by Sara Knowles
Language and culture is central to any export communication strategy. Insight and effective application of language and cultural awareness can make a world of difference to how your brand is perceived and, ultimately your credibility and profitability in new markets.
Have you ever tried to translate or open an SDL Studio 2014 project/package and your current TMs don’t match the ones defined in the project? For instance, have you ever tried to open a project and use an en-US TM with a project that uses en-GB TMs? Sounds like a problem.
The amazing Multifarious blog describes the process you have to follow in order to share your resources, such as a TM, a termbase or even a project, while working in SDL Studio 2014.Read more…
What’s an expletive, and is it bad? There are several types of expletives, and though some may be considered offensive, others merely signal passive sentence construction or a perhaps desirable vagueness.
Readers of a certain age may recall, during the Watergate scandal, references to “expletive deleted” in discussions of audiotape recordings of conversations between Richard Nixon and certain government officials: Profanity (lots of it) was censored when the recordings were prepared for court proceedings. At that time, “expletive deleted” entered the lexicon as an ironic reference to profanity.
This phrase derives from the linguistic definition of expletive, which comes from the Latin term explere, meaning “to fill”; it refers to a meaningless word. “Expletive deleted” denotes the omission of a potentially offensive word, but that’s not the only usage of expletive.
Today there are between 6,000 and 8,000 languages spoken in the world, depending, amongst other things, on how one distinguishes a ‘dialect’ from a ‘language’—social and political considerations are often wont to intervene. Of these extant languages, around 82% are spoken by populations of less than 100,000 people, 39% are spoken by less than 10,000 people, and 8% of the world’s languages are considered to be endangered, with one language dying out around every 10 days or so, on some estimates. Prior to 1492, with Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas marking the beginning of western imperialism by European kingdoms, there were probably twice as many languages as there are today. And projecting backwards through time, there may have existed as many as half a million languages in total, since the advent of Homo sapiens, some 200,000 or so years ago.
This is the new home of Dirty Little Secrets for Translators, our wordpress blog.
