Castro spoke for four hours, Gaddafi for 96 minutes and his interpreter broke down. Inside the booths where UN speeches are turned into six languages, live.
Posts with tag.: Languages
A bill granting Russian and other tongues regional status has split Ukraine’s parliament. The fight is not about grammar. It is about which way the country faces.
The world loses about 25 languages a year. At a conference in Carmarthen, 100 academics argued in nine languages about whether any of them can be saved.
Asian language translation revenue hit $1,312 million in 2008 and was projected to reach $1,516 million, with southern India's factories driving a hiring surge.
Belarus's 2009 census found those calling Belarusian their native language fell from almost 74 percent to 53 percent, with only 23 percent speaking it at home.
Three-quarters of UK students skipped French GCSE this year and German entries fell 4.5%. The 2004 decision to make languages optional is still doing damage.
Haryana Agricultural University will require overseas students to study Hindi. In India, a language mandate is never just an educational decision.
Stephen Pax Leonard will live a year with the Inughuit to record Inuktun, an undocumented language with about 1,000 speakers and a thinning sheet of ice.
India has chased UN status for Hindi since 2003, but the cost, the two-thirds majority and its own southern states all stand in the way.
The Association of Spanish Language Academies says Spanish will lead the world in native speakers by 2050. Here is what drives the forecast and what it changes.
Google translated 16 million words into Hindi, Tamil, Swahili and more for Wikipedia using Google Trends to pick articles and humans to fix the machine drafts.
How linguists are using crowdsourced volunteers to translate low resource languages that machine translation still cannot handle, from Haiti to intelligence work.
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.