optional is still doing damage.

Spain's Senate admitted Catalan, Basque and Galician with simultaneous interpretation. Congress refused. The row was never about headphones or the cost of booths.

Africa Talks Climate found that many indigenous languages have no words for the science of climate change, leaving warnings unintelligible to the people most at risk.

Google added Latin to Google Translate, announced it in a blog post written entirely in Latin, and predicted the results would be among its most accurate.

The Welsh Language Measure gave Welsh official status and put public bodies under a duty to provide services in it, creating steady demand and an unexpected quality problem.

African languages embody the cultural heritage, diversity, and identity of the continent

Haryana Agricultural University will require overseas students to study Hindi. In India, a language mandate is never just an educational decision.

Stephen Pax Leonard will live a year with the Inughuit to record Inuktun, an undocumented language with about 1,000 speakers and a thinning sheet of ice.

Occitan, Breton, Basque, Corsican and Alsatian all survive in a country whose constitution recognises one language. A guide to the languages spoken in France.

Iran’s president told the UN there was no translation. The two-minute silence in the headphones exposed how fragile simultaneous interpretation really is.

Latin, Greek and Hebrew survive at university because translation turns locked manuscripts into evidence students can argue with, and machines still cannot do it.

Wikipedia marks its tenth birthday by opening its first office outside the United States in India, betting that growth now depends on local language editions rather than English.

A column of numbers found under adobe rubble near Trujillo records a Peruvian language that has been extinct for centuries. One page against a very long silence.

From Roman Dacia to Church Slavonic, Soviet Cyrillic and the 2023 law that renamed it Romanian, the Moldovan language has always been an argument about politics.

Roman languages are a fascinating group of languages that have played an important role in the development of Western culture and civilization

Vengerian is the Slavic name for Hungarian, a Uralic outlier with 18 cases, vowel harmony and a focus position that machine translation still cannot handle.

A list of seven languages hanging on by a thread is entertaining, but the real predictors of language death are duller and far more reliable than speaker counts.

Castro spoke for four hours, Gaddafi for 96 minutes and his interpreter broke down. Inside the booths where UN speeches are turned into six languages, live.

A bill granting Russian and other tongues regional status has split Ukraine’s parliament. The fight is not about grammar. It is about which way the country faces.

India has chased UN status for Hindi since 2003, but the cost, the two-thirds majority and its own southern states all stand in the way.

The world loses about 25 languages a year. At a conference in Carmarthen, 100 academics argued in nine languages about whether any of them can be saved.

Asian language translation revenue hit $1,312 million in 2008 and was projected to reach $1,516 million, with southern India's factories driving a hiring surge.

Belarus's 2009 census found those calling Belarusian their native language fell from almost 74 percent to 53 percent, with only 23 percent speaking it at home.

The Association of Spanish Language Academies says Spanish will lead the world in native speakers by 2050. Here is what drives the forecast and what it changes.

Around 100 protesters gathered near Ukraine's parliament against a language law expanding Russian, arguing bilingualism in law means Ukrainian retreat in practice.

Google translated 16 million words into Hindi, Tamil, Swahili and more for Wikipedia using Google Trends to pick articles and humans to fix the machine drafts.

Senate Bill 2639 would force foreign-language signs in the Philippines to carry a Filipino or English translation. Mandating a translation is not the same as mandating a good one.

Linguists in Arunachal Pradesh set out to record an Aka dialect and found Koro instead, a distinct language with about 1,000 speakers and no written record.

Studying different languages can offer fascinating insights into the ways that humans perceive and understand the world

How linguists are using crowdsourced volunteers to translate low resource languages that machine translation still cannot handle, from Haiti to intelligence work.