Writing System
The American Nobel prize winner and writer William Faulkner said that reality is always uneven, conflicted and full of contradictions. The only way to organize it into a uniform format is to try and tell a story. The most significant legacy of humanity from the ancient world is, without a doubt, the writing system. It […]
The technological language revolution
There are languages that are not gender neutral, such as Hebrew and Arabic, where a brief look at the text can tell whether the author is male or female. For example, when a woman writes “I am going” in Hebrew or Arabic, the verb “going” is gender specific. In a previous post I mentioned how […]
The Language Paradox
The American author William Alexander described in an article he published in 2014 a frustrating process he went through that for about a year he tried to learn the French language. He writes that his mind rejected any learning strategy he tried. And when he thought he already understood something in French he tried to […]
MadCap Flare Translation
MadCap Flare™ is a powerful authoring tool with a wide range of features for creating sophisticated outputs. The fact that Flare enables the creation of this range of documentation sometimes creates a challenge when translating its content. Translating Flare is considered quite intimidating for technical translation service providers. MadCap prides itself for its single-source feature, […]
The Rosetta Stone
Encryption and secret codes have been at the center of many processes throughout history. Winning wars and revolutions were made possible only by cracking secret codes and secret languages. But deciphering writings is also related to knowledge and cultural history. In the 19th century, long attempts were made to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although the […]
Esperanto
It is difficult to know exactly when languages began to appear in the world. Similar to other evolutionary processes, languages have evolved over a long period of time and mutated over the years, new languages appeared, some survived and others did not. Linguists observe these changes by examining the vocabulary and similarities of languages. For […]
Slang Language
We are all familiar with slang words and it seems that such words exist in all spoken languages. Slang is perceived as an informal and sometimes poor use of language. However, there is much more to it. Slang evolves in a spontaneous, playful, and creative manner. It usually develops in specific groups that add or […]
It Sounds Better in Yiddish
The Yiddish language has a reputation of being a humor and jokes kind of language—the language of the common people. But, Yiddish also has a whole intellectual and creative side. This reputation of the language probably originated back in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment period where the language was associated with the uneducated old […]
The influence of interpreters on history
The previous post addressed the impact of translators on history. This article focuses on the special influence of the interpreters. Unlike a translation that deals with written text, the interpreter translates orally. Today, the profession of interpreters is highly developed and divided into sub-fields and specializations – consecutive and simultaneous interpretation with business specializations, accompanying […]
Translation and culture
There is a romantic beauty in the translator’s role in connecting cultures, openness to new world, transferring knowledge and technology that enables progress. Knowledge that shapes myths, symbols, norms and ideologies is deeply engraved in societies separated from each other by both physical and temporal distances. When the translator in the ancient world was exposed […]
