Whether you receive foreigners or travel abroad, cross-cultural awareness is a key factor in doing business.“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” goes the old saying. If only cross-cultural communication and awareness were so simple! The fac…

The 1st annual North American Summit on Interpreting was held in Washington, DC in June 2010. One of the feature events of the Summit, organized by InterpAmerica, was a presentation of the results of a comprehensive study of interpreting in North Ameri…

Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows that dealing with “the real lingo” can be a hurdle to effective communication.Many English-speakers who travel abroad hoping to make good use of their high school foreign language skills come in for a…

Our first new blog category deals with the main activities of language service providers: translation, localization and interpretation.We’ve just completed restructuring our blogs to better reflect what we do and what we write about. Language Tra…

Helping with media coverage is all in a day’s work for baseball interpreters.English is a second language for a number of major league baseball players. So naturally, interpreters have come to play an important role in helping players with limited En…

The simplest form of communication when travelling in foreign countries may be a picture book.Summer is travel time, and trips to far-away locales are increasingly frequent. For many Americans, “going abroad” used to mean a trip to Mexico o…

The simplest form of communication when travelling in foreign countries may be a picture book.Summer is travel time, and trips to far-away locales are increasingly frequent. For many Americans, “going abroad” used to mean a trip to Mexico o…

From old-fashioned phrasebooks to talking devices, a number of tools are available to help travelers navigate linguistically abroad.Language translation applications are widely available for smart phones, but other, separate tools exist, from phraseboo…

Edited by two Michigan universities, the Linguist List provides an astounding array of resources for linguists.Even after writing this blog for over four years, I am always discovering amazing online resources – and they aren’t always new, …

An online debate sponsored by The Economist magazine has brought up this thorny question. So far, participants are answering with a resounding “no.”Just about everything can take place online, including old-fashioned Oxford-style debates. The subje…