Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with multilingual

Indian English Speakers with Shifting Western Accent

Non Prosequitur — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:04:40 -0800

Is it a widespread behavior for multilingual speakers of english to get a more anglicized accent when talking to a native speaker? I don't mean just common code-switching (someone getting a drawl in Kansas, or someone going 'you understand' vs. 'you feel me' in different contexts.) But people going from like, Indian english to completely westernized english (in accents, not necessarily in diction or dialect) without making a conscious decision to do so. This is besides people 'faking' an accent because of class issues related to these things.

Multilingual job listings required?

Aleen — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:41:58 -0800

Discrimination filter: Must a company which has both an english and a spanish version of its website have job postings in both languages? Details follow. I work for a business that provides a service to companies in the United States and Puerto Rico. Business is conducted in english in the continental US and mostly (though not completely) in spanish in Puerto Rico, as may be obvious. We need to know if we are legally required to put job listings in both languages on both versions of the site, regardless of the location we are hiring. To date, all of our job listings are in english and are only linked on the english version. The majority, if not all of the people we have hired in Puerto Rico were recruited through an employment agency, if that matters.

You are not our/a lawyer and other standard disclaimers apply, of course.

Polyglotfilter: How do I keep track of all these languages in my brain?

hasna — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:52:10 -0800

Polyglotfilter: How do I keep track of all these languages in my brain? In short: I'm at various stages of each language, though some are on "pause" for the moment. What are the best methods for continuing my progress in each, without mixing them up? A bit of background: My native language is English. However I'm Canadian, and went through the French Immersion programme at school; my entire K-12 education was in French. I am now functionally fluent, but when I go long periods without using it, my grammar, genders, and some vocab start fading.

I also took a Spanish class, and through various trips to Mexico and Peru, I attained a basic level of conversational Spanish. It seems, though, that it almost disappears completely until I'm back in a Spanish environment... then I'm fine again, chatting with most everyone.

Arabic came next, which I've been studying, VERY sporadically, for a couple years. More of this has sunk in than I realize, though, when I find I'm able to read random words. I cannot, however, even introduce myself in Arabic.... so it's below basic.

Then all of a sudden, off I move to Istanbul, Turkey. Talk about an immersion environment! I've been studying Turkish for the 3 months here, with a Turkish friend, plus practical application... well, everywhere. I'm at the point now where I'm conjugating verbs, and putting together decent sentences, and I can usually understand the jist of what people are talking to me about. Arabic has proved extremely useful, because I'll stumble upon a Turkish word, and immediately know what it means; Turkish borrows a lot from Arabic.

Aaannnd... this summer, I'll be spending a lot of time out in Eastern Turkey, and with my Kurdish host family, and culturally, it would mean a lot to them if I learned at least a few phrases in Kurdish.

All this leaves my brain spinning. I try to speak in one language, and another one comes out. Spanish is my "least comfortable" one, and so I often find myself letting "Como se dise..." slip out when I'm actually trying to speak French or Turkish. Currently, Turkish is my focus. I'm working hard towards fluency asap (which is actually coming along rather quickly; it's an easy language). But I don't necessarily want the other languages to just fall to the wayside: I eventually want full fluency in Spanish and Arabic as well.

So, to keep this out of chatfilter, here's what I'm asking:

-To other polyglots: How do you keep the languages sorted out while you're learning? Do you have exclusively "Spanish" rooms? And just "Arabic" friends? so that your brain differentiates?

-Languages really are my thing, but is it ridiculous of me to try to work on fluency in one language, maintain my fluency in another, and learn polite conversation in 1-2 others all at the same time? Is that too much for the brain to handle?

-Anyone with experience learning multiple languages who has any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

( apologies for my atrocious grammar... there's few English speakers around, so even my own language is starting to fail me! )

Variations on variations

tiamat — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:22:58 -0800

Help me translate the word "variations" into as many lanugages as possible. (Or recommend good online translation services.) So I'm looking to translate this word into as many languages as possible in hopes of making a very cool looking poster one day. So far I have the following.

Note: I'd like the word to stay plural, but if that's not possible for some lingual reason I'll accept "variation' as a substitute.

EN: variations
GR: veränderungen
SP: variaciones
FR: variations
Italian: variazioni
Portuguese: variações
Japanese: 変化
Korean: 函捞
Chinese: 变化

If you can
A) confirm the above
B) suggest more lanugages

If you are multilingual, are your dreams multilingual also?

