Around the web – September 2019

Here’s your monthly round-up of September’s most popular stories about language and translation.

• In The Guardian: The role of dictionaries is to reflect language use, not to shape it. Yet many people see dictionaries as language prescribers not describers.
• Also in The Guardian: imagine you’re a young journalist and helpfully “fix” US spellings for UK ones, thereby indirectly causing an international incident (and 15 years later your mistake makes it to the big screen). Just like for translators, context is everything!
• Wars of words: “Places that accept foreign words with a live-and-let-live attitude are the exceptions”.

Languages are a battleground for nationalists
Sometimes they even invent them

• A group of Florida teen girls have stepped up to interpret and translate Indigenous Mayan languages in their local community.

Two of the Mayan Girls gather around a laptop and phone to record a Facebook Live video about measles with a Guatemalan-Maya Center outreach staffer                         (Credit: Madeline Fox/WLRN)

• The language scammers use to impress and flatter is so obvious and amateurish that it can seem astonishing that anyone could ever be taken in. Yet many ordinary people fall into the trap every year.

The Life Changing Linguistics of Nigerian Scam Emails
(Credit: Getty)

• The English language is ever-changing, and this interactive timeline shows how common words have evolved in and out of everyday use over the past 900 years.
• A week ago saw the official start of fall/autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. But what name did the season used to have?

The reason why Americans refer to autumn as fall
(Alex Ugalek/iStock via Getty Images)

• Quelles sont les meilleurs ressources linguistiques en ligne en français et en anglais ? Les conseils de Grant Hamilton d’Anglocom.
• Fun: test your language skills with this short quiz and see how many languages you can correctly identify.
• On a final note, today is of course International Translation Day. As 2019 is the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages, this year’s ITD theme is “Indigenous Languages”. So here’s a post by colleague Alina Cincan with 10 must-read books to find out more about various indigenous cultures and better understand the struggles they face.

In the poster for this year’s ITD (created by Graphic Designer Claudia Wolf) the “colourful branches represent the many indigenous languages, metaphorically growing on the big language tree”.

 

Further reading:

• Around the web – July & August 2019
• Around the web – June 2019
• International Translation Day