Language Trainers Blog

Small language book publisher Diglot Books is celebrating a victory against internet marketplace Amazon. The retailer had previously refused to make Cornish children’s story Matthew and the Wellington Boots (Matthew ha’n Eskisyow Glaw) available through Kindle Direct Publishing because the language was not supported by the platform. The Kindle Direct Publishing platform officially supports only 10 languages; English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque, though more languages are set to be added in the future.

Diglot Books pointed out that the title is actually in English and Cornish, and no extra letters or characters are used that are not already in the English language (Cornish has 23 characters.)

Director Alison O’Dornan used social media to garner support for the campaign, which has now seen Amazon’s decision reversed. Matthew and the Wellington Boots is now available through the Amazon Kindle store.

A new smartphone app which helps teach sign language has won another award.

Sign4Life was developed by secondary school students from Salesian College in Co. Limerick, as part of their Transition Year project. The app, which is now available on Android; is aimed at friends, family and teachers of the deaf, and is designed to help bridge the gap between the deaf and hearing communities through video technology.

In March, the five students won the regional finals of Junior Achievement Ireland. They followed this up in May by taking the All-Ireland National Junior Achievement title.

Caoimhe O’Neill, Ciara Reidy, Colleen Mullane, Chris O’Brien and Fiona Mangan then competed against teams from 32 countries at the Junior Achievement Young Enterprise  European Final, which was held in Bucharest, Romania. The girls won the prestigious Company of the Year award at this event, after making a presentation and undergoing an in depth interview with the judges.

“We have seen so much, we have learned so much. With some things, you have to make an effort. It isn’t going to come to you,” said team member Caoimhe O’Neill.

In addition, the UK team, Vitamin Boom, won the FedEx Access Award for their Super Froo-Tea tea bags and iced tea products, which contain Baobab.

The Junior Achievement programme is part of a worldwide organisation, and aims to bring enterprise to the education system, and give students hands-on experience of running their own business. The organisation uses mentors from local businesses to help students through the process.

French (along with English) is the official language of the Olympics, yet has been used sparingly in London for these Games. The only usage I’ve noticed is that all the official speeches at the opening Ceremony were given in French first, then English. Certainly all the newly erected official signs on the streets here in London are in English.

Have you ever wondered WHY the official language of the Olympics is French? Shouldn’t it be primarily the language of the host country?

The answer is that the official language is primarily French as it is the language of the International Olympic Committee. The IOC headquarters is in Lausanne, a French speaking city in Switzerland. More specifically, it’s in honour of the founder of the Olympic Committee, Paris born Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who is considered the “father” of the Olympic Games.

Other French language Olympic facts:

• 23 nations participating in the Olympics have French as an official language
• French and English are the official languages of the Olympic Charter (the rules which govern the Games) – however in the case of discrepancies, French takes precedence!
• Gilbert Fellim, the IOC’s Olympic Games Executive Director, says that French is always to be used during opening ceremonies and medal presentations.

Google has announced that over 200 million people use its’ Translate service every month.

Google Translate launched in 2006 offering Chinese and Arabic translation, and now offers translation in 64 different languages.

Google Research Scientist Franz Och said in an official blog post:

In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate.

Whilst the translation system isn’t as precise as a human translator, there’s no denying it’s popularity and usefulness.

Source: Google

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) have called for languages to be made compulsory in schools until AS levels, in order to help the future economy. Modern languages had previously been a mandatory subject for GCSEs, but this was changed in 2004. French and German were the most popular choices offered by many schools, but the number of students taking those subjects has halved in the last 16 years.

Last summer, 154,221 pupils took French. This is in contrast to the 350,027 pupils who sat the exam in 1995. 60,887 students took the German GCSE last year, compared with 129,386 in 1995.

Director General of the BCC, John Longworth, said:

“A renewed focus on language skills at school, as well as helping companies forge new connections overseas, could help ensure that current and future business owners are pre-disposed to thinking internationally.

We are already the sixth largest trading nation on earth, and the third largest service exporter, but to really secure our future as a leading exporter we need to help companies take advantage of new markets.

Giving businesses the opportunity to forge links with international firms, develop employees’ language skills, and providing compulsory education in languages for young people will transform many of the great businesses we have in the UK into success stories overseas.”

The business network also called for tax breaks for small companies which offer foreign language training to staff.

The National Curriculum is currently under Government review, with changes expected to be announced in 2013.

Source: Channel 4 News

Following the launch of the European Spanish store, online retailer Amazon.com now has a specialist Kindle shop for digital books in the Spanish language on its US site.  The books on offer include an exclusive on Paolo Coelho novels, the popular Twilight and Hunger Games collections, and titles by authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The site also offers subscriptions to Latin American newspapers, such as La Nacion.

