* ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE
* OCTOBER 6, 2010

Rare Find: a New Language
As Native Tongues Rapidly Become Extinct, Linguists Discover an Exotic Specimen
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ
[LANGUAGE] Chris Rainier

A Koro speaker talks to National Geographic Fellow Gregory Anderson in Arunachal Pradesh, India, as he makes a recording of the language.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, two field linguists have uncovered a find as rare as any endangered species—a language completely new to science.

The researchers encountered it for the first time along the western ridges of Arunachal Pradesh, India's northeastern-most state, where more than 120 languages are spoken. There, isolated by craggy slopes and rushing rivers, the hunters and subsistence farmers who speak this rare tongue live in a dozen or so villages of bamboo houses built on stilts.
Audio: Listen to Koro

I saw the man

The man saw me

I didn't see the man

The man didn't see me

I gave pig to man
Koro for Beginners
Koro word
(phonetic ) English translation
jew-prah head
ko-play four
soo-fee six
poh-lay bird
leh-leh pig
may-nay sun
may-pah night
keh-peh nose
moo-yoo rain
oh-foh older sister
kah-plah-yeh thank you/you're welcome

--National Geographic

The language—called Koro—was identified during a 2008 expedition conducted as part of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project. The researchers announced their discovery Tuesday in Washington, D.C. So many languages have vanished world-wide in recent decades that the naming of a new one commanded scientific attention.

"Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure," said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project's research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.

Prized for its rarity as an unstudied linguistic artifact, the Koro language also offers researchers a catalogue of unique cultural experience, encoded in its mental grammar of words and sentence structure that helps shape thought itself.

Languages like Koro "construe reality in very different ways," Dr. Anderson said. "They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language."

In an era of globalization, languages have been disappearing by the hundreds, edged out by English, Chinese and Spanish or suppressed by government practices. Of the 6,909 known languages, about half are expected to disappear in this century; every two weeks, the last fluent speaker of a language dies. This newest, with only 800 or so speakers, may be no exception.

"Even though this is new to science, this language is on the way out," said linguist K. David Harrison at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia. Many younger villagers, often educated at boarding schools where only Hindi or English are spoken, are abandoning their parents' language. "Young people are not speaking it in the villages," Dr. Harrison said. "If the process continues, Koro will almost certainly become extinct."
[LANGUAGEmap]

Even as languages disappear, many of them have never been identified or named. In search of that hidden diversity, linguists have been pushing deeper into remote regions and analyzing known language groups more thoroughly.

In China last year, researchers identified 24 languages in a region where previously only one had been reported. Recently, the scholarly compendium of known languages, called Ethnologue, added 83 previously unidentified languages from 19 countries.

As a matter of formal classification, Koro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese, the linguists said. Some 150 Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in India alone.

The language has no written form. Its only permanent monuments are the voice recordings made by researchers during the expedition, which they hope to use in compiling an online dictionary. Since the villagers have no access to the Internet, however, the dictionary and other digital records of Koro may only be of academic interest.

Eyak is an indigenous Alaskan language that has an unlikely ally- a 21 year old Frenchman named Guillaume Leduey. WSJ's Jim Carlton reports.

This newest addition to the global catalogue of known languages eluded notice until now because travel in the region is restricted by government permit and few linguists have ever worked there.

Moreover, it was masked by the unusual language diversity of the area, where so many languages are spoken that they seem to intermingle effortlessly in streams of thought. Indeed, the local Koro speakers themselves didn't consider theirs a separate language, even though it is as distinct from those spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian, the researchers said.

The researchers hope their work will aid efforts to preserve the endangered language. "If we care about the diversity of ideas and knowledge, then we should be concerned about losing these languages," Dr. Harrison said. "We are losing an immense body of knowledge."

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

Dificultades gramaticales: El plural de los compuestos

Dificultades gramaticales: El plural de los compuestos: "La doctrina gramatical reconoce que en general en el caso de los compuestos de 'dos sustantivos que se escriben separados pero que constitu..."

