This blog post is dedicated to all of the Céciles, Célines, Josés and Frédérics out there…

An easy way to make someone feel appreciated is to get their name right!  (I’m sorry, Petar, for writing “Peter” in my email last week…)  It does get a bit tricky when you are writing to Jesús or Agnès, however, as to really get their name right you need to stick in one of those funny accent marks…

The obvious way is to click the “insert symbol” function in Word or Outlook and look through all of the characters until you find the one you need, but this can sometimes take a while.  When I was at university, typing out too many French essays, I reassigned the functions of all the function keys on my laptop, so that when I hit “F2″, an “à” appeared, and “F3″ an “è”, etc.  (I don’t think it worked for F1 for some reason.)  I re-learnt to type with an extra row of keys and it really did speed up my essay-writing!

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This post doesn’t strictly relate to translation, rather just words themselves in whatever beautiful language they may be - or not, as is in fact the case in this post - either way, do read on…

Reading is a multi cognitive process that has us decoding symbols in order to derive meaning. Once the retina recognises a set of symbols, the primary visual cortex processes them and then Wernicke’s area interprets them.

Convention has us arrange the symbols in a certain way and deviation from that pattern is discouraged. This is in order to maintain understandability across generations and to aid the formation of new words acording to the rules already in place.

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The greatest - and I do mean greatest - quote by any non native in a second language has to be that belonging to US President, J. F. Kennedy. On June 26th 1963 he declared ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. Here comes the shocking part: he did not categorise himself as a jelly filled doughnut in saying those words, as the whole world, it seems, thinks he did.

In fact, according to the nuances of German, his translation of ‘I am a person of Berlin’ was perfect, as should any translation be. And that includes the punctuation, and brings me nicely to the topic of this entry: foreign quotation marks.

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Talking plants are no longer the works of fantasy or science fiction - a far cry from the intimidating Audrey II of The Little Shop of Horrors, and its sinister appetite, a plant in a Japanese cafe has become the world’s first non-human blogger, claim scientists.

Japanese IT company KAYAC Co., Ltd. has developed a sophisticated botanical interface system that allows plants to post their “thoughts” or impulses online.

Satoshi Kuribayashi, who is part of the project at Keio University, says that the aim of the project is to study ways of communicating with plants, and reveal something about their internal world:

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Recently, we had a .ttx file that would not clean up. We tried the usual tricks, including putting the Excel source file in the same folder as the .ttx, and naming the source file exactly the same name as the .ttx file, but nothing seemed to work. The error message we kept getting was:

“Unable to locate original file. Please copy this original file into directory above and try again. File skipped!”

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A brief, Friday morning, tea-break surfing session when you live approximately 60 miles from any sea means only one thing: I’ve been trawling the ‘net.

Fishing and sea puns aside, I’ve just stumbled over a very fun site - Language Trainers Group - and, although they don’t sell Portuguese speaking Pumas, nor Norwegian-tongued Nikes as the name suggests, they have an enjoyable game hidden amongst their pages.

All you do is watch the video clips of non native English speakers reciting lines from poems, then guess which country they are from based on their strangely accented twangs. If you are right, you get a chance to guess which city they are from, too, which is a lot harder in most cases.

A colleague and I got just over 50% correct, stumbling embarrassingly short of the bottom rung of the High Score ladder…how will you do?

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User Generated Content exploded on the web with blogging and social networking phenomenon, but User Generated News (UGN) is a relatively new phenomenon. Whereas European newspapers and broadcasters have been slow to adopt UGN, American newscasters have coined the term ‘Citizen Journalism’ with CNN’s IReport.com, MSNBC’s NewsVine.com and even Al Gore has Current.com. Enter YouReportTV.com.

People need a voice. The BBC gets an average of 10,000 e-mails or posts in a day to its ‘Have Your Say’ site and that can soar on big news days. Although that may sound an enormous number, some 5 million visit the BBC News website in a single day.

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I reckon subtitlers must be well in demand going on the amount of subtitled content we’ve been seeing on our screens of late.

Now, as a linguist and having spent many of my language-learning student years with my eyes glued to that bar at the bottom of the screen, I’m no stranger to subtitles. In fact, I am eternally grateful for the invention as, without them, not only would we be missing out on hours of Kung-Fu lips-moving-no-speaking hilarity, but I’d have been lost in the midst of countless French films, despite learning the language for most of my conscious life.

But what’s with all the subtitling of English speaking people that’s happening at the moment?

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It occured to me today that translation and foreign languages litter everyday life, even for those of us whom aren’t in some way married to the industry.

Take a moody, emotionally charged teen for instance; nothing but a disinterest in foreign languages plagues their consciousness, yet their subconscious is perpetually peppered with alien tongues.

From the perfunctory ramblings of Pete Doherty on ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (meaning ‘work makes you free’ - words which hung over concentration camps in war time Germany) to the twisted sonics of unintelligible, yet enjoyable, Scandanavian crew, Sigur Ros: multilingual-ness is everywhere.

So, too, are many English words used without a thought for their origin. Cliché, for example: a French word which comes from a time saving process typists used to use. For frequently occurring phrases, one slug of metal was cast to save typing each letter of each word out every time, and that slug was termed a cliché. A word which now describes an idea that has been overused to the point of losing its intended force or novelty.

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So, I’ve decided to start a new series of posts, and I do so for two reasons. One: in an attempt to supply you with some humour/work-evading ammo’, and two: to distract me from more menial tasks such as editing metadata for an incalculable number of our own web pages.

Humour or no humour, being really optimistic would be to believe that, one day, one of the facts penned here may win you a pub quiz tie-breaker or something. Anyway, let us begin…

Fact:

There are 2286 languages in the world which have neither a translated version of the Bible, nor a project in place to begin translation. This represents 196M people.

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