Around the web – April 2021

Did you know that April is the month that the UN celebrates Language Days for three of its six official languages: Chinese, Spanish and English. Anyway, here are more of the month’s news articles, blog posts, and stories about translation and language.

• It is urgent to examine and articulate the language used to talk about the criminal justice system

Many words that define human beings by their crimes and punishments are dehumanizing

• Literary translator Alexander Booth on translating the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker
• What are your CPD Plans for 2021/22? What counts as CPD, and why do it?

Shining a light on CPD (image by Colin Behrens)

• How UK and US English use and understand “sleaze” differently
• The British term “jab” actually originated in the U.S.A.

A British-style, three-letter word for a vaccination shot has proved irksome to many Americans (Illustration: James Yang)

• Translating a pandemic: the impact of COVID-19 terminology on Southasian languages
• Staying on the subject of the coronavirus: data from a Boston hospital showed that Latino patients who did not speak English well had a 35% greater risk of death
• Why speaking “bad English” might be the best way to communicate
• There’s no one right way or wrong way to use language

Your kid’s slang isn’t as bad as you think. New research indicates it can have learning benefits for children. (Photograph by SDI Productions/Getty Images)

• Two interesting articles in The New Yorker:
  • A new exhibit in New York showcases the surprisingly contentious history of English grammar books
  • On growing up and living in America (but could be any Western culture) with a “difficult” name

“I cannot detach my name from people laughing at me, calling me a bitch, letting me know that I’m the punch line of my own joke” (Illustration by Nhung Lê)

• Also on the subject of names, Facebook recently had to apologise after shutting down the page of a 900-year-old French town with an unfortunate name

Elsewhere on the blog

• Around the web – March 2021
• Around the web – February 2021