Research from the University of Chicago suggests that even in the 21st century, people with accents can be considered untrustworthy.A 2010 study carried out by University of Chicago researchers shows that a foreign accent tends to damage a speaker&rsqu…

What’s in store for the language service sector in 2011? Research group Common Sense Advisory has some ideas.Since 2005, the major research group Common Sense Advisory has been publishing predictions about the language service industry. The group&rsq…

A new site called Viki claims it has 100,000 volunteer translators subtitling for free. Subtitling is a highly difficult and painstaking translation task. Comprehension of film dialogue can be difficult even for native speakers; rendering the dialogue …

A video by Wisconsin Technical Colleges shows some of the key lessons learned by a student preparing to become a medical interpreter.As a provider of medical language services, we have often posted on this blog about professional language interpreters,…

In a Toronto hospital, translation volunteers are put to good use outside of the medical language sphere.On numerous occasions, this blog has emphasized the importance of using qualified medical language experts for language translation and interpretat…

There was a time when almost everything on the internet was in English. And that was a long time ago.In the early online years, some argued that the internet would increase, or even cement, the dominance of English as a lingua franca. Many of the worl…

Localization isn’t always about reaching out to foreign markets.We often think of localization in terms of communicating to foreign markets in a global economy. But a localized marketing approach can be carried out at home as well. New marketing eff…

Technology now allows learners to study languages interactively at home, in the car or on the plane. But how effective are these methods?Today’s language learner is faced with a dizzying array of methods. Traditional classes are of course offered…

In the final post of our three-part series on evaluating language skills, we’ll take a look at assessing language interpretation competence.In the US, one of the most recognized language skill evaluation tools is the ILR, or Interagency Language Roun…

We hear a lot about “dying languages.” But which ones are really on the verge of extinction?Languages, like species or cultures, can be endangered. When we think of languages that could disappear, we often think of obscure tribal languages, where t…