"How bad is your cultural cringe?" (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed) Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o. Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname? (laughter) Keith:…
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Mehrsprachige Buecher - multilingual books - ketabhaye chand zabane The release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census of Population data is an invitation to reflect on the composition…
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Cabramatta, Australia Last week an email was sent around my office about our upcoming Harmony Day celebration on 21 March. The email suggested that to mark the occasion, interested staff could…
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Translation of Christoph Gutknecht, “Codewort Schibboleth”, originally published in Jüdische Allgemeine, July 07, 2011 Each time I visit France and have breakfast there, I am reminded of Goethe. In his…
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A most amazing book has just landed on my desk: Do you speak Swiss, edited by Walter Haas, is the final report on a Swiss National Research Project devoted to…
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Condoms in translation It’s been impossible to escape this week’s media coverage of the pope’s comments about condoms and male prostitutes. There has been a lot of debate about what…
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The social networking market research site Inside Facebook has some intriguing language stats. In July, the fastest-growing languages on Facebook were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. The Portuguese growth rate…
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If you could choose to learn a foreign language, which one would it be? And why? Such choices are usually constrained by what is on offer. However, someone must choose…
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