I was wandering around the ocean of links and more links, when I found a blog called Flabbertech, which announces enthusiastically that “the simultaneous translator is almost a reality”. There is a Star Trek quote and then the blogger asks us what is surely meant to be a rhetorical question: Have you ever dreamt or even just [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Languages’
It’s Almost Like Star Trek! Or is it?
Posted in English, tagged Edward Luttwak, Emily Apter, Languages, Machine Translation, Star Trek, The New York Times, The Translation Zone, TRANSTAC on August 13, 2010 | 1 Comment »
In The Beginning Was The Word
Posted in English, tagged George Orwell, Language diversity, Languages, Lera Boroditsky, Newspeak, Psycholinguistics, The Virtual Linguist, Wall Street Journal on July 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »
The other day I was reading The Virtual Linguist and found this post quoting a very interesting Wall Street Journal article by Lera Boroditsky. A while back, in this post, we already talked about the idea that even though the way we think certainly shapes our language, it may also be true that language shapes the [...]
Language Diversity and Translation
Posted in English, tagged Art of translating, Evans&Levinson, Language diversity, Languages, Neurolinguistics, New Scientist, Noam Chomsky, Psycholinguistics, Translation, Universal Grammar on June 7, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I don’t think it takes a linguist to notice that the language we speak seems to shape the way we think, and how our brain works. Since the 1960s, though, we have pretty much accepted Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar, or, to put it briefly, that the human brain is born language-ready, with an [...]
Business, Onions, Beer and…
Posted in English, tagged English, French, Funny, German, Idioms, Italian, Languages, Stereotypes on April 24, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Time for some unpretentious linguistic fun once again. I have always found this little linguistic comparison to be amusing, as it is a case of well-known stereotypes being reinforced not by outsiders, but from within each community of speakers. We are talking about how the four languages I speak express – through well-crystallised idioms – [...]
