“Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech,” according to Quillpad creator Ram Prakash, the New York Times reports today. In the last […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 30, 2008
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Lerner Publishing, publishers of Angel Girl, based on Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat‘s “love story,” announced that they have “canceled pending reprints of the book and will refund the price of any returned books.” The story, based on Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, inspired many, including […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 29, 2008
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Lake Superior State University just released its annual list of Banished Words. Vote for the word(s) you would banish in our first ever FIT poll (updated with official list-the previous one turned out to be a…hoax!)!
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 29, 2008
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5:10 pm. Ma and I find ourselves at the NOIDA Trade Fair at the old circus grounds. There are stalls selling some Limca Book “record-breaking” variety of honey; “stomach flattening” abdominal belts; South Indian gold-plated jewelery; pleather accessories; miraculous “Ayurvedic” herbal supplements promising to cure every ailment known to man; tamarind, mango, and pomegranate flavored […]
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Written By: daveski on December 28, 2008
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While I was wading through the myriad book exhibits at the carnivalesque MLA conference in San Francisco (7000+ people here, they say), I happened across the very cool-looking Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations published in 2000 by the New York University Press, edited by Marc […]
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Written By: katie_k on December 28, 2008
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So I began writing this as a comment on daveski’s “Good morning” but it grew into this post instead. I’ve actually wanted to write on it for a while, so thanks for the inspiration daveski!
One of my favorite things in France was walking into a shop and immediately having to say “Bonjour Monsieur/Madame”. I was […]
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Written By: daveski on December 28, 2008
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I’m on the way to the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in San Francisco. Decided late this morning to go to a session on the 2007 MLA report on for Foreign Languages, where I know I’ll be able to meet a few fellow Berkeleyans. But I’m not ready to think about […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 27, 2008
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What do the following words have in common: abbey, aisle, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, sin, devil, vicar, acorn, almond, ash, beech, blackberry, blacksmith, chestnut, crocus, heather, ivy, lavender, primrose, sycamore, willow, porridge, raven, starling, stork, pelican, coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire and monarch?
The Oxford University […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 27, 2008
5 Comments
The Hubli Unusual Abuse competition takes place today on the hallowed grounds of the Dakshina Vaishnodevi Temple in Karnataka, a southern Indian state. The participants will “hurl abuses” (in English, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and other Indian languages), and winners will be awarded flower garlands. There are some guidelines for […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 25, 2008
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 25, 2008
7 Comments
A couple of evenings ago, with the temperature dipping into the low teens (in °C), and the stale winter air thickly polluted with smog, my mother and I happened upon the National Khadi Fair in a suburb of New Delhi, India. Even though we had pending errands to run, we were inexorably drawn to the […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 24, 2008
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‘Twas the night before Christmas when Youki and Usree decided to do a bit of cross-continental liveblogging using Skype. They had planned to liveblog their views about a viral music video, an “Indian” version of the Twelve Days of Christmas (performed by an “animated” pop singer, Boymongoose), but, the “organic” nature of liveblogging, as […]
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Written By: daveski on December 24, 2008
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Already more days have passed than I wanted since my first post on signs — I haven’t been carrying my camera around with me as I’ve been running around doing holiday shopping, bike has been in the shop, and with all the interesting things going on related to the end of the year, […]
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Written By: Youki on December 23, 2008
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My wife and I were looking at cell phone plans and commenting on how our current plan (that we got back when text messaging was brand new) charges us $1 per text message which is pretty high (but we pay $50 for 2 lines which is pretty low). Made me think of this video:
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Written By: daveski on December 22, 2008
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It’s that time of year, when we take stock of how language has changed along with all the events of the year. Lots to talk about this time around with global financial crisis, presidential elections, changing climates, and another year of crappy Bay Area sports teams. (sorry, A’s fans, it’s true…)
Have you heard about “edupunk”? […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 22, 2008
2 Comments
Standing in the middle of the room…
April 21st, 2005
I was standing at a central point in the room. The walls were all at approximately the same distance from me. I continued to stand there for a few moments.
***
That entry-in its painful recounting of life’s minutiae-comes from a post on “the dullest blog in […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 21, 2008
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I was looking at the Offbeat News section on Digg.com, when I found a link to this awesome Flickr photograph (see below). It presents famous logos of big companies, cleverly modified to reflect the tough economic times. [Click on the picture in order to see a bigger version.] “wmliu,” (who I […]
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Written By: Youki on December 21, 2008
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A monthly roundup of blog posts on Found in Translation.
Adam Mendelson shares his thoughts as a Spanish instructor here at UC Berkeley in “Spanish: Foreign or Second Language?”
Billette writes about her experiences teaching French 1 at UC Berkeley in “Apprehensions about Foreign Language Teaching, or How I Had […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 21, 2008
3 Comments
Still somewhat jet-lagged and travel weary after a recent 20-something hour marathon flight from San Fransisco to New Delhi, I headed over to a local gym, intriguingly named Addiction, to get a month’s membership. Yesterday we’d picked up a form, and today we were supposed to drop it off. Hunched over in the car […]
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Written By: Usree Bhattacharya on December 19, 2008
2 Comments
When all the people of the world finally speak the same language and commune in the same message or the same norm of reason, we will descend, idiot imbeciles, lower than rats, more stupidly than lizards. The same maniacal language and science, the same repetitions of the same in all latitudes–an earth covered with […]
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