Effigy2000 — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:25:16 -0800

Multilingual MeFites, tell me of your dreams! When you dream, do you only dream in your first language, or do your dreams tend to vary in the language that they use (as in, say, English one night, French the next)? Do you have dreams where multiple languages are used? And if you tend to have dreams in different languages, does the setting/scenario of your dream change based on the language, or is it all still just totally random?

Kurdish and Mongolian and Luganda, oh my!

Iteki — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 05:29:35 -0800

What are the most multilingual websites on the web? In helping computer illiterate people to use the web I like to be able to put them in front of a site in their own language. I have been using bbc.co.uk until now, as it has 33 languages, but the drawback is firstly that it only has 33 languages, and also that it is a news site, and the news from some of these countries is often somewhat upsetting. There are about 18 languages available on wikipedia.org, but I am a little hesitant as the content is so changeable.

Individual sites are good for really obscure languages, but I am ideally looking for one site that is available in a hundred languages. Ideally I am looking for as uncontroversial sites as possible, stuff like pop-culture, food, sport and lifestyle etc. I already have a lady who found something political online that she disagrees with and wants me to remove!

Social networking that doesn't rely on language

lhall — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:23:06 -0800

Niche social networking setup that relies on symbols/emoticons and pre-set phrases to communicate? I need to quickly set up a social network to connect a bunch of people all around the globe. There aren't really multi-lingual social networks, and the ones that do exist (Badoo, QuePasa) put a heavy emphasis on dating and aren't customizable.

Basically, I need a mix of Ning and Facebook, with the ability to sort people by the info they've entered (location, industry, etc). The reason those two systems won't work is that I don't want there to be a default language.

That's where the symbols or pre-set phrases come in - if I selected Greeting -> "Good morning!" it could display in the default language of the viewer, having been translated through the system. (Club Penguin has a similar phrase selection thing...in their case, it's to make convos safe for kids, but here it's an issue of spoken language.) Making sense so far?

Here are the needs the site needs to address:

- global coordination, everyone who signs up is pinpointed on a map and perhaps connected regionally (a la Facebook)

- expertise location, depending on the game community needs (sorted by ticking a checkbox, so it could be translatable to the viewer's default language?)

- statistics, who's playing where, what are their skills and expertise

- personal profiles and hanging out with the community at large (again like Facebook, just using a menu of symbols or pre-set words)

The catch with all of this is that I am not a programmer, although I can pull together resources as necessary...so, I really need advice. Are there any open source social network platforms available that would serve these needs? How would I go about making this thing a reality?

Is there a name for this?

msali — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:56:44 -0800

Is there a name for this multilingual phenomena? I was recently introduced to the concept of code switching, and inspired by another question posted earlier today, I decided to ask about something that I experience frequently, and wanted to know if someone can put a name on it (I am looking at you, Languagehat).
When recounting a story I have read, television I have watched, or a conversation I have had, I frequently have a hard time recalling what language I read, watched or spoke. For example, I could be telling a friend about a story I read on the internet, and when queried about what country/language the story came from, I simply cannot tell.
For the sake of background, I should note that I am actively and passively trilingual (I am a translator, hence the frequent use of various languages). I use/write/consume all three languages on a daily basis, thereby leading to a bit of confusion as to which language I am actually operating in. I hope this isn't too vague, but I wonder, what is it called when you don't know what language you did something in? I thank you in advance for any and all elucidations.

What's the jargon for a "convergent" word?

mecenday — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 06:39:18 -0800

I'm looking for a term my professor used to use for "convergent words." What do you call a word that uses roots with similar meanings to form the same concept across two languages? (either by chance or direct-translation) No, not a cognant. A cognant would be a word that just plain comes from the same origin, and therefore is similar across two languages, like the English/Spanish pairing of "circumstance/circunstancia."

What I'm talking about is more like the English/Russian pairing of "circumstance/обстоятельства*," where "об-" means roughly "circum/around" and "стоят" means roughly "stand." Also there's "crosswalk/переход*" where "пере-" is roughly "across" and "ход" is roughly "go/walk." The roots have the same meanings, but different origins.

Wiktionary says that in Brasilian-Portuguese a "computer mouse" is called a "mouse," as a cognant with the English. However, in Portugal, a native translation with the same concept as in English (rodent) is used, "rato." What would "rato" be?

I know there's a bit of jargon to describe these "convergent" words, what is it?

