An EU-commissioned report valued Europe's language industry at $12bn and growing 10% a year. Why the sector stayed invisible and what the investors saw first.
Arabic web users grew 2,000% and Chinese is overtaking English online. How Google Translate and human projects like Meedan are keeping the web readable.
Occitan, Breton, Basque, Corsican and Alsatian all survive in a country whose constitution recognises one language. A guide to the languages spoken in France.
Latin, Greek and Hebrew survive at university because translation turns locked manuscripts into evidence students can argue with, and machines still cannot do it.
From Roman Dacia to Church Slavonic, Soviet Cyrillic and the 2023 law that renamed it Romanian, the Moldovan language has always been an argument about politics.
Vengerian is the Slavic name for Hungarian, a Uralic outlier with 18 cases, vowel harmony and a focus position that machine translation still cannot handle.
Spanish has 500 million native speakers across 20 countries and no neutral default, which is why dialect, register and the subjunctive decide every translation.
Fifteen cases, consonant gradation, no articles and a verb that conjugates to say no: why Finnish grammar defeats both learners and machine translation.
Camera translation, offline packs and voice mode have removed the everyday friction of a foreign city, but they still cannot sign a consent form.