Of the UK’s richest under 30s, at least half (53 %) count languages among their skills, according to research, while only 14 % say they speak no foreign language at all.

According to MP Phil Willis “The lack of linguists in our society severely disadvantages us as a nation.”

As any Careers Advisor can tell you, the ability to speak another language is not only useful, it might be essential for a particular career path, or just might be the string to a candidate’s bow that makes them stand out from other applicants for a job.

With many young people answering “I want to be famous” to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, who among their role models are setting an example to youngsters that learning languages is a good idea?

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This - the second guest posting on our company blog – comes from Spanish translator Carlos Montilla. Unsurprisingly, given the subject of his post, tourism is one of his specialisms but here he recounts a tale from his recent trip to Peru in near native English: cheers Carlos!

Spanish from Peru

Puno is a city in south Peru located on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake. Puno’s access to the lake is surrounded by some 40 man-made floating islands inhabited by the Uros people. The Uros people live on these islands and depend on the lake and tourism for their survival. We took a boat with members of a Chivay Cultural Association and their families and disembarked at one of the islands, where part of the Uros community welcomed us.

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Have you heard 50 Cent’s latest track? It’s called ‘Captcha’ and it’s about what happens if the police find you.

April Fools! Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is based on the word “capture”, and although it does sound like it could be on a rap album, a ‘captcha’ is most often a set of squiggly letters you have to type in a box to prove to a machine that you are not a machine. Half of the time I get them wrong, which is why I was really intrigued when I found a few on the net recently that did not involve distorted or twisted letters.

Here are 2 to test your French: (answers hidden in glossary under Captcha)

When adding a comment to a blog, I found a captcha which asked “What city does David live in?” The answer was included in the blog title, so it took non-artificial intelligence to figure it out, but it didn’t involve straining my eyes to figure out if something was a lower case “L” or a “1″. If you know of any fun captchas, please share!

Oh dear, who did that translation for you, Hillary? Next time, give us a call!

If you haven’t seen the latest US foreign relations gaffe on the news, have a look at youtube - it really is quite funny! Hillary Clinton, in an attempt to improve US/Russian relations, had a meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, and presented him with a gift in front of a room full of reporters. The red button on a black and yellow base was supposed to say ‘reset’ in English and Russian, and was intended to be symbolic of Russia and the US restarting their relationship.

Clinton: “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?”

Lavrov: “You got it wrong; this says ‘peregruzka,’ which means overcharged.”

Ooops!

News reaches me that Birmingham City Council has taken the decision to ban all possessive apostrophes from road signs. The move is intended to sort the matter out once and for all following decades of debate across the city.

Birmingham started to drop the use of apostrophes from road signs in the 1950s so that signs in areas such as King’s Norton (or should that be Kings’ Norton?) actually read ‘Kings Norton’. Despite years of calls to have the signs replaced, the council has said not only will it not replace them; it will continue the practice of dropping the apostrophe from all future signs as well. It justifies its decision on the basis of cost, consistency and the fact that council staff spend too much time dealing with complaints about grammar.

The Apostrophe Protection Society (yes, you read correctly) has taken a rather dim view of the announcement, criticising the Council of ‘dumbing down’. And I have to say I quite agree.

So while the apostrophe debates may rage on, they will be utterly pointless in Birmingham at least.

Linguists around the world have nominated words which they would like to see banned as part of a survey by an American University.

Words and phrases mooted for removal from our lexicon include ‘bailout, going green, friendly fire, brainstorming’ and ‘dude’ (a personal favourite, as it happens).

I agree with ‘going green’ but principally because of how terms such as that one, and others like ‘carbon footprint’ or ‘credit crunch,’ become buzz words. Flashed around by people who don’t really care for the semantics of the word, but rather seek adoration for banding around trendy phonetics.

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A new art installation unveiled at the European Council building in Brussels has angered several EU members with its attack of national stereotypes.

The work - entitled “Entropa: Stereotypes are Barriers to be Demolished” - depicts Bulgaria as a toilet, Romania as a Dracula theme park and France as a country on strike.

The Czech Republic government thought it had commissioned work from 27 artists from all over Europe to mark the start of its 6-month EU Presidency, but it turned out to have been entirely the work of enfant terrible of the Czech art scene David Cerny, and two of his fellow artists.

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It’s a favourite cautionary tale among translation professionals: Make sure your translations are accurate or you and your product could become a laughing stock. The first step in achieving this is to use a native speaker - a golden rule that should never be broken.

Here are a few examples (many of which you may have seen before - but the old ones are often the best) of mistranslations into English - a language I would hate to have to learn as a foreign language myself, as there are so many exceptions to rules and slight nuances as the following will demonstrate:

“We take your bags and send them in all directions” - Airline Ticket Office, Copenhagen                (Never a truer word said!) 

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Toujours Tingo, by  Adam Jacot de Boinod is a collection of words and phrases from over 300 foreign languages for which there is no direct counterpart in English.

The “tingo” in the title is an Easter Island word, which means to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left.

Some of my favourite examples from Adam’s collection are the German ones: “Tantenverführer” - a young man with suspiciously good manners, literally, an aunt seducer; and “Trennungsagentur” - someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped. 

One word that may not have a British English equivalent is “Layogenic” - Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close, but there is an American slang expression for this that is certainly used in California: “A full-on Monet” (as used by Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher in the film Clueless.)

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Those of you who watch Top Gear will be familiar with the section of the show which sees an anonymous chap in a white overall drag a range of cars around the test track in as fast a time as possible. Whilst doing so, he often has music (think Baroque) or language learning courses (Greek recently) playing in whatever high horse powered beast happens to be at his mercy that week.

The last few shows, however, have had the - now cult - figure listening to Morse Code. And yes, we have a translation of it…

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