The Translations Blog
Find Out a Bit More About Languages
DID YOU KNOW THAT...?
August 19th is the INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN DAY.
Translators are as important and needed as other volunteers when speaking about humanity.
In emergency situations, language can be a barrier and translators are there to break them down.
Since 1991, September 30th was established as the INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION DAY by the International Federation of Translators (IFT).
St. JEROME. Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus) is the Patron Saint of translators.
He was born around 347 AD and died in 420 AD. and he was one of the most prolific Early Christian writers and translators.
The first written language was SUMERIAN (C. 3200 BC).
The first instance of this written language appears in a set of texts, most of which are administrative.
The Sumerian language was spoken in southern Mesopotamia before the second millennium BCE and was the first language to be written in cuneiform.
Very little is known about the Sumerian-speaking people who arrived in southern Mesopotamia, assuming that they did not originate there.
Some theories that Sumerian is a member of Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish, or other language families, is a minority opinion without sufficient evidence to make a definitive statement.
There are around 7,100 languages spoken today in the world.
This number is constantly in flux.
Roughly 40% of languages are now endangered, often with less than 1,000 speakers remaining.
According to Ethnologue. The languages with the most native speakers are Mandarin Chinese (918 million), Spanish (480 million), English (375 million), Hindi (341 million) and Bengali (228 million),
ENGLISH is the world’s leading language, It is the official language of more countries in the world and is the language of diplomacy, business and popular culture.it is spoken by 375 million people as a mother tongue, but when adding people who speak it as a second language we have more than 1.5 billion people in total.
The ROSETTA STONE is one of the earliest evidence of a written translation and was discovered in 1799.
Its text is written in 14 lines of hieroglyphic Egyptian, 32 lines of demotic Egyptian and 54 lines of Greek.
If you speak to a man in a language he understands you will get to his HEAD, if you speak to him in his language you will get to his HEART. (Nelson Mandela)
Anglicisms are linguistic borrowings from English into another language.
Although English is considered the base language of our century, the most widely spoken languages in the world are:
- Chinise
- Spanish
- English
- Hindi
CURIOUS WORDS
There are words (usually from very old languages) whose extensive meaning makes them both curious and valuable, and I say valuable because they show us that languages are culture, and transmitting that culture through translation becomes an art.
NAKHUR:
It is a word from ancient Persian and refers to a female camel that will not give milk until her nose is scratched. The cultural meaning comes from the fact that in ancient Persia camel’s milk was one of the most precious commodities since most of the population lived on it, so female camels had to be treated well and pampered so that their milk would not be lacking.
MAMIHLAPINATAPAI:
It belongs to the extinct Yaghan language, the southernmost language in the world, spoken in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. (According to data, in 2019 it was spoken by only one woman in the world). The word describes the situation of two people looking at each other and waiting one for the other to initiate something they both want but neither has the courage to initiate. We could say that this word is a candidate for any translator’s challenge.
