The trouble with business gobbledygook
By Lilia Borlongan-Alvarez, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Let’s face it – The current global financial crisis which has led to the mass firing of employees has spawned popular euphemisms which both government and private organizations find convenient to use to protect the latter from embarrassment or legal action.

So, “involuntary separation,” “letting go,” “downsizing,” “re-engineering,” “restructuring,” and “streamlining” are preferred to “layoffs.” The word “challenge” is used to actually refer to “a problem.” “Recession” is used to mean a “depression.” When one is given the “pink slip,” he or she is “fired!” And a company “disinvests” when it fact it “closes a retail outlet in a community.”

Everywhere one turns, euphemistic language pervades the workplace and almost all business dealings. No matter how you look at it, a euphemism’s real meaning is always worse than its apparent meaning, says Hugh Rawson, author of “A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk.”

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I, Translator
By David Bellos, Op-Ed contributor, The New York Times

Everybody has his own tale of terrible translation to tell—an incomprehensible restaurant menu in Croatia, a comically illiterate warning sign on a French beach. “Human-engineered” translation is just as inadequate in more important domains. In our courts and hospitals, in the military and security services, underpaid and overworked translators make muddles out of millions of vital interactions. Machine translation can certainly help in these cases. Its legendary bloopers are often no worse than the errors made by hard-pressed humans.

Machine translation has proved helpful in more urgent situations as well. When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January, aid teams poured in to the shattered island, speaking dozens of languages—but not Haitian Creole. How could a trapped survivor with a cellphone get usable information to rescuers? If he had to wait for a Chinese or Turkish or an English interpreter to turn up he might be dead before being understood. Carnegie Mellon University instantly released its Haitian Creole spoken and text data, and a network of volunteer developers produced a rough-and-ready machine translation system for Haitian Creole in little more than a long weekend. It didn’t produce prose of great beauty. But it worked.

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Hang on English speakers, it might get weird
By Christopher Moore, Huffingtonpost.com

Here’s the thing: the Oxford English Dictionary gives William Shakespeare first citation credit for more than 500 words. In fact, Will is credited with coining anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand new words, with consensus among academics coming in around 1700. Whatever the actual number, Shakespeare was a singular genius, a quantum leap in rhetorical invention, the twenty-nine foot long jump of English—but he was also the product of a revolution in the language in general, and we may just be rushing into another one.

From 1476, when William Caxton began setting Chaucer and other classic literature into print, until around 1611, when the King James Bible was widely released, the English language consolidated a scattering of regional dialects with disparate spellings and pronunciations into a single language, but a young one that left room for the extraordinary inventiveness of Shakespeare. The printed word moved the English meme in geometric, rather than linear, progressions, causing a demand for more and different units of information (i.e., words), and Shakespeare provided them.

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No
By Ben Zimmer, language columnist, The New York Times

Two of the most basic words in the English language, yes and no, are locked in a constant struggle, embodying abstract forces of agreement and opposition, positivity and negativity, acceptance and denial. Just look at the recent Congressional wrangling over health care reform, where the words have come to stand for much more than simply the up or down votes that legislators may cast. Democrats seeking a final compromise over health care legislation have talked optimistically about getting to yes. “I just wish and hope some of my colleagues will be willing to help us get to yes on this,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said. And a House leadership aide told The Huffington Post, “We do have an environment where people can now get to yes.”

Getting to yes has become a creaky cliché in political and business circles thanks to a best-selling negotiation manual with that title first published in 1981. The authors of “Getting to Yes,” Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, outlined the best strategies for reaching a settlement by identifying “options for mutual gain.” Fisher had been experimenting with the word yes for quite a while. Back in 1969, he argued in the book “International Conflict for Beginners” that the key to getting the other side of the bargaining table to agree is to present them with a “yesable proposition.”

