Russian has a word for light blue and a word for dark blue, but no word for a general shade of blue. So when interpreters translate "blue" into Russian, they’re forced to pick a shade. It’s one of the many complexities of translation David Bellos explores in his new book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/14/142309214/meaning-of-everything-often-lost-in-translation?sc=tw
Tagged with language translation npr
Join author and journalist Alex Bellos for a surprising and entertaining look at the world of mathematics.
By bringing together history, reportage and mathematical proofs, and covering subjects from adding to algebra, from set theory to statistics, and from logarithms to logical paradoxes, Alex Bellos reveals how mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives.
Join Alex Bellos at the RSA to discover the beauty of mathematical patterns in nature, the peculiar predictability of random behaviour, how to win at the casino, the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy, and why the best Scrabble players are mathematicians.
Speaker:Alex Bellos, writer, broadcaster and author of Futebol, the Brazilian Way of Life (Bloomsbury, 2002) and Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (Bloomsbury, 2010).
Chair:Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA.
http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/adventures-in-numberland
Linguist Christopher J. Moore has made a career of searching out some of the world’s most "untranslatable" expressions â words from around the globe that defy an easy translation into English. Moore shares a few of his linguistic favorites from his new book In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4457805
In the introduction to their eye-opening new book, Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World, co-authors Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche make the case that translation “affects every aspect of your life—and we’re not just talking about the obvious things, like world politics and global business. Translation affects you personally, too. The books you read. The movies you watch. The food you eat. Your favorite sports team. The opinions you hold dear. The religion you practice. Even your looks and, yes, your love life. Right this very minute, translation is saving lives, perhaps even yours.”
A bad translation may even be responsible for the longstanding anti-Semitic notion that Jews have horns. Listen as Bob Garfield and I talk with Kelly, a certified Spanish interpreter and former Fulbright scholar in sociolinguistics.
How the right words can have the wrong meanings, and the best translations lead us to an understanding that’s way deeper than language.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/translation
Tagged with radiolab translation language
On "Word of Mouth" program on New Hampshire Public Radio
Tagged with alex bellos numbers word of mouth numbers
Cross Talk — There’s no English translation for the Dutch word "Gezellig."Are there things that can never be understood, expressed or experienced outside their home culture?We’re wandering the unmarked maps of cultural translation!
Tagged with translation language
David Crystal is a world-renowned linguist. He’s the author of over 100 books, and an advocate of what he calls “Internet Linguistics" — an approach to understanding how we use language online. Nora Young interviewed David for Spark 220. This Q&A is a lightly edited version of that interview.
http://sparkcbc.tumblr.com/post/52398439754/internet-linguistics-q-a-with-david-crystal
Tagged with spark linguistics language internet book:author=david crystal
Today we travel to a world with universal translation devices. In this episode we talk about how machine translation could be meddled with, who gets to be the baseline language, and what these devices might do for language loss and assimilation.
Tagged with technology
"What automatic translation does for us as humans is really open doors," says one computer scientist with Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute.
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/07/19/translation-technology-future-language