FRENCH TO DUTCH TRANSLATION

Native DUTCH translator required for 5,500 word translation due by Wednesday. 

Please email us at careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com with your rates and availability. 

You can also register with us here: 

http://www.worldlanguagecommunications.com/careers

Watching foreign-language TV during the coronavirus pandemic can help you learn a new language

With university classrooms and language schools closed because of the pandemic, language students must find new ways to practise and improve. In recent years, an increasing number of applied linguists have been advocating regular TV viewing to learn English.

Research shows that students are motivated to learn language through watching foreign language television programs. In the world of professional sports, baseball players, ice-hockey players and football managers have also claimed that television was a key resource for their language development. 

Surprisingly, television has played a relatively small role in the language learning classroom. Our research has shown that students learn new words and phrases through watching television, and the amount of learning may be similar to what is learned through reading.

For the full article, click here. 

How to Learn a New Language at Home, According to Language Experts

By Kayla Levy

If you’ve watched all of Netflix, played every board game in your possession, and baked more bread than you can possibly consume, consider spending some of your newfound free time learning (or relearning) a language. The prospect of finally mastering, say, French, guarantees hours of indoor entertainment during our seemingly never-ending imperative to stay indoors, but experts say the first step in successful language learning is to consider your motivations. “People’s goals for learning another language can vary from something serious, like they need to move and function in another society, to the other extreme, of downloading a phone app and learning a new language just for fun,” says Dr. Julio Torres, assistant professor of applied linguistics at University of California, Irvine, who explains that pedagogical methods differ based on learning goals. Another thing to keep in mind are your “internal factors,” like learning style and interests, because “we tend to emotionally respond to something when it’s meaningful to us personally,” says Dr. Laura Baecher of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at Hunter College’s School of Education.

With everything from yoga classes to lectures currently taking place online (often for free), this is a unique moment to learn another language with the help of technology. “Language learning has always happened outside the framework of official learning online, but now you can easily find Zoom calls in other languages to participate in,” says Dr. Sandy Fox, postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University and founder and producer of Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish. “It’s a very special time for practicing language.”

So, whether you want to converse with your neighbor, or need to practice grammar for a distance-learning exam, we spoke with six language experts — including a director at the Middlebury Language Schools and a polyglot — to find the best programs and resources for your at-home language learning.

For the full article, click here

This is The Hardest Language In The World

This video is all about Jamaican Patois, aka Jamaican Creole, the English-based creole language of Jamaica.

On this episode of "Slang School," Kumail Nanjiani and Natalie Morales teach Miami Spanish and Urdu slang. The stars put their heads together to come up with some of the slang words they know best.

Insecure's Yvonne Orji Teaches You Nigerian Slang | Vanity Fair

This Turkish Language Isn’t Spoken, It’s Whistled

5 Of The Weirdest Languages In The World

Whistled language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero

Best Language Learning Software  

Based on In-Depth Reviews

HOW WE ANALYZED THE BEST LANGUAGE LEARNING SOFTWARE PROVIDERS

To learn more, click here

COST

Language learning software is usually billed in one of two ways: as a single purchase or as a subscription service. Our primary concern was evaluating if a software’s methodology merited its price.

EDUCATIONAL MODEL

The four essential skills of language learning are reading, listening, writing, and speaking. Any serious full-course software needs to incorporate all four of these skills in their educational method.

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

Some features aren’t as essential as others. Such is the case of offline modes, camera translation, and progress tracking graphs. Nevertheless, additional features can enhance the learning experience.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

When evaluating customer experience, we largely focused on assessing customer feedback and opinion for each product. We also compared each product’s free trial and money-back guarantee.

ENGLISH TO BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE
ENGLISH TO LATIN AMERICAN SPANISH
ENGLISH TO RUSSIAN
ENGLISH TO JAPANESE


We have approximately 45 short form videos, from 2:30 - 13:00 minutes each, which we need to translate and provide VO services for in the above languages. 

In the subject line of your email, write: VIDEO PROJECT - [LANGUAGE] 

In the body of the email, please indicate if you can do translation, voiceover or both. 

Please tell us your rates for either per word translation, voiceover or both. For Voiceover, please provide per audio minute rates only. 

For BR PT, you must be a proven native Brazilian translator. For LAT SP, you must be a proven native Latin American Spanish speaker. There is a good amount of slang in these videos, marketed for mostly 12-20 year olds, so a strong understanding of local colloquial terms is imperative. 

