Food is a subject nearly everyone holds dear, but expressing our love of food in different languages is not so easy. Most people are proud of a particular food or dish from their culture, and eager to share it with a visitor. Similarly, most of us are excited to sample exotic new dishes or even try our hand at [...]
Language is one of our worldโs most powerful tools, and throughout history, governments and large organizations have used different forms of language planning as a way to control that power. In a broad sense, language planning is an organized effort by a major entity to change a societyโs language. These efforts can be, and usually are, done for the [...]
From the moment we learn to control our mouths, lungs, and vocal cords as infants, we yearn to speak. As babies, we babble and attempt to copy words, and with no formal instruction at all, we can typically grasp the basics of speaking in under a year and begin to communicate. Neurolinguists have shown that our brainโs superior temporal [...]
"What's in a name?" Shakespeare's Juliet famously asked. The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on where you were born.As a translation company, we work daily with birth certificates, marriage certificates, and name-change documents from dozens of countries. Few things make the diversity of human culture more visible than the documents people use to prove who they are. A [...]
Picture this scenario: A young German executive from a semiconductor manufacturer is sent to pitch a proposal to a high-level business partner in Japan. The German executive knows his companyโs products are superior, and he spends days preparing different documents, case studies, graphs, etc. as evidence. At the meeting he gives these mountains of handouts to the Japanese businessman, [...]
