The DEA’s decision to recruit speakers of Ebonics―or African American Vernacular English (AAVE)―to listen in on wiretaps made for a brief brouhaha in the media a few days ago. But criticism focused mainly on the term Ebonics, which seems to be a trigger word for some of the racial divisions that dog American society.  No one objected much to the basic premise, which is the need for specialists to help cops understand perp-speak. See my previous post and the ensuing comments here.
But it got me thinking. We do our share of wiretap translation in other languages, and have found that people engaged in professional criminal enterprises prefer not to be understood by the law or other eavesdroppers. On more than one occasion, we’ve run into a wall when we’ve run up against an argot. [...]

Most of the travelling we do is in the movies. Even the most frequent of flyers would be hard pressed to see the sites we view so casually on the silver screen.  Filmmakers love to tell their stories in exotic locales. But just as a stage set may at times have to fill in for Deadwood, the exotic languages spoken in those exotic locales have to be tamed for local consumption. Eric Hynes has put together a great video slide show over at Slate to examine how Hollywood represents foreign speech.
Since the dawn of the talkies, filmmakers have had to face the challenge of foreign tongues. “Many filmmakers are content to shoot against a painted backdrop, toss in a few bonjours, and call it France, while others go to great lengths [...]

Bop as in “bang.” You know, like to “nail.”  As in, “whack the gopher.” That’s what I mean. But in Hausa you say bop the snake.
My head hunter, Mike Klinger, used to be in the Peace Corp in Niger. (Just to be crystal clear, by head hunter, I mean Mike helps me to recruit people for 1-800-Translate. What he does in his own time is his own business, mostly, but I’ll get to that in a minute.)
Mike had been living in the sticks (“en brousse” ) in Guidan Roumji―a wide spot on Route N1 outside of Maradi in Niger―for the last two years with the Peace Corp. He was headed back Stateside, with a pile of gear stacked next to his table at a dusty teahouse, the only white face [...]

Earlier this month, fluent sign-talkers from tribes across Montana and surrounding states gathered on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation for the first Plains Indian sign language conference in 80 years.
The conference, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, began with field work last summer in Montana to search for fluent Plains Indian sign-talkers.
Jeffery Davis, a linguist at the University of Tennessee, and Melanie McKay-Cody, a Chickamauga Cherokee/Choctaw from William Woods University in Missouri, identified more than two dozen sign-talkers among the various tribes. The group includes several tribal members who are deaf.
Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) is a sign language once shared among 40 different Native American groups on the Great Plains of North America, one of several Native American Indian Sign Language varieties. In 1885, it was estimated that there were [...]

Informed consent in clinical trials means different things to different people. Sometimes it means consent is given with full knowledge, and sometimes it just seems that way.
Nearly half of all U.S.-based clinical trials are now conducted overseas―many in countries where the native language is not English, where literacy in local languages is low, and health literacy is even lower.
Informed consent forms for international research are generally written first in English and then translated into the local language. In the latest IRB: Ethics & Human Research, researchers Caroline Lithinji and Nancy Kass question the assumption that if an English language consent form is simplified, then the translated version will resemble the original form in its readability.
‘The Kenya Medical Research National Ethical Review Committee determines readability of English consent forms before translation; however, it [...]

Taiwan is on the fault line of the world stage, a glittering prize suspended between the competing commercial and political interests of China and the USA. And Mandarin Chinese as spoken on the isle is the linguistic star, spokesmodel for countless SKUs and memes. And due to a problem on the set with direction, rewrite is pretty busy cobbling together the script as the show goes on, character by character.
Victor Mair, one of my favorite bloggers over at Language Log, just got back from Taiwan. He writes of his experience, “I find myself stunned by the multilingual, polyscriptal creativity of the people on that ‘renegade island’ (formerly known as Ilha Formosa, Portuguese for ‘Beautiful Island’).  One thing that could not escape my notice is the widespread use of English letters for English [...]

Does the language you speak change the way you think? If it does, how would you know? We already know that most people speak first and think later. But Stanford University cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky’s research is revealing that it’s even worse than that.
New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world.
“The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.
“The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries…. but the idea went out of favor with scientists when…. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal [...]