Tag: language acquisition

French, Language Acquisition, Links, Recommendations, Spanish, Translation

New Words #13: How Many Continents Are There?

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Years ago, when I gave my high school students an assignment (in French) to learn about the origins of the Olympic Movement, they were flabbergasted by the revelation that the Olympic rings represent “les cinq continents habités.” They had always been taught that there are seven continents, of which six are inhabited—but their French-language sources, along with the United Nations, were insisting that there were merely six continents, of which five were inhabited. What on Earth (literally) was going on?

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Irish, Language Acquisition, Links, Literary Translation, Translation, TV series

New Words #2: Complicated as 1, 2, 3

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Has there been an uptick lately in clickbait about “untranslatable” terms? Maybe the algorithms are just increasingly determined to lure me in. Either way, I’m not falling for it.

I suspect this focus on untranslatability leads people to believe that the challenges of translation are concentrated in a handful of terms per language, which isn’t the case at all. In fact, the grammatical impacts of simple, everyday concepts in a given language can affect its syntax, rhythms, and sounds in ways present as much of a challenge to translators as they do to language learners.

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