Around the web – April 2022

Here’s your April round-up of the month’s most popular news stories, blog posts and articles about language and translation.

• The six-title 2022 International Booker Prize shortlist was announced on April 7th at the London Book Fair
• Translation has allowed these 9 books to become popular all over again in English
• To avoid angering internet algorithms, people are changing language in real time by creating a new ‘Algospeak’ vocabulary

“Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media

• Prisoners in the UK often have to resort to language support from peers 
• On the (sexist) language of body parts
• Gender bias turns up even in the way we think of the neutral word ‘people’, as a 630-billion-word internet analysis shows it’s generally interpreted to mean ‘men’

Gender bias turns up in the way we think of the most neutral of words

• Why is a man who can converse in 24 languages and ‘get by’ in 13 more cleaning carpets for a living?
• Warm weather species moving north into Scotland have been given Gaelic names

Scotland’s newest animals get Gaelic names

• Do you ‘make’ or ‘take’ a decision? It might depend on whether you’re a speaker of UK or US English
• Fungi appear to “talk” in a language similar to humans

Macrolepiota procera, the parasol mushroom. Fungi have vocabularies of around 50 words.

• Taylor Swift was in the language news twice this month: firstly because an academic recommended translating her songs as a way to help Latin students learn the language, and secondly because she’s been the inspiration for the name of a new millipede species!

Elsewhere on the blog:

• Around the web – March 2022
• Around the web – February 2022