October | 2020 | A Smart Translator's Reunion

Here are October’s most popular news stories and blog articles about language and translation.

Ten strategies which can help you make your business more resilient and capable of coping with threats

Future-proof your business says Ewa Jasinska-Davidson

As coronavirus kills indigenous elders in the Americas, endangered languages face extinction
This month Lynne Murphy blogged about 20 American words most Brits don’t know and 20 British words most Americans don’t know
Exophony, a term introduced into modern vernacular in 2007, describes a practice that has existed for much longer: writing (literature) in a language that is not one’s own (see also my blog post about self-translation)
Euphemisms can hide facts that need to be confronted. How do they work from a linguist’s point of view?
What are the right and wrong targets in a linguistic struggle? An ever-growing list of things you cannot say helps no one

The battle against racist language is too important to trivialise

Two stories from the BBC website: the troubled history of the “filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language“; how do language rules about gender have an impact on how we see the world?
And also two articles from The Conversation: how does being bilingual affect your brain? It depends on how you use language; despite constant calls for plain language, jargon seems to have a habit of returning. It can be infuriating, but it’s also useful

In defence of jargon

Shortcomings with interpretation plague the French asylum process
Here are 5 Facebook groups for translators
Smile of the month comes from the paleontologists holding an online conference who recently found themselves banned from asking written questions if using a series of “naughty words”, including bone, when a profanity filter
them out …

Paleontologists in a virtual conference found themselves at the mercy of an overzealous profanity filter.

A Smart Translator's Reunion