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Immigration changing the language Of America
By Frosty Wooldridge, editor, BeforeItsNews.com
 
Over a decade ago, citizens voted to make English the official language of Colorado.  English remains the national language of America.  English drives the overwhelming majority of conversations in Canada and the United States.
 
But, you cannot help noticing that our English language finds itself being undermined and in competition with Mexico’s national language: Spanish.
 
These days, when I walk into Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Home Depot, Lowes Hardware, Target, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s or phone other companies—I might as well be in a foreign country. Press ‘1’ for Spanish; press ‘2’ for English.  Those businesses feature a language not of our country, which is a direct contradiction to our U.S. Constitution.   I cannot understand anyone in line because they speak other languages. I am irritated that I must contend with my native language being undercut and undermined by my own fellow pretend-Americans. Mind you, I love languages. I studied French and Italian extensively! My brother Howard speaks five languages fluently.
 
But those Spanish speaking aliens disrespect our country’s laws and language while they work illegally and live in contradiction to our laws.  

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Split screen: Metro-textual
By James "DexX" Dominguez, BrisbaneTimes.com

I have a confession to make: I am a dubbing snob. When watching any film originally made in a language other than English, I will always insist on subtitles. There are a few reasons for this, not least that when dubbing a foreign-language film a distributor will usually do it on the cheap and hire terrible actors. Even a good voice cast, in my opinion, cannot capture the quality of a good live performance.

There are linguistic issues on top of the artistic concerns, too. Every language has its own unique rhythm and cadence, its own balance of consonants and vowels, and, more subjectively, its own emotional range and subtleties. What may be expressed in a few words in one language may take three times as long to express in another.

When dubbing a film, even an animated one, the movements of the mouths on screen are locked down, and a translator has to do the best she can to formulate phrasing that will match the action on-screen as closely as possible. Voice actors then have to try to deliver a quality performance while also fitting their words into a precise envelope. The results are often stilted and awkward.

Even though I will always watch non-English language films with subtitles, it had never occurred to me that I could do the same while playing a game. Great games have been coming out of Europe for many years, with the now defunct French company Delphine Software International (Another World, Flashback, Cruise for a Corpse) being one of the most notable early pioneers.

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Abusing slow news days: Common mistakes in English
By Thom Holwerda, OSNews

Since everybody in the technology world is apparently having a vacation, and nobody told me about it, we're kind of low on news. As such, this seems like the perfect opportunity to gripe about something I've always wanted to gripe about: a number of common mistakes in English writing in the comments section. I'll also throw in some tidbits about my native language, Dutch, so you can compare and contrast between the two.

Let me start off by saying that overall, I think the OSNews readership has an absolutely excellent grasp of the English language. This is all the more impressive when you take into account that for about half of our readers, English is not their native language. We have readers from all over the world, and like me, and Eugenia before that, they grew up with other languages.

This means that this little story is not meant as some sort of arrogant diatribe about how the English language is being destroyed or whatever (heck, even after getting a university degree in this language I'm still making mistakes every other sentence). What I want to do here is point out some oft-made mistakes by many non-native speakers of English (and a lot of native speakers!) that are easy to combat.

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English as a life skill

The Sri Lanka India Centre for English Language Training (SLICELT) was opened by Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao recently. It marked a new beginning in English language education in Sri Lanka.

The establishment of SLICELT also marks a radical departure from the past in the way of learning and teaching English. While all other nations were speaking and using English in their own ways, Sri Lanka continued to speak and use English just as the English did. In fact, we were proud to admit that we use English the Queen's way long after becoming independent.

English educated gentry used to mock at other countries that developed their own English. Little did these brown sahibs realise that most of them would have been mocking at Sri Lankans for their attempts at safeguarding a colonial heritage. It was the Americans who started using English in their own way. The influence of American English has been so great that even the orthodox Britishers were compelled to borrow words and phrases from the American diction.

In retrospect we could observe that this overt subservience to the former coloniser’s language practice was a method to keep the knowledge of English language to a select few, to perpetuate a stratum of brown sahibs.

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