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Linguaholic

sidney

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Posts posted by sidney

  1. True to meaning is the way to go. If you look at the Marketing Mistakes Abroad thread within Linguaholic, you'll see some absolutely fantastic examples of what happens when we just directly translate words across. Even at times we will just translate phrases within phrases; an example of this is like I just posted about Pepsi. Pepsi's slogan at a time was "Come alive with Pepsi!" but in China, they translated it to "Pepsi bring your ancestors back from the dead!"

    I think we can all agree if we speak English, that "Come alive!" in the original slogan was not meant to insinuate that it could raise the dead. It was just an English way of saying "Wake up and be refreshed!" or "Be vitalized!" or what have you.

    That's why Google translate isn't that effective, it tends to translate words literally, like that "Come Alive" example. So if the true to word method doesn't sound right, then you translate it using the true to meaning method. Then the sentence would be really translated correctly.

  2. Ah, no, not intentionally, but I did try to translate a Stevie B. song that was sung in Spanish when I was a kid so that I would understand it because the melody is quite romantic. That was during the 90's, so since there was no internet yet that time, I used a Spanish to English dictionary, lol. Of course some lines of the song did not make sense at all since it was translated literally.

  3. I tend to remove the vowels when I text, so they're quite shortened, but they're understandable. Unless I'm using predictive text input or I'm texting formally, I just tend to abbreviate my words. I don't see anything wrong with that, after all, I'm just texting, I'm not writing a formal document.

  4. I would also agree that you don't have to be fluent in 2 languages to be considered as "bilingual", unless you're applying for a job that requires being fluent in another language. As long as you can speak and understand the basic and complicated sentences, even if you're not fluent, then you're already considered bilingual in my book.

  5. In the call center world, you get paid higher if you know another language besides English. Plus, if you know another language, you can tell if people around you start insulting or cursing you in another language, because I noticed that if they don't want the foreigner to hear what they're saying, then they start to speak in their native language in front of the foreigner.

  6. Well if I'm already fluent in a certain language, then correct grammar is indeed very important, like in the English language. But if I'm still learning a foreign language, then it would be more important for me to learn the basic words to get my point across, grammar is really not important at the moment. I'll just concentrate on it if I'm already fluent in the language.

  7. I haven't been out of the country yet, and my English is quite fluent, so so far I have never felt shy regarding speaking in general, whatever language it may be. Even with the regional languages spoken here, I don't seem to mind or care that I don't understand them, since Tagalog is the major and most widely used language over here.

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