On December 20, 2012, it’s all over ― the bak’tun, that is, the longest measure of time in the Mayan calendar. The Maya noted important dates using the Long Count, a 5,125-year cycle of 13 bak’tuns, each about 394 years long.
And if you’ve seen the trailers for “2012,” you know this is definitely bad news, as in end-of-the-world bad news. There are hundreds of books devoted to 2012, and millions of web sites, depending on what combination of “2012” and “doomsday” you type into Google.
Now NASA has announced that it isn’t the end of the world, but then they also claim to have landed a man on the moon . However, others, including contemporary Mayan shamans, agree with this assertion, so it looks like Doomsday has been postponed yet [...]

How do you say that in Lenape? Lenape? You know, the language people spoke around New York for thousands of years before the Euros trashed it.
When 1-800-Translate was at the dining-room table stage of the business plan, we were working for a group of monument designers who had a commission to do a piece at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. We worked with Conwill DePace and Majozo who did these awesomely intricate sculptures with plenty of multilingual text, in this case, “Let Freedom Ring” in forty languages.
Of those forty languages, it turns out there was one language with two names, so we had a hole for another one, and not one on that long list originated in the Western Hemisphere. I suggested Mayan, with those horror-show glyphs (my favorites), [...]

Lots of headlines this week on translation gaffs. I find them hilarious and a nice change from that old chestnut about poor branding of the Nova car model in Latin America many years ago (“No va” just “Doesn’t go” en español.  Get it?).  The only problem with all these news reports is that all the headlines read “Lost in Translation” ad infinitum.
My favorite was when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the Russians the diplomatic equivalent of the Staples “That was Easy” button. It was supposed to read “Reset” in Russian, but instead was mistranslated as “Overcharge” or “Overload,” which it seems has some bad connotations in Russian.
Secretary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a big laugh over it at the photo op, and Sunday morning I [...]