Category : Language

TCK and the third culture

370_multi11TCK– That’s the new TLA for Third Culture Kids, (TLA stands for Three Letter Acronym, FYI) Third Culture Kids is what author Ruth E Van Reken calls the kids who grow up outside either parent’s homeland. These global citizens are rooted in a couple of different cultures, not just one

Linguist at the Thanksgiving Table

For a hundred years, the great ships of the strangers coasted by. Sometimes they came in to trade, sometimes to rob and kill. They were the “metal men,” these Europeans, and the Indians along the coast of New England wanted their knives and axes, but feared the violence and disease

Social Media: What we’ve got here is ‘failure to translate’

Failure to Translate Social media doesn’t seem to translate… professionally that is. Facebook was translated by members, with amateurish results, and when LinkedIn announced they were going the same route, we pros were outraged, as reported in the paper of record, aka NYT. Translate tweets? There are a couple of applications

Rei!

President Obama’s deep bow to the Emperor of Japan a few days ago made the headlines. The photo was everywhere, and certainly makes for interesting blog fodder (thus this post). Conservative mudslingers see it as a violation of all that America holds dear, an egregious grovel-ation of republican (small r)

Validation for Clinical Trial Translation – Goldilocks Analysis (Part 2)

goldPart 2: Porridge too hot. In an earlier post, after providing a not-so-shocking exposé of translation practices in the American healthcare industry, I promised a Goldilocks analysis of the state of best practice in clinical trial translation. Today, the porridge is too hot. The MAPI Research Institute methodology is the

Your mother was an autistic hamster

Pierre Lellouche, the French Minister for Europe has caused a contretemps in Anglo-French relations when he was quoted on remarks critical of  ”Euroskeptic” Tories in the Guardian, a leading British newspaper. “They have one line, and they just repeat one line,” Mr. Lellouche was quoted as saying of Conservative policy. “It

Validation for Clinical Trial Translation – Goldilocks Analysis (Part 1)

Goldilocks1Over the last decade and a half as a principal at CliniTrans, the life sciences translation group at 1-800-Translate, I have worked on foreign language translation with about 200 institutional review boards and other clinical trial organizations The Declaration of Helsinki, the Belmont Report, the requirements of the FDA and

When is Spanish Not Really Spanish?

face-spanishWhen a native English speaker tries to speak it, that’s when. Today, in the US, we’re seeing more and more Hispanic immigrants, and we sympathize as they learn our language, with its many slang words and colloquialisms. And, when the tables are turned? Well, it’s just as difficult to go

Pretending to be a foreigner

FernsIf native-speaking ability gets you treated like a native, would you consider acting like a foreigner if you thought you might be treated better? Sometimes identity sounds better in disguise. Today I present to you, the strange case of Dr. Kobayashi, who switches his ethnicity as others switch hats. Kobayashi-sensei,

The Language Mosaic

The Language MosaicAt the dawn of modern humanity, around 75,000 years ago, the 5,000 or so members of the human race spoke a single language. But as the planetary population has expanded to 7 billion in modern times, so has the number of languages, now at around 6,800 or so.