Found in Translation

Saying Kaddish

Jonathan Haddad — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 07:22:14 +0000

I said kaddish for the first time this past Saturday. It was to mourn a dear aunt who recently passed away. Growing up, my parents and siblings would stay at her place when we visited Israel, and we experienced her kindness and generosity in countless ways. My aunt spoke little or no English. We used [...]

The Language of Clothing

kimmesome — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 05:05:02 +0000

What I find interesting is how different companies use different methods to make themselves appealing to consumers. The same company can even market its products differently simply because of a different neighborhood having a different type of people. Something that is interesting is how clothing brands market their products differently to people based on location. [...]

Restaurants and their Stories

f12ealang84 — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:45:05 +0000

The inspiration for our project was our mutual love for food and our propensity to dine out almost all the time. We decided to take our love of restaurants and show how there are multiple factors that contribute to the reputation that a restaurant develops in the minds of its patrons.

Our choice of restaurant to [...]

UCB sophomore seminar on linguistic landscape

daveski — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:40:16 +0000

This past semester, students in a new Sophomore Seminar offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Berkeley Language Center have taken significant steps toward understanding the complexity of language in multilingual environments like Berkeley.

Rather than focus on the speech or writing practices of bilingual individuals, however, participants [...]

“Where is the language classroom today?” – Looking back, looking forward

daveski — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:26:22 +0000

At a presentation I was fortunate enough to give a little over a week ago at the BLC (“Where is the language classroom today?: Reconsidering the place/s of language learning with technology”), I opened with a comment about the stage fright I was feeling at the outset of an hour-long presentation, one which [...]

Gaffology 101

Robin Lakoff — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:42:53 +0000

The world of the early twenty-first century is one divided by factionalism and suspicion, and connected by new channels of communication that are uneditable, instantaneous, and anonymous. Therefore the most important thing a modern president must know in order to be effective is how to use language, both interpretively and actively, both domestically and globally. [...]

Goodness is on the edges

aaminahm — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:37:07 +0000

It was the first day of school. As I stood near the front entrance of Mr. Larry’s 6th grade all-boy advisory an African American mother walks in with her son who was on crutches. Mr. Larry was speaking to another parent and student and so I took it upon myself to welcome this [...]

SS19: Reading multilingualism and superdiversity, online and in the city

daveski — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 08:40:36 +0000

I’m at the 19th Sociolinguistics Symposium, being held August 21-24 at Berlin’s Freie Universität, and wanting to report out some of the happenings here. As is the case at any conference, there are far too many sessions going on to experience or report on anything but a fraction of the totality (I [...]

Misframing of Hindi, Hinglish: A response

Usree Bhattacharya — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:11:54 +0000

The article, “Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head” by Ananya Vajpeyi (Assistant Professor of History, UMass Boston), published by the World Policy Journal, jumped out at me from among the sundry language policy related news items in a listserv email I received. While the attempt to parse out delicate and complicated issues related [...]

Well, yes I am an American: In gratitude to the Black Heritage Trail

aaminahm — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 21:36:41 +0000

As a follow up to my recent post “a fish out of water” I want to provide some context for my experience in Boston by pointing out that I walked the Black Heritage Trail through the Beacon Hill district today. This trail begins at the monument for the 54th regiment who fought the Civil War for no [...]