Translations That Work

08/09/2026

08/09/2026

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1617463899793240

08/09/2026

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1544784214330637&set=a.361090512700019

Aus The Guardian.

08/09/2026

06/09/2026

Learn more about the Endangered Language Fund's first sponsored UNESCO trainee (in partnership with the UNESCO Chair on  Rights Education Among Indigenous and Non-Dominant Language Communities), Sarojini Birua from the Ho community in India (pictured with Noro Andriamiseza Ingarao , Programme Sp...

05/09/2026

A fascinating cross-linguistic study investigated conversational data from 31 languages and dialects across five continents and found a striking pattern: every language in the sample had a short expression used to initiate conversational repair; essentially, a way of saying “I didn’t understand; could you repeat that?”

What is particularly interesting is that these expressions often have similar phonetic forms, despite occurring in languages that are otherwise unrelated. Examples include “huh?” in English, “ha?” in Spanish, “hã?” in Portuguese, “he?” in Icelandic, “a?” in Japanese, and “hva?” in Danish.

The researchers suggested that this similarity may reflect a universal property of human communication. When communication breaks down, speakers everywhere need a quick, recognizable way to signal a lack of understanding and request clarification. The expression may therefore have arisen independently in different languages through similar pressures of human conversation.

However, there is an important qualification: 31 languages do not represent all of the world’s languages. The study provides unusually broad cross-linguistic evidence, but it cannot prove that every language has such an expression. The stronger claim is that huh?-like repair initiators may be a near-universal or a potentially universal feature of human conversation, an intriguing example of how very different languages can converge on similar solutions to the same communicative problem.

(References in the comments)

04/09/2026

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/02/books/jonathan-franzen-the-corrections.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-lA.N6in._vY7nPPgF38U&smid=nytcore-ios-share&fbclid=IwY2xjawUHmndwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR6n8HAilX0t9uNsufwfpstjBoVx3tYJdw9kvGveG7VsGZraKeRTXHjpcdQTlw_aem_9D3uabZD5T0rqdnaJkXKSg

Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel was celebrated for its canny portrayal of American life. It’s also a remarkable act of literary creation.

04/09/2026

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1487208876776679&set=pcb.1487208916776675

01/09/2026

Someone shared this in my personal feed this morning. Enjoy :-)

Voice by Clark FultonPoem:If you can keep your head when all abo...