A new initiative aims to encourage “direct translation” of Hindu or Tamil literature into the world’s major languages – without going through the English translation.Due to a scarcity of translators for certain “language pairs,” esp…

A new initiative aims to encourage “direct translation” of Hindu or Tamil literature into the world’s major languages – without going through the English translation.Due to a scarcity of translators for certain “language pairs,” esp…

“Europe” is a vast multilingual and multicultural patchwork; so don’t assume that English is always enough to do business there.Americans travelling in Europe are often impressed by how well the population speaks English. Or if they aren’t…

While our website was overhauled, our three blogs went on a break too. If you have been to the Language Translation Inc. website lately, you may have noticed a new look. And if you have come to this blog lately, you may have noticed a distinct lack of…

A Waikiki restaurant has stirred controversy by applying a mandatory 15% tip to diners who don’t speak English.A friend of mine has a son who is a waiter in a Parisian restaurant – and he is always delighted to see Americans sit down to eat in …

If you want to get an exotic tattoo in a foreign tongue, you had best be sure of the translation.We all know tattoos are the rage in the USA, but were you aware that tattoo mistranslation is a recognized problem? Even the rich and the famous have been…

Thanksgiving is primarily celebrated in two countries: the USA and Canada. Since 1957, Canadian Thanksgiving has been celebrated on the second Monday of October. So as US residents settle down to Thanksgiving supper on Thursday, our Canadian neighbors …

A lot of other terms, actually – maybe like “dog” and “cat”?I learned the hard way about the complexities of saying merci. In France, when someone offers you something to eat or drink, it is considered ever-so-slightly impolite to say &ldquo…

Google Translate’s experiments with machine translation of poetry are yielding some intriguing results.In a post published last week on the Google Research blog, software engineer Dmitriy Genzel explains how Google is experimenting with poetry and st…

A former British minister has pronounced French a “useless” language. So what exactly makes a language “useful?”In a highly publicized and controversial statement, a former British Foreign Office minister called French “useless.” In…