*, for the sounder-outers:
обстоятельства = "obstoyatel'stva"
переход = "perekhod"

My vocabulary is large, it contains multitudes

seawallrunner — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 07:56:26 -0800

LanguageArts: to the bilingual (or more) people in the hive... Did you grow up in a two-language culture? I grew up in Montreal, Canada, where French is the main language and English runs a very close second. Even in my adult years, I speak two languages with my friends - shifting from French to English and then back to French during the course of a conversation. I'm not unique in doing this, I hear this often in Montreal, my friends do this too no matter their proficiency in English (or French). There appears to be no rhyme or reason for the 'switch' to happen, or no designated switcher in the conversation, who changes one language to the other (it could be me, or it could be the other person).

And this has little to do with the degree of closeness in the relationship - I've seen this done in retail stores between salespeople and clients, as well as within families or between friends.

So - my question: are we Canadians unique in this regard (I've seen this in Ottawa as well), or are there other countries where this happens as well? I'm thinking of countries with more than one official language - Spain (Spanish and Catalan), Switzerland (German, Romanche, French, Italian), anywhere else? Does this happen in Asian countries? In Latin America?

I'm not talking about moms switching languages with their toddlers in order to teach them another language - although this may have something to do with it, why us adults are doing this in our later years.

Fluently bilingual (or more) people, tell me more about how you talk with your friends - do you stick to one language only or do you drift from one language to the other to express thoughts and emotions? And if so, which languages do you use?

Pixel fonts versus TT fonts.

strawberryviagra — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:52:52 -0800

I’m looking for font recommendations for a multi-lingual online Flash application. The application will need to display a lot of textual information along with imagery. I’d like to keep font size to a minimum (say 11 point) across all languages, of which Simplified Chinese and Indian Marathi will be two of the chosen languages.
Would pixel fonts be a better choice than standard True Type (ie in displaying the intricacies of a multi byte character at that size)?
Any font guideline references, personal horror stories, vignettes of personal success relating to this would be extremely appreciated.

German jokes at a bi-lingual wedding

ajp — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 15:22:41 -0800

How do I make a multi-lingual best man's speech at a German wedding? Very similar to this previous post I am to make the best man's speech at a German wedding. However there are some differences from the other post.

First, both bride and groom are German, child-hood sweet-hearts from the south of western Germany. The wedding will be in Germany, the guests will mainly be German with some English, Italian, and other nationalities. I'm told that most people will understand English, but I'd like to do something that will reach everyone, and particularly the German-only speakers.

Second, it has been specifically requested that there be no props, photos, PowerPoint, etc. Frankly, that's making things a lot trickier, but I suppose I'll have to go along with it.

I am looking for a way to break any language barriers and encourage everyone to mingle. I'm thinking of drawing inspiration from Eddie Izzard's "le singe est dans l'arbre" skit, wherein he parodies the useless French he learned at school. Possibly I'll take a German joke as the theme for the speech, or an English joke and transcribe it into German... who knows.

Any suggestions for the best approach to take? I don't really need any tips on German etiquette or weddings in general, just how to make a bi-lingual speech without saying everything twice, and without leaving half the audience waiting for a translation. Oh, I can speak a smattering of German and have friends who would help with translation.

Some good Spanish to English / English to Spanish desktop translation program?

masymas — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 20:45:54 -0800

Some good Spanish to English / English to Spanish desktop translation program? I'm looking for a free or cheap desktop translation app (platform=winxp) with functionality similar to that of WordWeb (hotkey, dictionary, thesaurus, pronunciation variants, etc). Bonus points for multiple languages.

Luggage Tag Languages

NGnerd — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 16:51:21 -0800

I just bought an overpriced piece of luggage and as a method to make sure it's easily recognizeable (like all modern luggage it's plain black fabric) and lower it's inherent value i want to place a sticker on it that says "This is not your bag" in as many languages as possible. I just don't trust babelfish not to make my bag say "bag yours not" so i'm hopeing i can steal some of that bilingual knowledge out there.

What is the best way to implement multi-lingual capability on a site?

Asparagirl — Tue, 25 May 2004 00:28:31 -0800

I'm looking for advice on creating and maintaining a large multi-lingual website--or rather, a large English-only site that's going multi-lingual soon, once we start capturing our users' language preferences via a self-registration form and putting that into a cookie. Or is it better to detect the browser's settings? Or something else? Any book suggestions? First-person accounts? Suggestions of great websites that implement multi-lingual capability in novel or especially nice ways? FYI, we use a proprietary CMS to output a giant XML tree, which we manipulate via XSLT stylesheets, then pull them into a JSP and/or build the whole thing with various modules in Vignette. (Don't ask.) But my point is that getting the data into XML form at the outset is not a problem, if that helps answer the question any. Also, our user base are all registered users; you have to login to use the site. Which is why I'm thinking profile-based/cookie-based language choices, rather than browser-based.