What is a glossary? A glossary is basically a catalog of words from a select discipline or area of study in which the terms are arranged alphabetically and defined, discussed and/or translated into another language.

There are general glossaries on subjects like medicine, economics or art, for example, and then there are more specific glossaries within these topics, such as infectious diseases and public health, taxes and investments, or art history and photography. This categorization may be quite restricted, but the groupings generally overlap or include more than one area (a glossary on medical insurance may be useful for translating medical or insurance texts).

Some institutions and companies also have their own glossaries that aid the user/client in understanding the organization’s special terminology. These can be a lifesaver for a translator working on something from the company or in the same field.

Glossaries can be monolingual (the explanation or definition is in the same language), bilingual (the words and/or definitions are translated into another language) and can be used both forwards and backwards, meaning from either language, or even multilingual (translations in more than one language).

When using a glossary, it is essential to know exactly what you are looking for, what area or field you need to check and how precise the term needs to be.

A tip: If a bilingual glossary is not available, use a very specific monolingual one to gather a better idea of the true meaning(s) of the word you are after.

There are numerous sites that collect glossaries (by area, topic, language, etc.). Sometimes a glossary for a certain company or institution can be found on its website. And if you are facing an extraordinarily technical or specific topic, it’s not a bad idea to ask the client if a glossary is available.

I’d also like to share this link with you: GLOSSARY This is a compilation of different glossaries that a friend put together and which is divided by topics, subtopics, languages, etc.  Hopefully they will be as useful to you as they have been to me.

Every word has a meaning, but some words have more than one, such as homonyms: bark, bear, groom, etc. Sometimes a word means or symbolizes “something more” and the author can give it a special meaning or name (the best example is “Rosebud” from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane).

The dictionary defines disambiguate as “to make clear and (more) comprehensible and to state unambiguously or remove ambiguities.” This is what we do as translators. And it’s not always easy.

There are of course texts that are extremely ambiguous, but generally, we have enough “clues” to decipher the true meaning.
So what is it that helps us decipher the clues? A translator’s best friend:  “the context.” The context is “the part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning.” In other words, it is the relationship one word has with the rest of the message.

The cartoon here presents ambiguity taken to the extreme…

I often wonder about the future of language.

And yes, the singular “language.”
In 2003, Hollywood released Code 46m a film that discusses something very similar to what I’d been wondering about. The movie takes place in the not-so-distant future with people “inside” and “outside” of a very controlled system in which “papeles” (papers in the pidgin language everyone speaks) are required for authorization. All of the characters speak a language that is essentially English, but with different words from Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Mandarin… For example, people greet one another in Mandarin, saying “Ni Hao.” Everyone has a “palabra” as a password and can get “Outside” if they have their “papeles.” Couples say “Ti amo” to one another and when William (Tim Robbins) is asked if he has children, they ask him “Chico or chica?”

A lot of sentences are put together like these:
“You ever live afuera?”
“Did you have a cerveza?”
“I can’t find my cosa!”

Will the world communicate this way in the future? And if so, in a not-so-distant future? I actually feel that with the growth of “Spanglish” (and other combinations of languages), we are already on our way…

Some kids in the U.S. these days are helping their parents in a unique way: by serving as their personal interpreters and translators. Parents that do not speak or understand English get assistance from their kids in everything from ordering a pizza to medical exams. Is this a useful skill for kids or does it create a conflict of interests by parents taking the easy way out?

With the extensive enclaves of different languages throughout the US, it is not unheard of for people to live for years, decades even, without learning to communicate in English. In the right area, New York city, southern Florida, etc., English is simply not a necessity for some. Day to day life can be conducted in Spanish, Polish or Korean. Kids however, have much more exposure and may speak one language at home and English at school.

So what happens when the parents need to attend a parent teacher conference or are being diagnosed with an illness that requires special attention and care? Can children be entrusted with this responsibility?

The subject of bilingual education in the US is a hotly debated topic, but news source are frequently unclear in their definitions of what exactly bilingual education is. The general public is largely unaware that there exist a wide variety of programs for students whose native language is not English and assume that bilingual education means a fifty-fifty split in their two languages. Neither of the two most common programs, English as a Second Language programs and traditional Bilingual Education programs, uses this kind of system.

The traditional bilingual education program teaches core courses such as science and history in the student’s native language, be it Spanish, Chinese, etc. English is also taught, but as a special course. Programs vary by state, but students in traditional bilingual education programs generally spend only a small percentage of their time at school learning English. These are intended to be temporary programs that provide students with a foundation in their native language before they learn a second language.

