One World, Many Languages,
One Company, Worldwide™
As professional linguists, you can imagine our delight when we read a recent New York Times op-ed titled, The Sacred Spell of Words. It’s not often that non-linguists think of language in sacred terms, and yet those of us who make our living as professional interpreters and translators spend the majority of our time reverently…
Executive briefing centers are not new. However, an increasing number of US-based companies have been using them more frequently and intensely than ever before as they branch out into the international market. This is especially true in the era of the Internet and Silicon Valley, where getting your brand’s newest products and services out ahead…
If you speak English, it may seem like a no-brainer that it has become the lingua franca, but that isn’t such a no-brainer if you live in a non-English speaking country – or are descended from those who speak other languages. Due to the combined effects of colonialization, globalization and – quite honestly – and…
Data recently published by the Census Bureau for 2017 shows roughly half of residents in America’s five largest cities now speak a language other than English at home. While China may have its fair share of the media limelight, economic experts proclaim it’s India we should pay close attention to. According to an article in…
Language has always been fluid. Otherwise, Americans would still be using “thee,” “thine”, and “thou,” and Shakespeare’s plays could remain footnote-free in English-speaking countries. However, the advent of social media, which thrives on abbreviations, conversational colloquialisms, and acronyms, has accelerated the natural evolution of language. That makes it challenging for businesses, organizations, and politics to…
Even the most multilingual heads of state and politicians utilize conference interpreters in important meetings and crucial events. They know when it comes to the fragile, silken threads that often bind international diplomacy on all fronts – political, professional and humanitarian – precise words are essential to fluid communication. This respect for language and its…
French is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages, one of the few to be spoken on every continent, and ranked the sixth most widely spoken language after Mandarin Chinese (over a billion speakers), English, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic. It is an official language of 29 countries, second only to English. There are currently over 220 million French…
At multinational events, professional conference interpreters rely on several working languages. Obviously, interpreters are considered by most people to be bilingual – fluent in two languages. However, many of us are actually multilingual and we work in what we call A, B and C Languages. The majority of professional conference-level interpreters speak two to four…
What do Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Swahili, Wolof and Amharic all have in common? They are all languages spoken in Africa, and this list doesn’t even begin to cover all the myriad of smaller subsets of various language and indigenous languages and dialects that pepper this vast continent – There are thousands! Indeed,…
When planning a meeting or event with multilingual participants, it is important to determine the best way to ensure that all participants can understand what you are saying. To this end, there are several different types or styles of professional interpretation. Two of the most widely used are simultaneous and consecutive interpreting. It’s useful to…