One World, Many Languages,
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Each year, thousands of people move through the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. Among other things, these students learn, absorb and practice in The School of Language Studies where they’re immersed in intensive foreign language classes. For some diplomats, the goal is to become comfortable and socially conversational in the language of the…
You’ve probably heard of the Hippocratic Oath, by which physicians vow to “first do no harm,” and uphold certain ethical standards. Lawyers are also sworn in using an Attorney’s Oath. In the state of California, among other standards, new lawyers pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States and also to conduct themselves…
English English is spoken by some 380 million people as their first language, including 231 million in the US and about 60 million in the UK. As many as 1 billion people use it as a second language. While English is only the 3rd largest language by the number of native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese…
When you hire a new employee, it’s easy to weed out the unqualified from the qualified during the interview process. Why? Because nobody knows your business and your area of expertise like you do, and you can spot incompetence a mile away. When you are interested in hiring a professional language services provider, such as…
The smartest way to build a solid business relationship with an overseas client is to use professional translation and interpretation services. Nonetheless, there is significant benefit to learning a foreign language; even knowing a few phrases can go a long way in developing a business relationship. Certainly the best language services firms pride themselves on…
Google Translator is an incredible tool for a “quick and dirty” translation, but it completely lacks cultural and linguistic nuance. Automated language translation tools – or even fluent but non-native translators can take a website or document and smear it with proverbial mud. If your current language service does not have the cultural knowledge…
Our previous blog post discussed how the English language started spreading around the world, reaching a peak with the rise of the British Empire. However, it was not the only language to develop in the colonization era. So what can explain the unique international status of the English language? Linguistic Globalization Some suggest that English…
A Few Facts About English Arguably, English is the world language, spoken by some 380 million people as their first language. More than half of these (231 million) live in the United States, followed by some 60 million in the United Kingdom, the birthplace of the English language. Estimates of second language speakers vary greatly,…
What is Scandinavia exactly? Technically, Scandinavia consists of the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The name Scandinavia originally referred to Scania, a former Danish region that is now part of Sweden. The popular usage of the term in these three countries became a unifying concept in the nineteenth century. In 1839, after a…
It was a wandering French geographer with a vision of language as a unifying and deeply generative cultural influence who coined the term “Francophonie” (French-speaking world). His name was Onésime Reclus, a 19th century booster of French culture and language who traveled widely and wrote books primarily about the French colonies in Africa. His vision…