Traveling? Need Quick Translations?After scouring reviews for the best translation apps, the one app that came up again and again as being not only perhaps one of the best, but free as well, is Google Translate. There are some great apps out there for quick translation today. Obviously, you’re not going to get professional level translation for free, and sometimes you just need a quick translation for “Where’s the nearest restaurant?” or “Could you show me to my hotel?” No translation app is perfect, and we decided to do a quick and dirty test of Google Translate versus Bing Translator to start things off. Both are free, both are put out there by major search companies, and both get fairly good reviews, though we saw many more reviews include Google Translate than Bing Translator. Beauty Found in Translation It is a rare occasion when the world of language translations is dazzled by the beauty of translations. This time it comes in the form of Disney’s animated movie Frozen. The movie was released in 25 different languages with all of the dialogue lip-synced — a translation and production feat by itself when you consider language variations. Disney just released a YouTube video with the movie’s 4-minute title song “Let It Go” sung in all 25 languages in succession. Notice how all of the languages sound as though they are sung by the same singer and are perfectly lip-synced. This video is beautifully done and a joy to watch. Enjoy it! httpv://youtu.be/hHoyjg027WU Portmanteau, combining two words and two meaningsA few weeks ago we learned about “magpiety,” a word created by yoking together the two words “magpie” and “piety.” This combination of both words and meanings to create new ones in fact has a name of its own: portmanteau. Originally the word portmanteau didn’t mean anything at all. ‘Port’ is a French prefix denoting an object that carries the word following it. ‘Manteau’ means cloak. With the two together, you now have the word for a cloak-carrying object. That’s right, a suitcase. In its earliest incarnations, portmanteau referred to any bag that could easily be carried on horseback, but it evolved over time to mean the big, hinged, hard-sided pieces we would normally imagine today. Think one of those hefty leather jobs that look really good on old steam trains, preferably surrounded by dapper gents in suave hats and ladies with plenty of silk. |
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