A presidential word contest drew 2,123 proposals from 593 Estonians; the winner, taristu, replaces the borrowed infrastruktuur and enters the dictionary as a real Estonian word.
Posts with tag.: UN
Crisis Commons found a global network of Creole speakers to translate emergency texts after Haiti's earthquake, and is now recruiting translators for Pakistan.
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.
Thailand tried to grow Thai Wikipedia with statistical machine translation. The idea was right and the mechanism was wrong, for reasons every localization team now recognises.
The Georgian language stands as a testament to the richness and diversity of human linguistic expression
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.
VisitBritain told hoteliers not to thank Chinese guests for compliments. Behind the tip sheet sits a serious point about high and low context cultures.
Russian language is an essential part of world culture and history
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.
Künstliche Intelligenz revolutioniert die Übersetzung: schnellere, skalierbare und konsistente Fachübersetzungen durch KI kombiniert mit menschlicher Expertise.
Die beglaubigte Übersetzung spielt eine entscheidende Rolle in der globalisierten Welt, in der wir heute leben. Sie ist der Schlüssel zur Überwindung sprachlicher Barrieren in offiziellen und rechtlichen Angelegenheiten.
Iran’s president told the UN there was no translation. The two-minute silence in the headphones exposed how fragile simultaneous interpretation really is.
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.
Leeds researcher Serge Sharoff has £700,000 from the European Commission to build term banks that could reshape machine translation and language teaching alike.
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.
Spanish has 500 million native speakers across 20 countries and no neutral default, which is why dialect, register and the subjunctive decide every translation.
A Pennsylvania county paid $5,500 for court interpreters in a year and is asking whether it was necessary. The breakdown answers the question better than the headline.
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.
Italian is a beautiful and complex language that requires a skilled translator to properly convey its meaning and essence
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.
The OED holds millions of coined words that never caught on, from furgle to wibble, and the reason they failed has nothing to do with quality.
Shanzhai and fangnu made it into the new Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. Two entries, 670,000 words, and a quiet record of what China has been worrying about.
Google Translate and other translation tools are powerful tools that can help people communicate across languages and cultures
Vienna linguist Nikolaus Ritt argues sounds and words are selfish replicators that use speakers to copy themselves, turning language change into Darwinian evolution.
Twelve EU states move to create a unitary patent through enhanced cooperation, granting in English, French or German and breaking a decade-long deadlock over language.
Translating English is a complex task that requires expertise, cultural understanding, and attention to detail.
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.
Oxford picked 'big society' as Word of 2010 over vuvuzela and Boris bike. The shortlist is a case study in how English coins, blends and borrows new words.
A Universitat Jaume I imaging study finds bilinguals route attention tasks through Broca's area while monolinguals use the right hemisphere, and respond faster.
When it comes to translating either dialogue or the written word from
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.
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.