Month October 2002

Advertising America

According to this recent NY Times article, the State Department is launching an ad campaign to promote “American values” to the Muslim world: Special efforts will be made to give audiences here in Indonesia, elsewhere in Asia and in the…

Con Artist.scot

Registering top-level domain names can be a little confusing. There are country-code domain names (TLDs), like .de for Germany and .jp for Japan, and then there are the generic TLDs, like .com and .net. But be warned that there are…

Language and Health Care

“Language is among the top three barriers to adequate health care, said Fred Hobby, director of the project and chief diversity officer at GHS. So with a $1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, four area hospitals hope…

Spanish America

More than 10% of American residents now speak only Spanish at home, up from 7.5% in 1990, according Bill Frey, a senior fellow in demography at the Milken Institute. He writes: “Toy manufacturs, for example, upped their production of bilingual…

Languages Living Together

After reading about languages doing battle in Romania, it’s nice to see that languages can coexist in Lebanon: Lebanon, a former French mandate country, is a good illustration of how the French and English languages don’t have to be in…

Democracy, Translated

According to this NY Times story, Vietnam is requiring that anyone who wants to launch a Web site get government permission first. Here’s the story. What jumped out at me was this mention of what happened to someone for posting…

Hello Bonjour Ciao Hola

If you’ve used the free machine translation site Babelfish, you know that it can be a little time consuming to translate one phrase into multiple languages. Carl Tashian has created a handy workaround that takes care of the heavy lifting.…