“We’re excited to introduce Spanish language storefronts on all Kindles, as well as a dedicated store for our Spanish-speaking customers in the US,” said Kindle Content vice president Russ Grandinetti. ”We’re looking forward to continued expansion of our store for Spanish language readers around the world.”

In addition, the company now offers customer help and support in Spanish.

US Kindle users can buy the books here.

A new proposal from Qiu He, a provincial committee member in the Kunming, in the Yunnan province of China, has led to the mandatory education of local civil servants over the next year.  Because Kunming is widely known as a ‘bridge’ from China to South and South-East Asia, civil servants will not only have to brush up on their Mandarin and computer skills, they will have to master hundreds of basic phrases in five other languages.

Civil servants will have to attend an intensive schedule of classes after work, three times a week, sometimes until 10pm.

English is not the only language they will learn. “We will also learn Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese, as well as Mandarin and computer skills,” an official from the publicity department of the CPC Kunming Municipal Committee told reporters.

On-the-job public officials under the age of 50 in Kunming are required to master 700 daily expressions across five foreign languages including 300 English sentences and 100 sentences in Lao, Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese each.

Qiu also set out clear study duration. A report by Xinhua News Agency said that Qiu has required civil servants under the age of 50 in Kunming to master 300 English sentences, 100 sentences in Vietnamese, Burmese and Lao each before National Day this year. The Kunming Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government will organize tests to determine the standard of learning and will regard proficiency in rare languages as a requirement for promotion.

As much as I applaud foreign language learning in the workplace, I can’t help but think that this is a punishing schedule that may be a little too ambitious.  The languages are very different, and none use the same script.  I wonder if the students will be required to read and write these languages as well, or if the training will be predominantly spoken.  I will be interested to see how successful this venture turns out to be.

Full article from People’s Daily Online.

I’ve already mentioned how confusing business-speak can be, both to the language learner and the native speaker.  How often have you heard someone give a presentation and had no idea what they were actually talking about?

The Business Sentence Generator is a fun little application that uses a standard sentence structure and combines it with business-speak phrases and buzzwords to randomly create sentences worthy of the flashiest, most content-free business presentation in the world.

Here are the first four sentences it gave me.   It’s a little disconcerting how genuinely corporate they sound.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen…

From a historical point of view, the recent re-engineering necessitates supply chain integration.

Although…

In pursuit of unique opportunities, our burn rate is further compounded by considering a novel quality vector.

However…

Given the undue reliance on derivative materials, a transaction-enabled platform stabilises a tangible return.

In conclusion…

To proactively manage profit, our contingency schematic embraces our exceedance of standards.

Thank you for your attention.  Please sign here to allocate funds to my project…

Local council leaders in the UK have been issued a list of 200 jargon, or specialist, terms that they think should no longer be used when communicating with the public.

With more and more people unsure about their financial futures, councils have realised that they need to be more transparent with their communities.  This means that they need to let them know exactly what they’re doing, especially with taxpayers’ money.  And they need to let them know in plain English.  If someone is about to find themselves in worklessness (that is, unemployed), they should probably be told in words they understand.

The majority of people will have no idea what predictors of beaconicity, coterminosity, conditionality, or double devolution mean.  And when the people looking after your money and your town are throwing phrases like this around, you begin to wonder what they’re covering up.

If you think you know what seedbed and coterminous, stakeholder engagement mean to jargon-slinging  council types, take the BBC council jargon quiz.  I scored a sad 3 out of 7.  Check the full list of banned terms (unfortunately without translation into simple English) for more bafflement.

source: BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Councils get banned jargon list.

Learning business English can sometimes be much more of a challenge than conversational English or English for particular industries.  Students of English may be surprised that native speakers are also often frustrated by the sheer number (and often pointlessness) of new management-speak terms that are thrown around the corporate workplace.

In the office, everything from modified sports terms (‘this project will be a home run for us’), to business clichés (‘let’s think outside the box on this one’), to completely irrelevant analogies (‘this company is a really cool train set‘) abound. Middle and upper management seem to constantly be throwing together mixed metaphors (‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music‘) and making up words and phrases (incentivise, strategic staircase).  Is it because they don’t really know what they’re doing, don’t have a plan, or do they think that buzzwords will justify their overblown salaries?

Many of the above phrases are from a compilation of BBC readers’ worst examples of office-speak.  Read the full list to find out why one reader’s boss suggested idea showers instead of brainstorms.