The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/1035089
@Linguist_CIOL Ubang: The Nigerian Village where Men and Women speak Different Languages, 23/8/18 Boys grow up speaking the female language, as they spend most of their childhoods with their mothers and other women, as Chief Ibang explains. By the age of 10, boys are expected to speak the 'male language', he says. "There is a stage the male will reach and he discovers he is not using his rightful language… [then] you know the maturity is coming into him." If a child does not switch to the correct language by a certain age, they are considered "abnormal", he says. What the papers say… Google Translate Returns some Very Disturbing Results when you Type Certain Phrases, 25/7/18 "Languages which tend to have smaller amounts of translated texts to pair off against are generally the ones most responsible for the weirdest translations… This is where the potentially apocalyptic text comes in – religious texts including the Bible exist in all the languages causing the oddities, and this would potentially explain some of the more esoteric messages being fired out." Google Translate: The unlikely World Cup hero breaking barriers for fans, 11/7/18 Google reports a 30% increase in Translate sessions from within Russia using mobile phones since the tournament began, with conversion from Spanish to Russian the most popular option… Queries containing 'World Cup' have gone up by 200% and those involving 'beer' by 65%. Statistics may appear dry but they seem to confirm one of the more desirable side-effects of a World Cup: a genuine effort from people of multiple nationalities to have a good time and get along. The latest from the languages world NEWS & EDITORIAL Using baby talk with tots helps them learn to speak more quickly, according to research released in July. Linguists at the University of Edinburgh studied babies aged 9-21 months and found that those who were exposed to onomatopoeic words (e.g. 'bow-wow'), diminutive words (e.g 'doggy') and repeated words had a larger vocabulary. The study, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and published in Cognitive Science, concluded: "Even though words such as 'choo‐choo' and 'bunny' appear superfluous, they may play an important role in bootstrapping the development of the lexicon as a whole." https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12628 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 5 The government has reversed its decision to block the introduction of a GCSE in British Sign Language (BSL) until after the next general election. Previously, the Schools Minister Nick Gibb had said there was no need for a GCSE in the language. Described as a "major turning point", the U-turn follows a campaign by 12-year-old BSL user Daniel Jillings, whose lawyer argued that the lack of a BSL GCSE might be "discriminatory and unlawful". The National Deaf Children's Society backed the campaign, citing evidence that 92% of children think there should be a BSL GCSE. There are 45,000 deaf children in the UK who may want to take the exam. Boost for BSL recognition Recordings of more than 150 Amazonian languages have been destroyed in a fire that ravaged the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Around 20 million artefacts were lost in the fire, which burned for six hours on 2 September. The museum's Documentation Center of Indigenous Languages had recently started to digitise its archives but most of its records, including audio of extinct indigenous languages, was not backed-up. Brazil language archives lost The benefits of baby talk The company which manages the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI) has announced that it will launch a National Register of Public Service Translators in 2019. NRPSI Ltd consulted a variety of stakeholders, including NRPSI registrants with a translation qualification, before making the decision. The new register will be run in the same way as the NRPSI. See bit.ly/NRPSTlaunch New register of translators © SHUTTERSTOCK