When we first moved to Doha, Justin and I drove around taking pictures of company logos in Arabic, in order to put together an identify-the-brand quiz. We never got around to actually making the quiz, though.

Happily, someone else has! Can you name the Companies From the Arabic Version of Their Logo?We got 100 ( Read more... )

The other day I started playing with translationparty.com, which a friend posted about here recently. Translation Party translates things back and forth from English into Japanese until they reach steady state. For example, "All for one and one for all." gets translated into "One is an all in all," then "One is all," then "All is one." At that ( Read more... )

I recently used Google translate to help me correspond with a Japanese company, and everything seemed to work out well... but now I'm worried that my emails read like this Read Me.

Excerpts:

"Many to be enjoyed by everyone it is matter of course, design professionals who are willing to give such a high-quality fonts will endeavor to create a ( Read more... )

I wanted to send a coworker a link to my calendar, but first wanted to check that it would only tell her when I'm busy/free, not show her my appointment schedule. So I just opened a browser I don't often use, to make sure I wasn't logged in, and then accessed my calendar. It looked like this:


( Read more... )

A student pointed me towards Save the Words, where you can do your part for the English language by adopting a rare or obsolete word that's in danger of falling out of dictionaries.

My word is adimpleate, which means "fill up," so if you hear me asking people to adimpleate my teacup in the near future, you'll know why ( Read more... )

CNN's front page currently has a sentence that makes me cry inside:

"Though previously Democratic, McCain's supporters see Pennsylvania as a potential swing state with just six days to go."McCain's supporters are previously Democratic ( Read more... )

An Italian woman, decrying the assimilation of English words into Italian, in today's BBC News:

"People think it's chic to use English words, but I don't like it at all. It's important to keep language clean."

Yes, it's not... "chic"... to use words borrowed from other languages.

I noticed while traveling through Eastern Europe that, despite the fact that Eastern European languages come from vastly different language families, they all call oranges something like "portokal." Then I moved to Arabic and learned that the word for orange is برتقال, "burtuqal ( Read more... )

I found myself staring at the bookshelf in a hospital waiting room this morning, while waiting for a routine appointment. The bookshelf said something along the lines of:
Missionary Materials
Missionary and Guidance Department
For Reading Only
After I finished congratulating myself on reading the Arabic, I started wondering more about the books on ( Read more... )

Last week someone feeling rather despondent wrote "أين تذهب حياتي؟؟" on my whiteboard at work: "Where is my life going ( Read more... )