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/757464
thelinguist.uberflip.com DECEMBER 2016/JANUARY 2017 The Linguist 27 FEATURES A good read: 1. She was revealed to be the best-selling novelist known by the pseudonym Elena Ferrente; 2. They won the Man Booker International Prize, which put the work of translator on a par with that of author by being award jointly for the first time; 3. With a new translation of the Quran using a split-page format to draw 3,000 parallels between the Bible and the Quran; 4. An app displaying two language versions of the same book simultaneously, available in multiple languages. That's entertainment: 1. Funding of £74.5m secured until 2022; 2. The first British Sign Language-only TV ad launched on C4, initially without subtitles; 3. Because the American couldn't read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) in the original French; 4. Multilingual evacuation drills. In class: 1. MFL courses in some state schools in England due to falling intake; 2. "Harsh and inconsistent" GCSEs and A-levels (Language Trends); 3. The end of Routes into Languages funding; 4. Two-thirds; 5. A mentoring scheme aimed at stemming the decline in A-level MFL take-up in which university students mentor secondary school pupils. Twitter storm: 1. Changes to the spelling of 2,400 French words (approved by the Académie Française in 1990); 2. The rise in hate abuse following the Brexit vote in June; 3. Oxford dictionaries' usage sentence "rabid feminists" and other "sexist" example sentences; 4. Attempt to get the word petaloso ('full of flowers'), invented by 8-year-old Italian school boy Matteo, into everyday Italian usage. High tech: 1. Improved Google Translate function enabling in-app translation; 2. The advert seemed to celebrate sexual harassment; 3. Pilot, its real-time ear-piece translator; 4. The Japanese games company replaced the Cantonese names with Mandarin pronunciation. Quiz answers Across 1. German 12 across (7) 5. Turkic language written over the years in Arabic, Cyrillic and now Latin script (5) 8. Neologism describing one who does fundraising on the streets (7) 9. From Arabic, religious laws, especially in Christian contexts (5) 10. Literally 'Ladder', opera house in Milan (5) 11. From Sanskrit meaning 'extinguished', this describes the end of the rebirth cycle. (7) 12. Named by Collins as Word of the Year 2016 (6) 14. Italian 12 across (6) 17. A balletic leap, from French 'scissors' (7) 19. One who wanders from place to place seeking pasture (5) 22. Portuguese 12 across. (5) 23. To make something last longer than necessary (4,3) 24. 'May it' 12 across, Latin. (5) 25. Tungsten is one word we derive from this language (7) Down 1. Latin 'bow', used to describe low horizontal cloud (5) 2. Acronym essential to the deep-sea diver (5) 3. Ready to be spent in Kabul (7) 4. A verb form which functions as a noun (6) 5. It comes from too much worry (5) 6. With 210 million speakers, this is the world's seventh most spoken native language (7) 7. But it's spoken in South India, not North America! (7) 12. French name used locally for the woodcock in America (7) 13. Adjoining washing facilities (2,5) 15. Holy faith can be found in New Mexico (5,2) 16. Greek 12 across (6) 18. Radically, it comes before 'garde' (5) 20. Early explorers, such as Captain Cook, first tried to transcribe this South Polynesian language using Latin script (5) 21. Is this language nonsense if repeated? (5) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Crossword no.16 Solution, page 33 Who's who? 1. Four-year-old Bella Devyatkina went viral worldwide after showcasing her skills in seven languages on the Russian TV show Udivitelniye Lyudi ('Incredible People'); 2. Jean-Luc Mélenchon said English can't be one of the European Parliament's three working languages following the Brexit vote; 3. Jonas Nay became the face of Walter Presents, a C4 service dedicated to foreign language TV, when it launched with Deutschland 83 in January; 4. Andy Gray 'interpreted' an interview with David Luiz for beIN Sports using his O level French. Until it was pointed out that Luiz was speaking Portuguese. In numbers: 1. c.; 2. b.; 3. a.; 4. a. Political dealings: 1. A Minister for Language Policy; 2. Losing up to £150,000 a year Government funding; 3. Although Hollande said "Islamist terrorism" was at the "roots of terrorism", that was cut from the interpretation; 4. To combat the likely impact of Brexit; 5. A new Welsh- language area of the British Government's website. Who said… 1. Julia Donaldson in a Dundonian Scots translation of her modern children's classic The Gruffalo, published in October; 2. Menus in South Korea, leading the government to set up a task force to deal with embarrassing restaurant translations; 3. Lord Ashdown, former leader of the UK Liberal Democrats; 4. Google Translate from Ukrainian into Russian – an apparently deliberate act of sabotage. True or false: 1. True; 2. True, according to researchers in Cambridge and Cyprus; 3. False: researches at McGill University in Montreal claimed they could use brain scans to test aptitude; 4. False: the word 'seven' is pronounced 'chat', meaning 'penis' in Cantonese. For the quiz, see page 14.