Category Archives: Languages/Linguistic curiosities

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Finding the words for a world in crisis” was the theme for the 2020 International Translation Day poster design contest set up by FIT, the International Federation of Translators. The beautiful winning design, by Russian artist and translator Liza Gunenko, captures the importance of unity …

“September 30 marks International Translation Day, a time to reflect on changes in the industry in 2020”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes create a new one, combining bits of each into something new that everyone can use to communicate easily. A recent article in BBC Future warns that these “linguistic mash-ups”, better known as “contact …

“What are “contact languages” and why are they in danger of extinction?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of Russian literature, based in Oxford. She won a highly competitive fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2018, and her translation of Natalia Meshchaninova’s Stories received a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. If you …

“Russian literary classics set in 2020: updates to Russia’s greatest books”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “International Non-Binary People’s Day” is celebrated ever year on the 14th of July since 2012 and is aimed at raising awareness around the issues faced by non-binary people. The use of a more inclusive, gender-neutral language is one such issue, as it is an important …

“How to use gender-neutral language, and why it is important to try”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Sampooran Singh Kalra (b.1934), known as Gulzar, is an Indian lyricist, poet, author, screenwriter, and film director. His anthology of 365 poems, one for every day of the year, has just been published by Harper and Collins. He describes it as his “tribute,” in the …

““A poem a day”, 365 poems in 34 languages by 279 poets: a tribute to the many languages of India”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The numbers about emoji use are mindboggling: it is estimated that more than 700 million are used every day in Facebook posts alone. And the emoji real time tracker on Twitter flashes so fast it comes with an epilepsy warning. At cApStAn we have been …

“How emoji have become an essential way for diverse communities to have visibility online”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Over the past few days the internet has been abuzz with talk about GPT-3, OpenAI’s newest AI language model. GPT-3’s predecessor, GPT-2, released in 2019, was already able to produce convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening …

“OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI is now out, and it is mindboggling”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Chi Luu, a computational linguist and natural language processing researcher, writes about idioms and their special power to draw people together in a recent article for JSTOR Daily. The origins of idioms, she says, are most often frozen in time, lost in the mists of …

“The origins of idioms are lost in the mists of metaphor and meaning: they are “the fossilized poetry of language””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Publishers around the world are reporting booming sales of “The Plague” (La Peste), an allegorical tale set in a town at the mercy of an epidemic, written by French Nobel prize writer Albert Camus in 1947. Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation …

“New English version of Camus’ “The Plague” during Covid-19: how historical context can affect translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The French film Les traducteurs (The Translators) premiered last year in November at the French Film Festival in Prague. The plot follows a group of nine talented polyglots charged with translating the third installment of a fictitious Daedalus trilogy, a series of novels that, with …

““Literary lockdown”: how the translation of a novel by a best selling author made for a thriller film plot”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion of new words and phrases, both in English and in other languages. We have written about the new lexicon, and how it is helping people to make sense of the changes in our lives, in three recent …

“Beyond the battle, far from the frontline: a call from linguists for non-war-related ways of talking about Covid-19”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Neologisms related to the coronavirus pandemic are spreading so fast that it is hard to keep up and our article on this topic  of March 25 is already out of date! We have picked up some new terms here and there from different sources in …

“Elephant in the zoom, Le Creuset wrist, and cough-shaming: how Covid lingo is creeping into our every day language”