Finally a use for machine translations! The site www.translationparty.com is a simple, yet oddly addictive way to kill some time. It uses Google Translator to perform an indefinite number of back translations, typically producing something nonsensical and quite different from the original phrase. It’s kind of like the
As translators, we need our memories to operate at a certain level in order to remember vocabulary, rules, collocations, maxims, exceptions to rules, etc. A few things that can help us with our memories comes from a great website known as The Brain Power Pages (where you can also find tips on taking full advantage […
Do you ever get spam that makes absolutely no sense at all? Messages that say things like “summer slim-time muscle man science pill formulations”? Odds are that the original message was written in another language and then run through an online machine translator. Spammers worldwide have realized that they can
According to recent research from the University of Virginia (reported at BBC online and mentioned by Steve Gillman on The Brain Power Pages), a great deal of our mental abilities can reach their top potential by the age of 22, and begin to deteriorate at the age of 27… Bad news. But all’s not lost. […]
Radio shock-jock and English Only supporter Michael Savage was one of sixteen people to be barred from entering the United Kingdom. Also included on this list issued by the UK Home Office were convicted skinhead murderers,a former Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard and several members of Hamas. What does it take to get on this [&he
English is invading Spanish! This is of course something of a two-way street, but it is hard to find a Spanish-speaking country whose dialect is not now infused with Anglicisms, loan words and outright bastardizations. This happens with all languages, but the number of English words sprinkled into daily Spanish can truly be
An onomatopoeia (according to Webster’s definition) is “the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it.” These are used linguistically to describe sounds (boom, bang, click) and can even serve to express a thing or idea visually instead of aurally, like “zig-zag&