by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Webinar hosted by CITLoB with Steve Dept and Sandeep Nulkar, 7.1.2021 “Quality is the most used word in our industry but it is one thing to say you provide quality translation, it’s another to say you can actually measure it”. ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Exophony is the practice of writing in a language that is not one's own. Some exophonic authors are bilingual or multilingual from their childhood years while others write in an acquired language. Although the phenomenon is not new the term ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Hindu scholar and linguist Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the past 10 years translating and “decolonizing” the Bhagavad Gita, one of India's most famous epic poems, written 5.000 (some say 7.000) years ago. His work was published this month with the ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Language science has focused for so long on things like grammatical complexity that information about “transfer rate” has been mostly overlooked, says evolutionary linguist François Pellegrino, from the University of Lyon, co-author of a study on this topic published in ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emily Wilson's 2017 English translation of The Odyssey raised quite a stir for its its audacious use of contemporary language and her gender neutral approach (see our blog article on this topic) but the new English version of the epic ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Rotwelsch is an ancient language of the road, spoken by vagrants, refugees, merchants and thieves since the European Middle Ages. It means “beggar’s cant” and is based on a combination of German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Romani -- the language of Sinti ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village It’s that time of the year again when dictionaries announce their selection of top trending words. “Words of the Year” (WotY) are supported by usage statistics and typically reflect societal attitudes and concerns. The tradition dates back to 1971, with ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Edward Brooke-Hitching's The Madman's Library: The Greatest Curiosities of Literature is hot off the Simon & Schuster Ltd press (published October 2020). In it the English author has put together an impressive collection of some of the strangest books ever ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village While language change is not a new thing, says Chi Luu, a computational linguist and natural language processes (NLP) researcher, “it’s different in how fast and how virally it can spread now, as well as the impact it can have ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "Does joy, by any other name, in another language, still taste as sweet, and fear still sting as bitter?" asks Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D. lecturer in Cultural Psychology, in a recent article for Psychology Today. The article refers to a study ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In Emily Wilson's translations of the classics the Greek goddess Demeter has “cornrows in her hair”, Achilles is described as a “superhero”, and Odysseus, when disguised as an old, homeless man, carries a "tote bag"...(1) Wilson’s innovative approach to the ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "Holding my brush to write this letter, two streams of tears flow/ Of the thousands hardships I have suffered nobody knows" ... These words are written in a language called "Nüshu", which literally means "the script of women". Nüshu is ... Read more >