Entertainment

Father Builds Inuit Video Game

by Richard Kazandjian January 29, 2012 Education

When it comes to protecting threatened languages, technology can be a double-edged sword. It can serve to discourage young people from speaking the language of their parents and grandparents, or it can provide tools to help them learn it and space for them to practice it. Here’s one especially sweet example of how technology can [...]

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Who is Santa Claus?

by Richard Kazandjian December 23, 2011 Entertainment

Santa Claus is a familiar figure to children and adults across the world; a “jolly old elf” who rides through the night sky on a sleigh, bringing presents to all the good boys and girls. But who is Santa Claus, really? Where the does the legend come from? The English name “Santa Claus” comes from [...]

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Ancient Roman Graffiti

by Richard Kazandjian December 22, 2011 Entertainment

5 Funny Inscriptions You might think of graffiti as a modern urban problem, but rest assured, writing on walls is an ancient art. Our forebears liked to make their mark on a place just as much as we do. Perhaps even more so, considering that they often had to chip away at stone walls to [...]

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Siri Doesn’t Understand Scottish Accents

by Richard Kazandjian October 31, 2011 Entertainment

At its last conference, Apple introduced Siri, a robotic virtual system that comes embedded in the new iPhone 4S.  Right after it was introduced, Apple caught a lot of flack for Siri’s name, which sounds vulgar in both Japanese and Georgian. Now that the product has been released to the general public, Apple is getting [...]

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Another Week, Another Tech Translation Fail

by Richard Kazandjian October 28, 2011 Entertainment

Last week, Apple was roundly mocked for using the name “Siri” for its new voice-controlled personal assistant.  Apparently, they didn’t bother to see if the name would have any negative connotations in other languages. In fact, it sounds very much like “buttocks” in Japanese and is a particuarly crude way of referring to one’s penis [...]

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The Bard in Translation

by Richard Brooks September 29, 2011 Entertainment

Shakespeare fans,  mark your calendars: next spring, the Globe Theatre will truly live up to its name when it hosts the “Globe to Globe” Shakespeare festival starting April 23rd. During the festival, the theater will present all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays, in 37 different languages or dialects. The plays will be performed by theater companies [...]

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The Berenstain Bears Now Speak Lakota

by Richard Brooks September 23, 2011 Entertainment

Just about everyone under the age of 50 has fond childhood memories of the Berenstain Bears. For decades, they have dominated children’s story hours in schools, libraries and homes. Over 260 of the books have been published in 20 different languages, and the Bear family has also made the leap from print to TV multiple [...]

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Talk Like a Pirate

by Richard Brooks September 22, 2011 Entertainment

Monday, September 19th was a very special day: International Talk Like a Pirate Day! If you weren’t aware of this occasion, you might have been under the impression that people celebrating it were either drunk or mad. However, the holiday actually has a long and distinguished history, going all the way back to 1995. International [...]

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Original‎ Chinese Translation of “Colombiana”‎

by Richard Kazandjian September 7, 2011 Entertainment

The distributors of the action movie Colombiana, which stars Zoe Saldana as a female assassin, ran into a bit of a hurdle when they tried to get the movie approved for distribution in Hong Kong. The problem? An unintentional double entendre in the movie’s original Mandarin title, “Hei-lan-jiao,” which means “Black Orchid Beauty.” Unfortunately, in [...]

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Chinese Opera Program

by Richard Kazandjian August 25, 2011 Education

Music may be the “universal language,” but that didn’t make learning to sing opera in Chinese any easier for the 20 American singers who joined China’s “I Sing Beijing” program this summer. The Associated Press chronicled the vocalists’ struggles in a recent article. You probably remember learning to sing “Frère Jacques” and “Feliz Navidad” in [...]

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