The Language of the Olympic Games
Despite the Corona epidemic, a year late and with a lot of uncertainty, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games started. An Olympic games event is a multinational, multicultural, multilingual gathering that attracts billions of spectators from all around the world. The term comes from the Greek word Olympias describing a four-year cycle. Beyond the sport games […]
Language and Gossip
There is nothing as delicious as hearing good gossip…. Almost everyone gossips. It comes very naturally even though we are almost unaware of when we are gossiping. More than half of our conversation time can be characterized as gossip. In most cases gossip is about people we know and only a small part of the […]
The Printing Revolution & Languages
We are in the midst of a communication revolution. There has been no precedent in history of such rapid evolution. A similar revolution, one of the greatest inventions of the previous millennium that had a worldwide impact was the invention of the printing press. The distribution of relatively low-cost books significantly increased literacy, which further […]
Idioms
It is said that in order to really know a culture one must know its idioms. What is it about idioms that is so deeply connected to the culture? It is also said that the beauty of a language is influenced by the wealth of its idioms. Are there really differences between idioms in different […]
Etymology
The fact that languages change over time is not only learned from the distant history of the evolution of languages and cultures. We all see how new words appear and change over time. Languages borrow words from each other and during the process, the words change. This migration of words from one language to another […]
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 […]