Well, actually, you couldn’t, because today I am talking about whistled languages.

They may be as rare as an honest politician, but they exist, or existed, all the same, and not just in the enchanted forests of the seven dwarfs. On the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, for instance, or in Turkey (Kusköy, “Village of the Birds”), France (the village of Aas in the Pyrenees), Mexico (the Mazatecs and Chinantecs of Oaxaca), South America (Pirahã), Asia (the Chepang of Nepal), and New Guinea.

It is in West Africa, though, that the sound of whistling is most common. Widely used in languages like Yoruba and Ewe, even the finest of the romance languages, French, is whistled in some places.

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Web-Translations’ MD, Daniel Rajkumar, chatted with Normanton MP, Ed Balls, last month in a meeting that was part of an event organised by Make Your Mark: The Wakefield campaign aims to to unlock the UK’s untapped enterprise potential.

Daniel, and two other young business people from the region, spoke with the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families about the challenging practice of setting up and running a company from scratch, without the experiences and confidence that comes with age. The exchanges were recorded and are to be used in universities and schools in an attempt to light an initial spark of awareness or ambition amongst the next generation of go-getters.

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It has quietly come to light that any golfers competing on tours run by the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), must speak English.

The language vigilantes seem to be targeting 45 South Korean players, and the fact that eight of those women rank amongst the top 20 earners only serves to highlight the underliying cynicism of the crusade.

For those in question, failing an English Language test will result in an overly officious suspension from the tour. The reason? Well, these succesful Koreans are winning a large portion of the tournaments but are not reaping big-buck rewards for the media moguls behind the scenes, owing to their inability to give post match interviews. Tricky as it is to work out exactly how enlightnening such an interview would be, there seems to be a fairer way of doing things…

Interpreters, anyone?

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When even your own Chancellor starts to talk down the economy, you know you’re in for a tough time.  But there is one advantage to the gloom that has led to another record low for Sterling; exporting. British goods and services are now more attractive than ever to foreign markets and a surge in exports could really help slow down the decline.

If you’re new to exporting, it can seem daunting at first but if you already have an English e-commerce platform, a company like  Web-Translations  can help you start trading in another market in just a matter of weeks.  And if you’re worried about servicing foreign-language speaking clients, services like email-translations can help you deal with customer enquiries without the need to recruit linguists into your customer service and fulfilment teams.

It might just be the only way you will survive in a climate where many of your competitors will fail.

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Language has come a long way from the pictographs of 5000 years ago (above), with the development of grammar an integral part. You wouldn’t think much of reading a piece of text littered with grammatical errors, as much as you wouldn’t were it soiled with spelling mistakes, right?

I read somewhere that, back at the turn of the last century, some Bolshevik print workers from St Petersburg refused to carry on with their jobs unless they were paid, not only for each letter they printed, but each punctuation mark, which seems fair…(note to self: do not let a translator hear that, we’ll have all manner of trade unionists on our backs: those printers arguably precipitated the first Russian Revolution!)

My point is that, paid for or not, grammar is as important as anything else, which is why translations should not be edited by anyone other than a trained linguist, despite what your intuitions may tell you.

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The ultimate answer is ‘it’s up to you,’ but here is a small gathering of words which may help to sway you one way or the other…

Think of this address on the back of your widget sales brochure, which has been translated into Hindi:

Widget Heaven
13 Wiggle Road
Bristol
W1D G3T
United Kingdom

Sure, the city and street should not be translated, but is the average provincial Indian postman really going to know what United Kingdom means? If you were posting something which had been translated into English would you know what यूनाइटेड किंगडम meant? (That’s an easy one, too, it means United Kingdom.)

You see the point.

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Now, that may seem like a bizarre post title - I mean, how hard can it be…’make this text Spanish, would you?’ - but there will hopefully be things to learn for everyone in this article, be you a translation purchasing virgin, or a seasoned pro’.  The aim here is to help you to help us which, in turn, will hopefully result in more satisfying project outcomes for you.  Let’s begin…

Firstly, let me outline to you what we at Web-Translations consider to be quality.  We understand that you only want to pay for what is of use to you, and that’s it; nothing else in our world constitutes quality.  

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