Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

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 translation of Homer’s Odyssey won …

“British scholar Emily Wilson’s fresh and contemporary translations of the Greek classics discussed at a recent Yale University event”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Finding the words for a world in crisis” was the theme for the 2020 International Translation Day poster design contest set up by FIT, the International Federation of Translators. The beautiful winning design, by Russian artist and translator Liza Gunenko, captures the importance of unity …

“September 30 marks International Translation Day, a time to reflect on changes in the industry in 2020”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The age of online communication has brought about a radical reinvention of punctuation, in ways that transgress the boundaries of what is commonly defined as “good grammar”. This has sparked concerns about the future of formal language and become a hot topic of discussion. In …

“In the era of internet language punctuation is morphing into new shapes, acquiring new tasks, and new meanings”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emoji have become an immensely popular form of online communication. The numbers about their use are staggering: it is estimated that more than 700 million are used every day on Facebook alone. Many consider emoji simply a way of adding emotional charge to social media …

“Addressing cross-cultural issues in emoji “translation””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes create a new one, combining bits of each into something new that everyone can use to communicate easily. A recent article in BBC Future warns that these “linguistic mash-ups”, better known as “contact …

“What are “contact languages” and why are they in danger of extinction?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of Russian literature, based in Oxford. She won a highly competitive fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2018, and her translation of Natalia Meshchaninova’s Stories received a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. If you …

“Russian literary classics set in 2020: updates to Russia’s greatest books”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “International Non-Binary People’s Day” is celebrated ever year on the 14th of July since 2012 and is aimed at raising awareness around the issues faced by non-binary people. The use of a more inclusive, gender-neutral language is one such issue, as it is an important …

“How to use gender-neutral language, and why it is important to try”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Google launched “Fabricius”, a web based AI tool to let users interact with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, on July 16, 2020, to coincide with the anniversary of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta stone was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text (Egyptian/Ancient Greek) to be recovered in …

““Fabricius”, Google’s new AI tool, unravels the symbols of Ancient Egypt”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Sampooran Singh Kalra (b.1934), known as Gulzar, is an Indian lyricist, poet, author, screenwriter, and film director. His anthology of 365 poems, one for every day of the year, has just been published by Harper and Collins. He describes it as his “tribute,” in the …

““A poem a day”, 365 poems in 34 languages by 279 poets: a tribute to the many languages of India”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The numbers about emoji use are mindboggling: it is estimated that more than 700 million are used every day in Facebook posts alone. And the emoji real time tracker on Twitter flashes so fast it comes with an epilepsy warning. At cApStAn we have been …

“How emoji have become an essential way for diverse communities to have visibility online”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Over the past few days the internet has been abuzz with talk about GPT-3, OpenAI’s newest AI language model. GPT-3’s predecessor, GPT-2, released in 2019, was already able to produce convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening …

“OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI is now out, and it is mindboggling”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Chi Luu, a computational linguist and natural language processing researcher, writes about idioms and their special power to draw people together in a recent article for JSTOR Daily. The origins of idioms, she says, are most often frozen in time, lost in the mists of …

“The origins of idioms are lost in the mists of metaphor and meaning: they are “the fossilized poetry of language””