Folks, amig@s and ami-e-s – gender neutrality goes international
From singular “they” to the title “Mx”, gender neutrality is slowly becoming standard for English speakers. But we’re translators, so we wanted to know how other languages tackle the gender conundrum. Read on to discover what “x”s, “@”s and “*”s have to do with gender – and how Obama sidesteps the question entirely.
Platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn offer their own automatic translation feature. Just click beneath a post and your computer will instantly provide you with a version in your own language through the magic of neural machine translation (NMT). But just how good is this feature?
“Social distancing” has been a buzzword for several months now. But what about linguistic distancing? To pass the time until we can meet up with friends again, we’ve taken a look at the compound words that just can’t bear to be apart.
Have you seen the movie Parasite? Danced to Psy’s Gangnam Style? Tried out some Korean beauty products? If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, then you – like many of us – are riding the Korean Wave.
Subtitles make movies accessible to an international audience. And yet they’re often inaccurate or incomplete. We explain why that’s no bad thing – with the help of Korean smash hit Parasite.
If anyone knows how to make working from home a success, it’s our super freelancers. Here are their top tips for setting up shop inside your own four walls.
Today’s neural machine translation (NMT) engines can translate simple texts quickly and acceptably into a wide range of other languages. And they’re improving constantly. So how did we get here?
Since the death of silent film and the birth of the ‘talkies’ in the late 1920s, the question of how to translate on-screen entertainment has been a worldwide conundrum. Almost a century later, film translation has developed into an art form of its own – yet approaches remain very different.
With Noto, Google has developed a font family that works for every language in the world. Here’s how the company is enabling global communication – and what IKEA and tofu have to do with it.
With less than two weeks left of Advent, Christmas party season is in full swing – and the potential for awkward conversations with people you have nothing in common with is correspondingly high. But if words fail you, there’s one language that everyone understands: music.
Digital natives still write letters to Santa. But the content has moved with the times – with hilarious results.
Every year, thousands of children around the world mail letters to “Santa Claus, North Pole” – and they get a response thanks to dedicated multilingual teams.
Biddschee (You’re welcome): our little Oktoberfest dictionary. We’ve collected some snippets of the Bavarian dialect all to do with attire, food and social culture to help make your Oktoberfest in Munich a linguistic success.
Today we’ll be discussing the various ways of expressing indifference in different languages. What does sword fighting have to do with it? And where do hats, potatoes and scrap metal come in?
A passionate hook-up in a club vs. a dreamy meeting with true love – how can the same song come across so differently in another language? The answer lies in lyric transcreation.
When you’re used to using the Latin alphabet, it can be easy to overlook one of the central questions of any language – how we write it down. A look at some of the more interesting ways in which languages have put pen to paper.
Many of us are familiar with the idea of conlangs (“constructed languages”) from TV shows like Game of Thrones and books like the Lord of the Rings series. But one video game went the extra mile to fully draw its players into its world – Far Cry Primal.
Shava-what? Namast-heh? It’s worth stretching your mind beyond the four corners of your yoga mat. Translating the most important yoga terms might well be the first step towards inner peace.
You’ve probably heard of Pennsylvania Dutch. But what about Texas German? Supertext takes a look at some lesser-known varieties of German.
The final days of Wimbledon are the perfect time to look at some of the baffling language served up alongside the strawberries and cream.
Topics: Berlin, entertainment, Zurich | Comment