Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village We live in an age in which we communicate with “hashtags, broken sentences and fragments of ideas” and where opinion and debate are reduced to “liking and disliking, binary options rather than articulate responses”. The author of the recent Financial Times (FT) article deplores that …

“Is Latin still relevant in today’s world?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Franco Moretti, literary critic and co-founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, argues that to truly understand literary history one needs the help of computers to “crunch” data from thousands of books at a time. A new publication, “Canon/Archive”, collects 11 of the lab’s research pamphlets, …

“Can computers “read” books and what knowledge can we gain from them?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Lost in translation – this recurring and derogatory judgement is an “old chestnut” that keeps bouncing back, says the author of the article. While she does confirm that some words do not have an equivalent and that translators do struggle with idioms, culture-specific words and …

“On old chestnuts and misguided ideas about translation”

Two weeks ago, a complete 18th century library was discovered in Bouillon. The books, all of them over 200 years old, are in pristine condition. A miracle for bibliophiles. The 18th century was the last moment in history when it seemed possible for Encyclopedists to be well-informed about the latest developments in just about every science …

“Multidisciplinary Task Forces to Manage Complexity”