Translation

Malaysian Defence Awkward Translation

by Richard Kazandjian January 30, 2012 Translation

Last week, the Malaysian Ministry of Defense posted an English translation of its dress code for employees on its web site. Unfortunately, it appears that they didn’t make arrangements to have the translation work done by a competent translator. The results were predictably hilarious and awkward. Some of the issues stemmed from simply atrocious grammar. [...]

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Brand Name In China

by Richard Kazandjian November 29, 2011 Languages

Thinking of moving your business to China? A word to the wise: hire a skilled translator! As a recent article in the New York Times points out, translating a business name into Chinese requires much more than Google Translate; you also need a deep understanding of the nuances of Chinese culture to avoid utterly humiliating [...]

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Chinglish

by Richard Kazandjian October 18, 2011 Languages

Language barriers and mistranslations are fertile ground for comedy. Chinese translations of English seem to be particularly vulnerable to gaffes, possibly due to a shortage of fluent English speakers and a corresponding over-reliance on translation software. As an aside, it should be noted that English speakers have their own problems when it comes to translating [...]

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An Irish Translation for “Angela’s Ashes”‎

by Richard Kazandjian October 13, 2011 Publishing

Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes chronicled his childhood growing up dirt-poor and hungry in Limerick, Ireland. In writing it, McCourt tried to capture Limerick as he experienced it- the good, the bad and the ugly (and there was an awful lot of ugly). The book was a hit with both critics and consumers, winning [...]

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Translating Honeybees

by Richard Kazandjian September 15, 2011 Nature

By now, many scientists are willing to accept that intelligent animals like dolphins may have languages of their own. But what about honeybees? They couldn’t possibly have their own language, could they? After all, they’re just bugs!  Not so fast, say scientists from the University of Dundee in Scotland. They believe that honeybees may, in [...]

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iPhone App Helps Troops

by Richard Kazandjian August 11, 2011 Learning Languages

When it comes to Afghanistan, winning the all-important “battle of hearts of minds” has proven to be quite difficult…especially when soldiers don’t speak the language. Now, a new, free iPhone app is available to help soldiers learn Dari, one of the local languages. The app, TripLingoDari, was recently profiled on CNN.com. Dari, the Afghan dialect [...]

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Ancient Greek Translation

by Tanguy August 4, 2011 Translation

In 1896, students from Oxford University on backpacking trip stumbled upon a rubbish dump in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. To modern archaeologists, the contents were about as far from rubbish as you can possibly get: thousands of pieces of Greek papyri, dating back to the period after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. The [...]

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Translation On The Silver Screen

by Tanguy July 27, 2011 Entertainment

These days, movies and even TV shows are expected to play for a global audience. However, translating them is often as difficult as translating literature. So much of what makes a successful film or TV show “work” is rooted in local culture. For example, consider Disney’s recent worldwide release of “Cars 2.”   Rick Dempsey, senior [...]

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Translation of Foreign Stores

by Tanguy July 13, 2011 Stores

New York City has long been a city of immigrants, the first stop for the “huddled masses” who got off the boat in Ellis Island. While modern-day Americans like to natter on about how those original huddled masses assimilated themselves immediately while today’s immigrants do not, the truth is that immigrants have long clustered together, [...]

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Speaking With Cars

by Tanguy July 7, 2011 Languages

Language is more than just a set of vocabulary words. For example, think of how two different people can say the same thing two different ways. This complexity is what makes it so hard to create adequate machine translation programs, or even to teach machines to recognize spoken commands. In an attempt to build cars [...]

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