If you’re freelancer, it is quite hard not to procrastinate at home. You just want to start something but without noticing, you happen to be distracted by Facebook or other social networks… – or simply by Wikipedia. Yeah, I like reading Wikis, too.
So, if you want to keep up with your deadlines, you just have to make some rules for themselves. Whenever I get a translation, I use this tactic: “I will not check other websites until I finish 5 pages.” I’m sure you all have such rules and it will be useful if you share them with us.
Let’s see another alternatives…
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There are thousands of languages and dialects around the world. If you encounter a language that you’ve never heard before, you feel like an alien is speaking to you.
But it doesn’t work like that for people who are interested in foreign languages. Instead of listening to an alien speech, we try to understand some certain patterns, we give attention to syllable stresses, we try to find some lexical similarities between our own language and this “alien speech”.
So, I discovered an interesting website showing the similarities between languages. It does not go in detail and it only shows the percetages of the similarities in certain categories, but I’m sure you’ll want to check it up.
First, you select the language that you want to compare to other languages:
Than you can see the similarities a certain language shares with others.
Cactuses () indicate the relative difficulty of learning this language if you already speak Italian. The fewer cactuses/cacti, the easier.
Here is the website: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/similarities/index.html
Enjoy!
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Maybe, most of the people is just interested in major languages which are English, French, German, Chinese etc. However, a translator is interested in ALL the languages no matter how many people speak it- or no matter if it is already dead or not.
Here comes another language in which you will be interested. I hope there are native speakers of this language among us and I hope they can give more information about it.
The Fula or Fulani language is a language of West Africa. It belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family. It is spoken as a first language by the Fula or Fulani people from Senegambia and Guinea to Cameroonand Sudan.
Fulani is an official language in Senegal (Pulaar) and Nigeria (Fulfulde), an official regional language in Guinea (Pular), where many speakers are monolingual, and a national language of Mali (Maasina) and Niger (Fulfulde).
There are several names applied to the language, just as there are to the Fula people. They call their language Pulaar or Pular in the western dialects and Fulfulde in the central and eastern dialects.
It uses suffixes (sometimes inaccurately called infixes, as they come between the root and the inflectional ending) to modify meaning.
There are about 25 noun classes (the number may vary slightly in different dialects). Each noun class has a singular and plural form, and each form has a corresponding article, nominative pronoun, accusative/dative pronoun, demonstrative adjective and adjective agreement pattern.
This is written in Fula language. It means:
One evening a judge found in a book that everyone who had a little head and a long beard was a fool. Now the judge had a little head and a long beard, so he said to himself, “I cannot increase the size of my head, but I will shorten my beard.” He hunted for the scissors, but could not find them. Without further ado he took half of his beard in his hand and put the other half into the candle and burnt it. When the flame reached his hand he let go, and all the beard was burned. Thus the judge felt ashamed, for he had proved the truth of what was written in the book.
P.S. Most of the information is taken from Wikipedia. I’ve just summarize the certain parts and have not included all the information there.
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While the internet has become a vital part of our lives, it just goes beyond the computers or laptops… With tablet and smart phones, we carry the internet wherever we go and we really need it when we are mobile. So, the famous internet websites find enjoyable applications to promote their brand in mobile as well.
Thanks to one of my friends, I come across with a perfect mobile application for language lovers: Duolingo!
Its web site is quite colorful and funny. It makes you practice a language and it turns this process into a game…
You have your own skill tree and you can compete with your friends as you complete new missions!
It also has its iPhone application. Wherever you go, you can continue gaining new skills and beat your friends out.
Do you want to try? You can visit the website here: http://duolingo.com/
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Sometimes, you can generate tens of new words using the same letters of a certain word. What you find is generally quite amazing!
Here below, you can see a funny example of rearranging the letters and forming new words out of them! I’m sure you can add many more to this list. If anything comes to your mind, please do not hesitate to leave a comment!
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We all know that Google Translate cannot produce decent translations but we cannot deny the fact that it is a useful tool for everyone. Since we are curious about every language, it helps a lot about understanding the general topic of a text. For example, I don’t know Italian, but when I paste an Italian text and translate it into English, I can perfectly understand what the text is about.
I’m sure we all have at least one funny story to tell about Google Translate, but we should also appreciate this technology. They have a new update and we can use it offline now!
Here is what the news about:
Google updated its Google Translate app for Android with offline support and vertical text translation. You can download the new version now directly from the Google Play Store.
The offline language packages include support for 50 languages. To use them, just select “Offline Languages” in the app menu to see all the offline language packages available for download. To enable offline translation between any two languages, you need to select them both in the offline languages menu.