Chinese Translation - Interpreting

Chinese Translation and Doing Business with China
September 22, 2010

Posted In: Chinese Legal Interpreters, Mandarin Court Interpreters, Chinese Court Translation & Interpreting
By All Language Alliance, Inc. on September 22, 2010 6:45 AM | Permalink

Professional Chinese-English and English-Chinese language translation and interpreting services play an important role in international business. One common complaint of American companies doing business with a Chinese company is not getting what they paid for. For example, the American company pays a significant sum for a product from a Chinese company and, in return, gets either nothing or a faulty product. Typically, the US company never actually sees the Chinese company but simply conducts the transaction virtually, wiring the money overseas. So, if this is you, what do you do?

Start by reviewing all documents in the case and write a demand letter to the Chinese company. This letter should be in Chinese, so a foreign language translation will be required.

A second option is to hire an attorney in the area the company is located. If the Chinese lawyer's English is not up to par, hiring a foreign language interpreter will also be needed.

A third option is to file an action in the US and attempt to attach company assets located in the US. This too will require a foreign language translation of the original notice.

¿Hasta dónde podría llegar la tecnología a reemplazar a un intérprete?

¿Funcional o no, válido o no? la tecnologia avanza en todo campo...


http://larazon.es/noticia/9535-llega-la-autotraduccion-simultanea

Nueva Gramática del Español

He recibido un capítulo de muestra de la Nueva Gramática del Español, si alguien está interesado en conocerla, únicamente escríbame a la dirección: director@serviciostradprof.com y con gusto se la envío.

Saludos a todos.

La ortografía es muy importante.

Compartimos un correo electrónico que hemos recibido en distribución masiva y en el cual se infiere que la ortografía es clave para transmitir cualquier mensaje pues cometer un error en esta área puede ocasionar el posible descrédito y deslucida imagen de una entidad.

--Forwarded Message Attachment--
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:45:51 -0500
From: info@orangeandweb.com
Subject: Notal Editorial
To: emailmarketing@orangeandweb.com



Estimados Clientes:

Somos conscientes que le hemos causado un inconveniente al escribir incorrectamente la palabra "ofrece" en el envío de un email publicitario.

Lamentamos las molestias que ello le pudiera causar, y merece saber que, ya hemos tomado las medidas pertinentes para enmendar el error, como muestra de nuestra comprensión en este asunto.

Es importante informar que ello no implicará, que otros productos y servicios nuestros se vean afectados.

Agradecemos a todos los que se comunicaron con nosotros y le invitamos a que nos sigan ayudando en nuestra labor.

Por favor, acepten nuestras más sinceras disculpas.


Reciban nuestro saludo,

Equipo Editorial Servicio Email Marketing Orange Web Solutions.

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Pensar en otro idioma .... traducción

Es como montar a caballo o jugar al futbol.
Hay que experimentarla para sentir esa pasión.
Así, con ejemplos sencillos y contundentes, el
doctor Fernando Carlos Vevia Romero explica
la fascinación del oficio de traducir.
Traductor al español de 14 obras, la
mayoría del alemán y las demás del inglés y
francés, este profesor que imparte asignaturas
como semiótica en el Departamento de Letras
de la UdeG, comenta
que el oficio de traducir
es como todas las
pasiones: se siente y es
difícil de explicar.
“Es como entrar en
otro mundo. Nota uno
de manera especial que
las cosas familiares se
dicen de otra manera. Es
otro modo de enfocar
ciertas problemáticas que en nuestra cultura
nunca se tratarían”.
Consciente de que la traducción perfecta
es imposible, sugiere como ideal el contacto
directo con el texto y el esfuerzo por pensarlo
en la lengua propia. “No solo que sepa lo que
traduce, sino pensarlo otra vez en su propia
lengua es excitante”.

Today's Term of the Day - equity

Ownership interest in a corporation in the form of common stock or preferred stock. It also refers to total assets minus total liabilities, in which case it is also referred to as shareholder's equity or net worth or book value. In real estate, it is the difference between what a property is worth and what the owner owes against that property (i.e. the difference between the house value and the remaining mortgage or loan payments on a house). In the context of a futures trading account, it is the value of the securities in the account, assuming that the account is liquidated at the going price. In the context of a brokerage account, it is the net value of the account, i.e. the value of securities in the account less any margin requirements.

Ownership interest in a corporation in the form of common stock or preferred stock.

Total assets minus total liabilities; here also called shareholder's equity or net worth or book value.

The value of a property minus the owner's outstanding mortgage balance.