The Voice of LingoTech
ConveyThis Helps Website Owners Make Their Sites Multilingual For Free
Apr 18th
ConveyThis is a new website that provides a free website translator button and a multilingual feedback form button to website and blog owners.
As the web continues to grow more and more diverse, it is becoming increasingly important for website owners to cater to diverse language speakers. While it’s best to have websites translated by a professional translation company for the highest accuracy, this can usually be quite costly.
ConveyThis provides a simple and completely free solution.
The best thing is that users don’t need to have any programming knowledge whatsoever to add the website translator and feedback form to their site. ConveyThis creates all the necessary code automatically. Once a user signs up at ConveyThis.com, they can visit the ‘Create a Form’ page to get started. The user simply has to copy and paste the code into their site when they are finished, and they will have a website that can cater to multiple language visitors at the click of a button.
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10 Regional Americanisms For Your Next Roadtrip
Apr 18th
A little while back I did a blog post about the Dictionary of American Regional English which is compilation of regional phrases from all over the United States. It has been a 50-year endeavor to capture the diversity of the American English language from cultures from the past and present.
For anyone who’s driven cross country, you know how different each state (and even each county) can be. It isn’t just the landscape, but the people as well, so of course it stands to reason the language becomes as unique as the region.
In the last post I didn’t list too many regional examples from the dictionary, so let me correct that by sharing some of them with you now.
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American Slang From The Early 19th Century
Apr 17th
It’s interesting how every generation that comes along inevitably needs to add their own ingredients to the language stew, so to speak. While I was growing up, the ubiquitous ‘cool’ was popular, but we also had words like ‘stellar’, ‘boney’, ‘lifted’, ‘thick’, and ‘haggard’; the meanings of which seemed to only be known by those in a certain age-bracket.
This, of course, is nothing new. Generations after generations have been creating their own slang words that fade in and out of popularity, some quicker than others. My parents’ had ‘daddy-o’, ‘big tickle’, ‘square’, etc. I guess it is just a generation’s way of carving out their own niche in history, as nothing is more relative to a culture than the way people communicate with each another.
Recently I came across a website with some words from the generation 200 years back. It’s an interesting peak into a culture that is far removed from today’s, and yet, inherently exactly the same.
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One Word Translator (OWT) For Your Website Or Blog
Apr 16th
Website Owners — Have you ever wanted to include a translation tool on your website? Tired of redirecting to and from Google Translate or some other machine translator tool? Now you can incorporate One Word Translator into your website easily and for free.
Developed by Translation Services USA, the team behind Translation Cloud and Ackuna, One Word Translator (OWT) provides a simple translator tool that embeds directly into your website by simply copying and pasting a portion of code into your site, wherever you want.
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Church Of Kopimism Is Now Officially Recognized
Apr 16th
The Church of Kopimism, the new religion devoted to file-sharing, has been officially recognized in Sweden.
Started by Isak Gerson, a 20-year-old philosophy student at Uppsala University in Sweden, together with Gustav Nipe, a member of Sweden’s Pirate party, and others, the Church of Kopimism is founded on the principles that information is holy and so is the act of copying and sharing information.
This belief in the open distribution of information is what led the Church of Kopimism to seek religion status rather than mere organization status. The group began about a year and a half ago, and after three tries to become recognized by Sweden, they finally succeeded.
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What’s The Deal With Friday The 13th?
Apr 13th
So it’s Friday the 13th…The unluckiest day known to mankind. But why?
The origin of Friggatriskaidekaphobia (the fear of Friday the 13th) is not really conclusive, but it’s believed it came from an amalgamation of two different superstitions: that thirteen is an unlucky number, and that Friday is an unlucky day.
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Poor-Speaking Romney Gets Bad Translation
Apr 13th
Враг номер один: No. 1 enemy
I am, in general, a big fan of the democratic process. Give the candidates their say, vote ‘em in, or vote ‘em out.
But during the electoral season — which in the United States is pretty much nonstop these days — I start waffling on the “give them their say” part of the process. Sometimes I wish they’d shut up.
That goes double when they babble on camera, circle around a topic, leave clauses dangling and use nonstandard vocabulary. Because when you filter their comments through translation, headlines and some editorial cherry-picking, a stupid comment becomes a международный инцидент номер один (No. 1 international incident).
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5 Historically Legendary Translation Blunders
Apr 13th
Whenever you have millions of people speaking different languages, miss-communication will always be the number one problem. We rely on translators and interpreters to be the go-betweens; the rosetta stones, so to speak, of all the world’s people.
However, these interpreters and translators are human beings, and in being so, are subject to making mistakes. Unfortunately, sometimes these mistakes can result in life-altering consequences.
The following 5 mistranslations showcase some of the biggest blunders ever to be recorded in the pages of history.
11 Funny Foreign Sayings
Apr 11th
…And What They Mean
Raining cats and dogs
Sayings, or idioms, are commonly known expressions whose meaning is symbolized by a generally unrelated phrase. For example, kick the bucket meaning ‘to die’.
These types of sayings can be very much tied to a particular geographical culture. What may be a well-understood phrase in one area may fly over the heads of people in another. Even sections within the same state may have such cultural differences as to not share the same idioms.
Since that is the case, you can imagine how confusing idioms from foreign countries may sound to one another.
I’ve compiled a list of some of the strangest, and funniest, sayings from other parts of the world.
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The Language Of Flowers
Apr 11th
Most people know that giving someone flowers is a way to show they care. But did you know that the type of flower you choose has a meaning all its own?
The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, was a Victorian-era means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken. This language was most commonly communicated through Tussie-Mussies, an art which has a following today.
The nuances of the language are now mostly forgotten, but some flower-meanings still carry some resonance today. Red roses still imply romantic love and pink roses a lesser affection; white roses suggest virtue and chastity and yellow roses still stand for friendship or devotion.
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