The addition of offline support is a very big move from a company like Google which is obsessed with online services and moving everything to the Web. For that reason alone it’s great to see the company a move that goes against its very DNA. Google admits the “offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents” but still says they get the job done “when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access.”
Many users have Internet access when they need to translate something, but it’s hardly a guarantee. If you’re traveling with your phone or tablet and need to figure out what something means on the go, you can now refer to your Google Translate app and get an answer without worrying about finding a Wi-Fi hotspot.
Here’s the official Google Translate 2.6 for Android changelog:
Translate without a network connection with offline language packages (available on Android 2.3 and above).
Translate vertical text in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean with your Camera.
Since I’m a translator, I like learning new cultures and languages like most of you. The idea that there are hundreds of different languages makes me excited because it means there are soooooo many things to learn. Each language is a new culture and a new area of exploration.
Although we couldn’t visit the natives of this language, let’s go over what Javanese language is and how it looks like
PS: The information is taken from Wikipedia. I just quote the parts that are more interesting.
Javanese language is the language of theJavanese people from the central and eastern parts of the island of Java, in Indonesia. There are also pockets of Javanese speakers in the northern coast of western Java. It is the native language of more than 75,500,000 people (more than 30% of total population in Indonesia).
Javanese is part of the Austronesian family, and is therefore related to Indonesian and other Malay varieties. Most speakers of Javanese also speak Indonesian: for official and commercial purposes, and to communicate with non-Javanese Indonesians.
While evidence of writing in Java dates to the Sanskrit “Tarumanegara inscription” of 450 AD, the oldest example written entirely in Javanese, called the “Sukabumi inscription”, is dated 25 March 804.
Javanese can be regarded as one of the classical languages of the world, with a vast literature spanning more than twelve centuries. The language developed in four stages:
Old Javanese, from the 9th century
Middle Javanese, from the 13th century
New Javanese, from the 16th century
Modern Javanese, from the 20th century (but this stage is not universally distinguished)
Javanese, like other Austronesian languages, is an agglutinative language, where base words are modified through extensive use of affixes.
Modern Javanese usually employs SVO word order. However, Old Javanese sometimes had VSO and sometimes VOS word order. Even in Modern Javanese, archaic sentences using VSO structure can still be made.
Sanskrit words are still very much in use. Modern speakers may describe Old Javanese and Sanskrit words as kawi (roughly meaning “literary”); but kawi words may also be fromArabic. Dutch and Malay are influential as well; but none of these rivals the position of Sanskrit.
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Last week, we discovered a perfect set of sentences and I’m sure you will love them all.
I published a piece of it on our Facebook page and people loved it so I wanted share it here as well. Since we are all interested in languages, these sentences are just for us, as language nerds.
These sentences are intelligently structured and they are quite amusing. I hope you also love them…
Please feel free to share if you have such sentences in your mother tongue.
I want to thank the owner of this compilation but we couldn’t find him/her. Anyway, thank you for this precious sentences!
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Reading between the lines is not so easy everytime. However, there are times that both the parties know the exact meaning of a sentence but somehow like that little game of hiding real meanings behind other sentences. Why we do that?
Here is a video by theRSAorg ob Youtube. I’ve come across this just now and I hope you’ll like the way they explain the relation between “direct” and “indirect” speech in many respects such as anthropology and psychology. Take a 10 mins break and enjoy!
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Last week, I’ve read a quite interesting article about a work by Mark Mayzner who worked in Bell Telephone Labs, Barnard College, USC, NYU, and Loyola. It was a very detailed research about the frequency of letters in English. He analyzed 20.000 words from the books in 1965 to show this frequency. Now let’s learn about more his Google Research visit and its contribution to his work almost 50 years later!
Note: This part is a quotation from the blog of expectlabs. You can see the link at the bottom.
In 1965, Mark Mayzner meticulously analyzed over 20,000 words from books, magazines, and newspapers using an IBM card-sorting machine, in order to paint a more complete picture of the various word and letter frequencies that characterize the English language. Mayzner recently contacted Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, to see if he could update his experiment by leveraging the enormity of data in the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Norvig agreed to the challenge, and updated Mayzner’s study by analyzing the over 97,565 distinct words which were mentioned over 743 billion times in the Google data collection. In fact, Norvig’s sample had 37 million more word occurrences than the 20,000-word sample that Mayzner used.
Norvig’s chart below visualizes letter counts by word position, with the frequencies proportional to the length of the bars. The results show that the most common first letter in English is T, while the most common second letter is O.
You just want to start something but without noticing, you happen to be distracted by Facebook or other social networks… – or simply by Wikipedia. Yeah, I like reading Wikis, too. 
) indicate the relative difficulty of learning this language if you already speak Italian. The fewer cactuses/cacti, the easier.
