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I was doing Wikipedia Roulette (where you start at an article and then end up somewhere completely unrelated), and as I read articles about various racial slurs I came to ones about people imitating the Chinese language as a slur (this particular article referenced Shaquille O'Neal having the meaningless message of "'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so" for ( Read more... )

I've said, repeatedly, that translation is just as much of an art as it is a science. It's one thing to directly translate, say, lines of dialogue in a story, sentence for sentence. But does the MEANING remain? What is said is as important as why it is said and what remains unsaid, so indeed, conveying that same "feeling" in another language can ( Read more... )

One of the hardest things about learning the Spanish language all those years ago, is the use of the subjunctive. Because English's subjunctive is sporadic (to put it mildly), the initial concept that a whole VERB conjugation existed for something that didn't seem so separate a concept in English was, intially, a confusing one. The slow demise of ( Read more... )