ON THE LANGUAGE OF RIDDLES
Have you ever wondered why we love riddles so much? Is it the double or veiled meaning they put forth, our penchant for puzzle solving, the intriguing opposition between two or more descriptive elements the referent of which must be identified,…
ENDANGERED LANGUAGES
Language endangerment is a serious concern to which linguists and language planners have turned their attention in the last several decades. For a variety of reasons, speakers of many smaller, less dominant languages stop using their heritage…
TRANSCREATION
With the countless advances in technology, social media, and business practices, it can be hard to keep track of all of the new terms and concepts that are born every day. Translation has been around for a while now, and localization seems to…
WHY WE LOVE RUSSIAN (I)
With more than 250 million speakers on this planet (and in space), Russian is the sixth most spoken language worldwide, the most spoken in Europe, and the second most used language on the Internet. Learning it may be very useful for communication…
WHEN BRILLIANT SAYINGS CANNOT BE LITERALLY TRANSLATED
By some estimates, the English language has more than one million words. Although impossible to establish an exact figure, it is generally agreed that there is no other language with so many words. And it’s not like any of us use all one million…
MACHINE TRANSLATION VS. HUMAN TRANSLATION
Translation is usually defined as the act of transmitting the language of the source text into the language of the target text, taking into consideration cultural and linguistic differences. It gained a significant role starting from the 1940’s,…
WHY WE LOVE PORTUGUESE
The sixth most spoken language in the world by the number of native speakers, and one of the fastest growing European languages, Portuguese is the sole official language of eight countries, forming the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries…
TRANSLATION – WHAT A WONDERFUL WOR(L)D
Although translation is an art that exists since ancient times, languages keep changing and translation has to evolve as well. There are countless cases where translations are known to have played a decisive role in the development of literary…
On the Origin of Christmas Words
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed most commonly on December 25th as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. Etymologically, Christmas…
ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION BY CHILDREN
The acquisition of language “is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform.” (Leonard Bloomfield)
Every child has the capacity to learn, more precisely to acquire any human language. Language is an…