You can contact us at careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com

Thank you! 

WLC Team

Has “Homosexual” always been in the Bible?

THE WORD ARSENOKOITAI SHOWS UP IN TWO DIFFERENT VERSES IN THE BIBLE, BUT IT WAS NOT TRANSLATED TO MEAN HOMOSEXUAL UNTIL 1946.

WE GOT TO SIT DOWN WITH ED OXFORD AT HIS HOME IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA AND TALK ABOUT THIS QUESTION.

YOU HAVE BEEN PART OF A RESEARCH TEAM THAT IS SEEKING TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE DECISION WAS MADE TO PUT THE WORD HOMOSEXUAL IN THE BIBLE. IS THAT TRUE?

Ed: Yes. It first showed up in the RSV translation. So before figuring out why they decided to use that word in the RSV translation (which is outlined in my upcoming book with Kathy Baldock, Forging a Sacred Weapon: How the Bible Became Anti-Gay) I wanted to see how other cultures and translations treated the same verses when they were translated during the Reformation 500 years ago. So I started collecting old Bibles in French, German, Irish, Gaelic, Czechoslovakian, Polish… you name it. Now I’ve got most European major languages that I’ve collected over time. Anyway, I had a German friend come back to town and I asked if he could help me with some passages in one of my German Bibles from the 1800s. So we went to Leviticus 18:22 and he’s translating it for me word for word. In the English where it says “Man shall not lie with man, for it is an abomination,” the German version says “Man shall not lie with young boys as he does with a woman, for it is an abomination.” I said, “What?! Are you sure?” He said, “Yes!” Then we went to Leviticus 20:13— same thing, “Young boys.” So we went to 1 Corinthians to see how they translated arsenokoitai (original Greek word)  and instead of homosexuals it said, “Boy molesters will not inherit the kingdom of God.” 

I then grabbed my facsimile copy of Martin Luther’s original German translation from 1534.  

My friend is reading through it for me and he says, “Ed, this says the same thing!” They use the word knabenschander. Knaben is boy, schander is molester. This word “boy molesters” for the most part carried through the next several centuries of German Bible translations. Knabenschander is also in 1 Timothy 1:10. So the interesting thing is, I asked if they ever changed the word arsenokoitai to homosexual in modern translations. So my friend found it and told me, “The first time homosexual appears in a German translation is 1983.” To me that was a little suspect because of what was happening in culture in the 1970s. Also because the Germans were the ones who created the word homosexual in 1862, they had all the history, research, and understanding to change it if they saw fit; however, they did not change it until 1983. If anyone was going to put the word homosexual in the Bible, the Germans should have been the first to do it!

For the full article, click here

What Assembly Bill 5 Means for Linguists

On Sept 18th, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 5 (CA AB 5) into law which will take effect in January. The new California state law reclassifies a large number of independent contractors as employees, making them entitled to labor protections, such as minimum wage and unemployment benefits. While AB 5 was written with companies like Uber in mind, the translation and interpreting industry has spoken out in regards to how this will affect a large number of professional linguists working in the field. Despite this opposition, the bill was passed without any sort of exemption for translators and interpreters. Both the American Translators Association (ATA) and the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) have both spoken out against the law, highlighting the need for an exemption.  

The author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, has said AB5 would punish businesses that have tried to bend the rules in the past in regards to worker classification. However as the AIIC also points out, “Through our profession’s long history in the United States and abroad, the independent contractor status of conference interpreters has been shown to work.” There are exemptions for other professions, such as real estate agents, hairstylists and barbers, doctors, dentist and lawyers. But the bill was passed with no exemption for linguists. As the ATA points out in their statement, “Without an exemption, this bill would unduly lump together these independent professionals with individual workers who do not make a deliberate choice to provide freelance services.”

For full article, click here

AB5: California Passes Bill That Translators, Interpreters Say Threatens Livelihood

On September 11, 2019, the California State Senate voted to pass gig-worker bill AB5 without an exemption for translators and interpreters. Final vote was 26 to 11 and AB5 now goes to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who will likely sign the bill that kicks in January 1, 2020.

AB5 or “Worker status: employees and independent contractors,” clarifies the definition of what a contractor is under California law. It is based on the State Supreme Court’s Dynamex ruling, which defines an independent contractor by the ABC test.

This means any California employer who wants to treat a person as a contractor must prove that person works independently of the company’s control and direction, works outside the company’s usual course of business, and is engaged in an independently established trade of the same nature as a matter of course.

For full article, click here