Translations are often cited because they are simply so poor they are funny. Alphadictionary.com provides many examples to smirk at like the sign over an information booth in a Chinese railway station which was marked ‘QUESTION AUTHORITY’. Some of these mistranslations acquire almost mythic status. I’m sure this one quoted on the site said to [...]
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Cheap Carabiners – Hang your Keys off These, but Climb at Your Peril! Or names for things you did not know had names. Recently, a friend of mine lost their keys. I asked if it was the set with the silver carabiner. My friend was surprised to learn that the silver hook carried [...]
Dogs and culture apparently. I thought it was language and culture. This image comes from the Wordle web page and links through to the bigger picture. Here you can create beautiful word clouds. They cannot be saved as files or downloaded, but they can be added to the public forum or linked to [...] Aagh, superfluous ludic language. So punny it’s painful. My apologies. But it captures the point. There has been a horrendous hiatus and now we begin again, a small beginning, a subtle shift of the left big toe, but there it is. A friend pointed out this interesting article on the New York Times’ collection of [...] Recently someone was kind enough to give me a copy of a French textbook published in 1965 which contains some perfect examples of the occasional absurdities of the grammar translation method referred to in a previous post. Grammar translation was commonly used for teaching Latin and Greek and then applied to modern foreign language learning. Basically, [...] So, here comes part two of the animal culture debate. Part one you can find here – and yes, it was too good to be true, she was not house-trained overnight… Do animals have culture? Well what is culture? Oh dear. It is defined in so many ways by so many people: are we talking about [...] The UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger provides a list of nearly 2,500 dead or dying languages. Support for dying languages is often controversial in situations of scarce resource where the preservation of a language might mean the extinction of a people, but often when a language dies, a wealth of cultural knowledge, [...] or ‘Curious ways in which the English Language may be made to convey Ideas or obscure them’. This is the title of a humorous American book from 1883 which is a companion to ‘English as She is Spoke’ and brings us back to the topic of ambiguity in language. There are some wonderful clangers in this one, so [...]
After much deliberation and reading about possible havoc and chaos that might be wrought on our stable home, I have just acquired a thirteen-week-old puppy. She is, what you would call in Ireland, a ‘dote’. On the one and a half hour drive home in the heat of the car on a summer’s [...] |
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