English as a Second Language (ESL) programs are also temporary, but are more of an adapted immersion program. ESL students also take special classes on the English language, but core courses are also taught in English. These classes are modified to the needs of the students whose first language is not English, but instruction is in English and there may be a wide variety of cultures and languages represented in the class.

These two programs are quite different, but the distinctions frequently get lost in the cries of xenophobia and the lamenting of the supposed deterioration of American culture.

After having received several valuable comments from readers, I’ve looked into Ideal Nol and Esperanto a bit more in an effort to differentiate their purposes, current and projected usage, and challenges that the languages face.

Esperanto was created with the most honorable of ambitions: promote international understanding in an effort to foster wold peace. Creator Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof’s  romantic and idealistic goal for the language was for it to become the world’s second language. Ideal Nol was also of course created for a sort of international understanding, but more so between college students texting one another than the entire world. Another significant difference is that while Ideal Nol can be spoken, it’s niche lies more in the digital realm of SMS and MSN.

Finding current (and accurate) figures on the number of Esperanto speakers is quite difficult, but the most widely-circulated statistic puts the number of Esperanto speakers at somewhere between one and two million. There are songs in Esperanto, films produced completely in Esperanto and numerous books and magazines in the language. Ideal Nol is quite young, so there are no figures  available for it yet, but what the creators lack in followers, they make up for in optimism (talk of a Nobel Prize). The idea of a native Ideal Nol speaker sounds preposterous, but who knows..

Esperanto’s biggest foes have been Hitler, Stalin and English. While the first two made active efforts to suppress “the language of spies,” the latter has crept into a position as the world’s unofficial second language. Ideal Nol also has its detractors, as can be evidenced by the comments on last week’s post, and may prove to be nothing more than a flash in the pan.

In the same vein as ttyl, lmao and gr8, Ideal Nol is a new language created by Enric Cabrejas that combines the simplicity (confusion) of abbreviated text messages and messenger conversations with the simplistic rules of Esperanto. The new form of expression was devised as a way for individuals without a common language to communicate, be it vocally, over cell phones or online. According to the Ideal website, it is rapidly gaining momentum across European college campuses and the world.

Ideal Nol is based on 7 basic grammar rules and an ever-expanding lexicon that can both be consulted online. Next week I will provide an update on the current status and possible future of the language, but until then, bai!

How many words are there in Spanish? How about in English? Depending on who you ask, there are different answers… There is a certain tendency (among Spanish-speakers) to overestimate the number of words in Spanish as well as the overall variety of the language’s forms. Some say that it is out of a need to win some kind of competition more so than a defense of real numbers.  The problem is that there are no concrete figures… How does one go about counting the words?

I’d say that Spanish has a “ton” of words, or maybe even a “gazillion.” This makes me wonder: Does “gazillion” count as a word? What about other localisms and slang? You would also have to add the special terms used by certain groups: doctors, lawyers, artists of all types, “marginalized” individuals (locked up, drug addicts, etc.). You won’t find these words in dictionaries. And so I ask myself: Do you count all of the feminine and masculine variants, the singulars and plurals, the diminutives, the augmentatives….? And aaaaaaaaallll of the words that we make up each day, for text messages or chatting: some abbreviations, other “stretched” ones (like the second one in this sentence), other manipulated words or “vesre”* in Spanish? We also have “imported” words, the ones we copy, borrow and steal from other languages, plus those that undergo a slight phonetic modification and adaptation so that we can consider them new. And there are also bad words (which we’ve discussed here before) and although they are “bad,” there are a lot of them and they are widely used… even if they’re not in the dictionary. Does whoever counts words include those?

With everything said and done, whether it’s 100,000 or 300,000 words that “exist,” how many do we actually use? Depending on our cultural upbringing, I’ve heard that we use between 1000 and 10,000 words. How many more are there that we don’t use because while they are still in the dictionary, they are obsolete, out of style, etc.  Many are relegated to a catalogue of unused words that once belonged to our language. And many more will continue to be incorporated as language never stops growing.

However many they may be, they are our “prime materials” and we have to keep learning them in order to be able to use them in our daily lives.
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* “vesre” («revés» en vesre) is to form words backwards: this is a type of word formation that consists of the permutation or metathesis of the syllables of a Spanish word. This stems from the Castilian Spanish spoken in the River Plate area of Argentina and Uruguay and was popularized by the tango scene at the beginning of the twentieth century. A few examples: “mionca” (camión), “ñoba” (baño). ( http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesre)