For the translator in the twenty-first century, one of the most fervently repeated collocations of the times has to be machine and translation, those two suggestive siblings that have gone on to establish their reputations as the acrobats in a traveling circus of technology. As members of the audience, both captivated and unsettled by the performance in the ring and the apparently high-flying stunts of our little siblings, translators have front-row seats that make them the perfect observers of the madness and implicate them in the occasional fatalities. Once the lights have been extinguished in the audience, we might be dazzled, disturbed, cowering, maybe even fearful that one of the…
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Known the world over as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages–I assume that all the diligent, methodical precision used to create these levels in the first place has to be applied to the title itself, which is very precise but a pain in the **s to remember–the CEFR is used most commonly in Europe to classify the proficiency of learners of a foreign language. Given that I reside here in the United States, where language learning and proficiency levels in a foreign language seem to have taken the same illogical path to oblivion as the metric system (known but barely used, and even maligned by some), we use…
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La jerga me interesa porque pertenece a un punto del aprendizaje de idiomas: a menudo funciona como divisor entre los hablantes nativos y los estudiantes de un idioma. La verdad es que la jerga es cosa sabida para los que hablan un idioma desde la cuna, y requiere de una cierta soltura en el habla que no se ve frecuentemente entre los que hablan el idioma al nivel de un estudiante —el llamado L2 learner. Por eso, lo que me llama la atención sobre la jerga es cómo se utiliza, cómo se despliega en un determinado contexto, y cuáles son las personas que la utilizan en este contexto. Pero lo…
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In his snarky and incisive polemic satirizing the American class system, Class, Paul Fussell provides a tour-de-force panorama of what most Americans, especially those marinating in our current postmodern zeitgeist, would never acknowledge in polite company: that although all citizens in this Western democracy are equal under the law, possessing rights to life, liberty, and property, they are nonetheless different and thus unequal, inferior and superior as determined by the myriad attributes that humans can exhibit. Each of us has attributes constituting our strengths and weaknesses, and we all know this; but the exigencies of postmodernism are such that digressing from a philosophy of egalitarianism containing no nuance is tantamount…
