Ask an American to name off some colors and you’re likely to hear “Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple.” Perhaps substitute Indigo and Violet for Purple if the person really knows their rainbow, or add in White and Black as a sort of afterthought. Of course, this isn’t the rote response you’d get from everyone– […]
Devoid of accent, if you were reading a transcription of a conversation and told it happened somewhere in America, you might still be able to figure out where. How? Regionalisms. They’re those seemingly insignificant words that creep into your vocabulary after living in an area for a while. You pick these colloquialisms up to talk with […]
Going into a medical setting can be a difficult job for an interpreter. There are added legal restrictions that must be kept in mind to protect the patient’s privacy, high tensions surrounding diagnoses, and the ever-watchful eyes of friends and family. Sometimes, the patient may not “get it” the first time, so as an interpreter […]
Even for lifelong English speakers, regional dialects in the United States can be a stumbling block for understanding. Regions quickly develop their own cultural identities, which leads to idiosyncrasies in pronunciation and slang. However, the relative youth of the United States has kept mutations of the language relatively low. The differences in linguistic fragmentation between […]
It’s the heart of the winter, and around this time of year those of us in the Northern Hemisphere often entertain the idea of skipping town for a few days or weeks in favor of a warmer locale. If you’re one of the lucky ones who gets to take a break from life and travel […]
At Affordable Language Services, we like to share our knowledge of culture and language with the community. Gary Elfers, our Executive Director, headed to the Batavia Rotary Club to speak last week. The members enjoyed it so much, they even blogged about it! Gary explained the difference between translation and interpretation, a bilingual speaker and […]
Online lingo is seeping into daily conversation as we talk about “googling” or “friending.” A recent article in Intelligent Life magazine looks at the increasingly common phenomenon of creating verbs from nouns. (The fancy term is “denominalisation,” if you were interested.) In “You’ve Been Verbed,” writer Anthony Gardner reasons one force driving this change is […]
US News and World Report lists Interpretation and Translation as one of the Top 50 Jobs in 2011! Here’s why: Employment opportunities are increasing quickly. The exact figure the Labor Department projects is a whopping 22 percent growth by 2018. They attribute this to a growing population of non-English speakers in the US, and an […]
The English language is losing words left and right. We cannot ictuate enough just how tristifical this is for all of us who love words! That’s not to say the size of the language as a whole is shrinking; people are always inventing new words (see our post from earlier this week about the 2010 […]
Affordable Language Services opened a language school this year for students age 6+. We’ve already graduated several students and we wanted to share a photo from ‘graduation day’ for two students who completed our Conversational Spanish course. These two completed our 20-hour Conversational Spanish Course. They now are ready to go to a Spanish-speaking country, […]