Archives for December 2019

Another interesting aspect of grammatical gender in languages is that there seems to be no consensus on what makes a word (or object the word is referring to) either masculine, feminine, or neuter. In German, you get the curious examples of the word for “girl” being neuter – das Mädchen – and the word for “manliness” being feminine – die […]

Another interesting aspect of grammatical gender, as it was used in Old English, is the different ways nouns were grouped together. Sure, there is the obvious male-female distinction, but you can also see the animate-inanimate differences: “he” and “she” vs “it”. As it turns out, next to masculine and feminine nouns, one way of classifying nouns […]

In order to properly systematise a language, it’s important to group together words that have some aspects in common. That way, you simply need to learn a limited amount of grammar rules that apply to these classes, instead of learning every single word and how it behaves. And, in linguistics, gender is simply another way […]

Simultaneous interpretation is slightly misleading. There should always be a small pause between the speaker and interpreter to give the interpreter time to process and render the interpretation accurately. In the case of languages like Portuguese, Spanish or Japanese, it may be helpful to allow this extra time to account for word order differences. Although […]

First includes those which increases processing capacity requirements either because they require more processing per unit time (for example dense or fast speeches and enumerations) or because their signal is noisy or distorted (for example heavily accented speeches, speeches with unusual grammar or logic, noisy physical environment and inadequate acoustic equipment). The second category includes […]

Translators deal with written language and have time to polish their work, while interpreters deal with oral language and have no time to polish their output. The implications are: (1) Translators need to be familiar with the rules of written language and be competent writers in the target language; interpreters need to master the features […]