Category: languagePage 2 of 4
I’ll be on the road for a while, and posting could continue to be light until mid January. Meanwhile, I’ve agreed to be a reader for this translation…
Quote of the day — and a call to action –from Times Online: It may appear agrestic to ask, but The Times is calling on its readers to…
Believe it or not, this comes up all the time, and after all these years I have yet to decide what’s right. For example, I e-mailed a print…
She’s got a piercing voice, that’s for sure. Maybe you develop that to be heard over five children during howling blizzards. But what about her accent? There is…
According to the dust jacket of The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, published by Morgan Road Books in 2006, the book explains why A woman uses about 20,000…
You might have heard about the restaurant in China that, in preparation for the Olympics, decided to translate their name into English. I guess the translation program was…
News flash! rules grammar change (onion audio) .
Google Blogoscoped has translated several Garfield strips into Chinese and back again using Google Translate. Here’s the text, in case the strip is hard to read at this…
Here’s a fun little game from Language Trainers Group. Listen to people read a passage from “If” by Rudyard Kipling, than guess where they are from. I scored…
Machine translation: there’s nothing like it. Enjoy this short video with babelfished dialogue.
I wrote yesterday about a word that was misspelled by thirteen out of fourteen experienced editors. Here are two words from the test that were each missed by…
It means “to dry; to preserve by drying.” I’m hiring a temporary replacement editor for a colleague who will be out several months on a medical leave. I…
The reader, Bradley LaShawn Fowler, is suing two Bible publishers (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan), alleging that the translators erroneously rendered a passage resulting in a false suggestion that…
Some pretty porous copy on this text panel about porous paving at the National Botanical Gardens near the capitol building in Washington, DC. (Official, nonpartisan, federal government-approved typos.)…
Sybil was the pseudonym of a woman whose story was told in a popular book and movie of the 1970s. She supposedly had sixteen distinct personalities. Now, studies…
Literacy is addictive. Once you start reading you don’t go back. But what happens when you’re not allowed to read? I went to see an ophthalmologist about some…
Oxford University Press has placed the data from its World Atlas of Language Structures online. There’s some interesting information here. Following are some examples. The map below shows…
A study by the University of Arizona has reported surprising results when testing native French speakers on the gender of nouns. Across the board, the French speakers showed…
Most posts at Right Reading are published at 5:00 am Pacific Time. But this one will run at 11:59 the night before. I wouldn’t want to be a…
Fake memoirs are in the news again, with the usual hand wringing. No need to go into the details, which have been thoroughly reported. Instead, let’s think about…
RightReading would not ordinarily post an institution’s capital campaign video, but the presentation below by Richard E. Miller, Chair of the English department at Rutgers University raises some…
WORDSMITHING: The process of going through a document and making sure the best possible word is used in all circumstances. — ww.lewiswritingservices.com/glossary.htm If there is one word I…
Sound Comparisons is one of those sites that makes you think there just might be something to this internet business. It contains recordings of a variety of words…
At a camping store: NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCOUNT TENTS