Bob’s your uncle

Mar 8, 2012 by

Bob’s your uncle

In an earlier post, we have discussed how kinship terminology differs from language to language. Where one language may have an umbrella term for several different relations, another language make have a more detailed network of...

read more

Google Translates Gender

Feb 13, 2012 by

Google Translates Gender

[Thanks to David Pesetsky for inspiring this post] The topics of Google Translate and of translating gender have been discussed in this blog before. I have argued that Google Translate fails to understand language (as many...

read more

Does Google Translate speak "like a 10-year-old"?

Nov 7, 2011 by

[Thanks to Martin W. Lewis for inspiration for this post] In several earlier posts (see here, here and here), I’ve already touched on the topic of Google Translate and its failures to… translate. But the argument...

read more

On Google Translate, again

Sep 17, 2011 by

On Google Translate, again

In a couple of postings last winter (see here and here), I already discussed Google’s machine translation tool, Google Translate (GT) and expressed my skepticism about it. Today, another article on GT by David Bellos from The...

read more

How can we know what an ancient text means?

Sep 14, 2011 by

I don’t usually post links to videos or other blogs, but this lecture by my friend and colleague Dr. Joel M. Hoffman is brilliant and well-worth watching! And it touches on the topic we’ve been exploring for some time...

read more

Fruit, vegetable, boy, girl…

Aug 24, 2011 by

It may appear from the previous post that gender is “lost in translation” only when a literary text is translated from a language with no grammatical gender system into a language that does have one, but this is far from...

read more