Our news for translators April 2021 kicks off with Lady Gaga. The songwriter and winner of 11 Grammys and one Oscar has announced a surprise move into machine translation. Find out more about her reasons for taking on this new role as Chief Technology Officer for a major MT provider in this entertaining April Fools’ Day article from Katie Botkin.
In literary translation, Granta magazine has named the world’s best young Spanish-language writers. The list includes writers from Spain, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Chile, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Ecuador, all under the age of 35 Granta hails the selection, which also includes 11 female authors as “extremely diverse”. Read more about it here. Article by Sam Jones of The Guardian.
New York, New York, so good they named it twice. And, it seems, also one of the most linguistically diverse cities on the planet. This huge diversity is now represented in the first ever linguist-designed language map. Released in December by the Endangered Language Alliance, its mission is to document and support endangered languages. Click here to read about five of the more than 600 languages mapped in the city. Article by Ross Perlin, published on Words without Borders.
This last year has seen us all learn a lot of new words we never thought would become common parlance, like social distancing, lockdown, and much more. In Germany, the pandemic has given rise to over 1,200 new terms. Christine Möhrs, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, has tracked this new vocabulary, much of it borrowed from English. Read more here about these new terms, including more than 30 different versions of the term lockdown. Article by Luisa Beck published by The Independent.
Want to get our news sent to your inbox? Sign up for our newsletter.
