May 10, 2008
By Richard Gray

Babies who hear foreign speech in their first nine months of life find it easier to pick up languages in school or as adults, research has found.

But those who hear only English as babies are left unable to distinguish between subtly different sounds not used in their native language.

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May 9, 2008
By Chung Ah-young

``Riding the Bullet'' written by Stephen King made its debut on the Internet in 2000, available for download free-of-charge. It stunned the publishing industry, as the demand for the story was so high that it rendered the server totally inaccessible.

Many publishers thought the digital era would eventually bring an end to the publishing industry within five years or so, as electronic books and Internet-based materials might replace paper.

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01/05/08

...What we did was take a few of the tired old stand-bys and translate them through a slew of other languages and back again, to find that perfect balance of interesting, insightful and incomprehensible.

That process usually goes great with buzzwords - take this sentence from yesterday's budget: "We wrestled down the fiscal dragon by instituting public sector program renewal, performance targets and frank accountability."

Translate it back and forth enough times, and you get the deep and pithy and downright Jabberwockian: "We fought underneath the fiscal kite, by them the renewal of the public range program, which achievement objectives and the open justification obligation introduced."

Which really, means just about as much.

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29 Apr 2008
Joff Wild, IAM Magazine

"...Under the EPC, patents are granted in one of three official languages: English, French and German. Whereas each state previously required the often lengthy patent document to be translated into its national language, the London Agreement abolishes this for the countries that have signed up."

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28-Apr-2008
By Shane Starling

"Subtle language differences" may confound regulators in the midst of translating thousands of health claims ahead of a pan-European 2010 approval deadline, according to various industry sources.

They are concerned certain words and phrases such as "restores health" and "improves function" may get lost in translation, leading to some claims being interpreted as medicinal in certain member states.

Medicinal claims are prohibited under the auspices of the European Union health and nutrition claims regulation that was enacted in January 2007.

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By Andrew McGall
04/27/2008

Americans accustomed to the 26-letter Roman alphabet and the English language may believe they can never enter the impenetrably dense thickets of cross-hatched markings and flowing lines of Asian writing. A Chinese or Japanese newspaper or book might as well be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Indeed, the Chinese alphabet that the Japanese adopted is a kind of hieroglyphic system, in that the symbols can represent both sounds and ideas.

Gabriele Mandel's "Japanese Alphabet" is a formal introduction to the 46-character Japanese alphabet. Most of it is a 98-page practical guide to vocalizing consonant-vowel combinations and writing the alpahabet's letters. Here on facing pages for the more poetic hiragana and the simpler katakana forms are each character's sequence of strokes, "voice" and "half-voice" markings, parallel Chinese character and an example of each in four modern print fonts.

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Thursday, Apr. 24, 2008
By ANDREW MONAHAN

Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) was, by most accounts, a horrible bully. The Japanese nobleman lived through the country's violent transition from the Heian aristocratic era to the martial Kamakura shogunate, and was surly, severe and infamously ugly, as if malformed by the turbulence of his times. But as a poet and editor, Teika has transcended the ages. He compiled Japan's most influential and long-lasting anthology of poems: the Hyakunin Isshu (one hundred people, one poem each), also known as the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. For more than seven centuries, these poems have resonated with countless readers.

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April 22, 2008
By Teresa Buckner

MARS HILL, N.C. (ABP) -- Across the centuries, across the ocean, through bombings and world wars, a sacred bit of history has emerged from the distant past to find a home at Mars Hill College.

The North Carolina Baptist school has received a 1686 copy of Martin Luther’s Bible translation. It was donated by Elfriede Ludwig Wilde, a resident of Texarkana, Texas, and former resident of Hendersonville, N.C.

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2008/04/07

TEHRAN(MNA) -- The third edition of Persian translation of “The Holographic Universe” was published by Hermes publishing company in Tehran two years after its first edition.

Authored by Michael Talbot, the English edition of the book was released in 1992 and Iranian new wave filmmaker Dariush Mehrjuii has translated it into Persian.

Talbot writes that “…there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it… are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

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April 4, 2008
By Emily Graham

Hundreds of millions of people may speak Russian, but at Bowdoin, the language is dying. Enrollment in the College's Russian department has dwindled since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but a couple of faculty members and a small number of students keep the program alive.

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Asia Has Embraced The Global Movement To Spread Knowledge

March 28, 2008
By JEREMY WAGSTAFF

A revolution of sorts is sweeping education.

In the past few years, educational material, from handwritten lecture notes to whole courses, has been made available online, free for anyone who wants it. Backed by big-name universities in the U.S., China, Japan and Europe, the Open Education Resources movement is gaining ground, providing access to knowledge so that no one is "walled in by money, race and other issues," says Lucifer Chu, a 32-year-old Taiwanese citizen and among the thousands world-wide promoting the effort. He says he has used about half a million dollars from his translation of the "Lord of the Rings" novels into Chinese to translate engineering, math and other educational material, also from English into Chinese.

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Rohit Bhargava on Wed, 05/23/2007 - 15:37.

Intel, a current Ogilvy PR client, has just launched a new Chinese language blog focused on technology and is generating some great conversation through comments already.

Unfortunately, automated translation software cannot provide a coherent picture of the content yet - so you might be out of luck with getting much from the content of the blog, but it's a great example of a company building out their global strategy when it comes to social media and providing an outlet for more smart minds within the company to share their voices, regardless of the language barrier. A bit of insider info ... coming soon will be other multilingual blogs from Intel designed on bringing out even more of the expertise from individuals inside the company from other countries.

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The North Koreans and Chinese have criticized the changes, but what they fail to realize is that their belligerence toward Japan has accelerated a Japanese revision in their thinking regarding military power

By Richard Halloran

Monday, Jan 08, 2007

`The only thing one director-general of the agency was able to accomplish was to have a military band parade in his hometown.'

Tomorrow the Japan Defense Agency becomes the Japan Ministry of Defense in a change that seems small on the surface but is substantial in its reality.

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By Jess Halliday

09/01/2007 - The bonds between the Japanese and European functional foods industries are strengthening, as industry and regulators recognise the mutual benefits of working together.

Japan is renowned as having the most developed functional foods industry in the world; it was the first country to introduce government-approved health claims in the 1980s.

According to US-based analyst Paul Yamaguchi, the Japanese nutrition market was valued last year at around US$27 billion, but FOSHU foods (foods for specified health uses) account for only $6 billion of this. Non-FOSHU functional foods account for $11 billion, and dietary supplements around $11 billion too.

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Associated Press 11.28.06, 6:24 AM ET

Asian markets fell Tuesday, following Wall Street's worst day in more than four months, as Hong Kong shares tumbled 2.9 percent in the biggest single-day drop in five years and as Japanese stocks slipped.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index dived 564.48 points, or 2.9 percent, to 18,639.53. The decline was the steepest since the index plummeted 923.74 points, or 8.9 percent, to 9,493.62 points on September 12, 2001.

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