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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…
Kicking off the holiday season, the American Thanksgiving occurs on the fourth Thursday of November. Its origins go back to the fall of 1621, when Pilgrims celebrated their first successful wheat crop. The holiday has since evolved into a day in which families gather around a feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin…
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…
Pablo Chang-Castillo is an entrepreneur with a free spirit and an enterprising and disciplined work ethic. The Founder and CEO of Chang-Castillo and Associates, Pablo was seemingly born into the translation and interpretation business. His last name alone, a hyphenated amalgam of China and Latin America, needs no embellishment as an emblem of diversity and…
A country dotted with castles amid forests, Germany is picturesque and saturated with history. While Germany is known for its precision, organization and orderly diligence, German literature and music are also filled with deeply romantic yearnings. Beethoven’s triumphant “Ode to Joy” from his 9th Symphony, written after he became deaf, communicates a dawning and resilient…
Brazilian, European, and African Portuguese, while all the same language, have each been forged by unique historical forces. Languages contain history, the effects of cultural movements, the explosive narrative of political upheaval as well as the geological and biological influences of location. Population movements are legible within syntax and heard in pronunciation. Brazilian and African…
The Korean peninsula is a challenging topography of height and depth with caldera lakes and rugged mountain peaks, a landscape that has cradled a unique language isolated from other language families, a language with no known, verifiable genealogical or “genetic” relationship to any other language – a language isolate. Korean is that language, with hidden…