Someone may speak two languages well enough to communicate with native speakers, but the skills demanded of translators go beyond that. Translators must bridge linguistic and cultural gaps, which means translating concepts, instead of a literal word-for-word version.

Here is a well-known example: Pepsi wanted to increase sales in China. The slogan "Come Alive With The Pepsi Generation" was introduced to Chinese consumers as "Pepsi Will Bring Your Ancestors Back From The Dead."

Other cases aren't only scary, but actually fatal. A medicine bottle reads "Adults: 1 tablet 3 times a day until passing away" when the intention was “until symptoms pass..."

Most of the Western vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek and many words may look similar in several languages but have different meanings.

These so-called “false friends” can be misleading.

Article by Rafa Lombardino

Source: San Diego BBB

A recent New York Times article, When Your Life Becomes a Verb, talks about how Charlie Sheen's last name has become a verb meaning "partying, questionable decision making and public humiliation." I started thinking about other last names that are now common words in English.

Lynch, boycott, and sandwich were the first that came to mind. Zamboni and jacuzzi are the last names of their inventors, but they have become generic names in their categories.  We forget that these eponyms were once closely associated with human beings. Will "sheening" have legs, or will it disappear once we move on to the next celebrity scandal?

The Exclamation Point!

The exclamation point is greatly overused!
One could even say it is frequently abused!
In advertising copy, it repeatedly resounds!
And in breathless prose, it literally abounds!
The poorer the writer, the more frequently the case!
The exclamation point, they readily embrace!
To give a little emphasis! To make a little point!
This punctuation mark they will appoint!
But, to make emphasis perfectly clear,
Good writers generally appear
to make little use of exclamations
and other such typographic affectations.

-- Ed Truitt

Ed Truitt is a science writer at the Weizmann Institute of Science

For more poems about grammar, visit National Grammar Day.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) passed last year will significantly increase the number of people on insurance plans.  Some insurance industry analysts estimate that there will be an additional 44 million enrollees, many of whom do not speak English as their first language.

The PPACA requires that health plan details as well as benefit, prescription, and treatment information be “culturally and linguistically appropriate.” In other words, the information must be translated into languages other than English by July 1, 2011.

Are insurance providers prepared to meet this deadline?

I recently spoke to someone preparing an estimate to produce a 20 minute film. One of the components that she needed to include was the cost of translating the script from English to Spanish. The only problem was that the script hadn't been written yet, but I was able to give her a number for the estimate. 

If you find yourself in this situation, you can roughly calculate the number of words that your script will have. Here's how:

Speech Count

• The average person reads 3 words per second
• The average person reads 88 words in 30 seconds
• In one minute, the average person reads 170 words

For a twenty minute script, there would be approximately 3400 words. This does not take into account pauses or scenes when there is no voiceover, but it gives you something to work with.