Language & Learning
“The words should roll out of the mouth” – On the dubbing of “The Wire” in German
For the original interview in German click here. Frank Schröder is one of the two authors of the German dubbing of the acclaimed television series “the Wire”. In an interview with Babbel Blog, he speaks about the difficulties of translating the dialogue-rich series, which portrays the day to day goings-on of the police and drug [...]
“Die Worte sollen aus dem Mund purzeln” – Über die Synchronisation der Serie “The Wire” ins Deutsche
For the English translation click here. Frank Schröder ist einer der beiden Autoren der deutschen Synchronfassung der vielgelobten US-Serie „The Wire“. Im Interview mit dem Babbel-Blog spricht er über die Schwierigkeiten bei der Übersetzung der dialogreichen Serie, die den Alltag von Polizisten und dem Drogendealermilieu in Baltimore schildert. Sie läuft seit September im deutschen Pay-TV. [...]
Maps: 1,000 dialects and 6,912 living languages
Last week we had Mara interviewing the Dialect Doctor, who claims to cure accents and strengthen dialects. Well, now here is databank of roughly nearly 1,000 speech samples: Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph; the recordings are collected and listenable over at the speech accent archive. They have the [...]
There goes another myth: Children aren’t “sponges”
It’s not just the free-market myth that’s crumbling these days: Anne Sodermann, Michigan State University professor emeritus of Family and Child, spent some hundred hours in a bilingual Mandarin-English Kindergarten in Bejing. In a recent study (Powerpoint-presentation here), watching 3 to 6 year old children from 16 nationalities, she came to a surprising conclusion: “There’s [...]
How do you say “body language” in Spanish? Debate does not provide the answer
Maybe too cowed to weed out the actual message(s) from last night’s American presidential debate, the media’s now wringing their hands over “body language“. Once again, more than what Senators Barack Obama and John McCain said, it’s how they said it. A nice bear hug at the end deflected the damage of McCain pointing and [...]
Factsheet: About eLearning
Babbel Blog factsheets provide the media, students and curious types with a comprehensive overview about language-learning and eLearning-topics. Download factsheet no.1 about eLearning here (pdf)
Palin(drome) goes back and forth
According to a mysterious “language monitoring service” cited by CNN, Sarah Palin , the American Republican vice presidential candidate, spoke at a tenth grade level (due to her astute use of “passive deflections”) at last week’s debate, while her Democratic counterpart Joe Biden managed only to graduate from the 8th. The analysis however championed form [...]
Save an endangered word, redefine the dictionary
I’ve always found it curious that the Americans have no centralized institution which establishes the end-all be-all of language. I mean, something along the lines of the German Rechtschreibungen, grammars that all of which incorporated a rather catastrophic spelling reform mandated by an official agreement between German-speaking countries in 1996. Or the Real Academia Española [...]
Par for the course? Ladies’ golf ditches English-only policy
I’m willing to wager that even those who’ve been speaking English their whole lives couldn’t tell you with confidence what a bogey or a mulligan is. Sports vocabulary has always constituted something of a rarefied language. I mean, words like scrimmage, sack or blitz have got to sound like Greek to the unintiated. Yet the [...]