Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Monday, April 1, 2013
April Fools' Day Vocabulary ('Dia da Mentira' em Inglês)
Don't be a fool! A few key words related to April Fools' Day and their Portuguese translation.
April Fools' Day
("Dia da Mentira", literalmente, "Dia dos Tolos")
Fool (tolo, bobo)
Hoax (farsa / fraude)
Joke (piada)
To make fun of somebody / to mock somebody
(tirar sarro de alguém)
Prank / Practical Joke (trote / 'piada prática')
Trick (truque, artimanha, trote, 'peça')
To play a trick ('pregar uma peça')
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April Fool's Day,
celebration dates,
language,
Vocabulary
Friday, January 11, 2013
Soccer or Football?
The question seems obvious, but it can be a bit tricky. And the answer is: it depends where you are!
If you're in the U.S.A, so Football is a game for strong men that have to cross a field carrying the ball with their hands and, yes, they can try a field goal by kicking the ball. A lot different from SOCCER the sport in which the players have to use their feet and only the goalkeeper can hold the ball with his hands.
But in the U.K. and the rest of the English speaking world, FOOTBALL is the sport played by stars like Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The British are considered the creators of modern FOOTBALL and they have traditional clubs, such as, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea, although England has won the World Cup only once.
Football (or soccer in Brazil)
Talking about that, Brazil is the greatest World Cup champion and it is going to hold the next World Cup in 2014. The name of the sport in Portuguese is 'futebol', an adaptation of the English word 'football'. ![]() |
| Charles Miller |
Football was brought to Brazil by an Englishmen named Charles Miller in 1984. In the beginning the word 'football' was used to refer to the game, and other English words were used to talk about the sport. And some early clubs that became very popular through the years incorporated English terms to their names, generating curious combinations, such as 'Sport Club Corinthians Paulista' and "Grêmio de Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense".
As you can see, English might be very different from Portuguese but it's influence is big even in Brazil's most popular sport.
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Why is English is in the news in Brazil?
The Ducks go Gangnam Style
Thursday, January 10, 2013
'The word of the year' isn't a word
"Hashtag", is the word of the year, according to the American Dialect Society (read more here). Ironically enough, it isn't a word that will naturally come into a conversation, but the name of a symbol that became crucial to 'highlight' or 'tag' specific subjects on social networks such as Twitter, Instagram or Google+.
A few months earlier, the Oxford American Dictionary had chosen 'gif' as its word of the year (read more here). GIF, if you're not aware of it, is an acronym for Graphic Interchange Format, and it's the kind of technique used to create 'animated pictures' like in the banner at the top of this page or in images like this cat with headphones.
These two examples confirm that the impact of technology on language is enormous, but they also show the two sides of how we use social media: if the hashtag is very useful to organize information and groups of people around a specific subject, gif images are usually silly and meaningless, showing how childish the web has made us.
Let's wait and see if 2013 will make words more meaningful than this...
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Marcadores:
article,
English,
language,
word of the year
Sunday, October 14, 2012
What does it stand for? Acronyms and Abbreviations in English
When teaching or studying ESP it's very common to come across with a lot of abbreviations and acronyms .
An acronym is "a word formed from the first letters of the words that make up the name of something" (that's how it's defined by OALD, or Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary).
And in this era of micro-blogging and fast written communication, more and more acronyms are created everyday (just have a look on Twitter's "TT" (Trending Topics) and you'll see that).
In the business area, acronyms are usually an important part of the professional jargon.
When someone wants to know the meaning of an acronym the question is:'What does it stand for?'
Take a look:
'What does ESP stand for?'
'It stands for English for Specific Purposes'.
Some acronyms can make the answer to this question quite complicated. That's why it's very helpful to have some resources at hand. Besides the traditional Google search engine and the online dictionaries, there are some websites like acronymfinder.com, acronymsearch.com and abbreviations.com.
But take care because an acronym can have lots of different meanings.
For instance, I looked for "ESP" in abbreviations.com and got over a hundred definitions!
TAFN. TA. SYS!
(That's all for now. Thanks a lot. See you soon!)
You may also like: 5 tips for ESP teachers
Beyond Google Translator
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Lyrics that aren't lyrics
Sometimes songs are remembered not because of what they mean but because they are (intentionally or not) completely meaningless. Check out some examples on this very cool video in which these crazy guys cover 26 songs (!) that don't mean that much...
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Beyond Google Translator
On my previous post about ESP I mentioned Google as a possible resource for everyone looking for specific vocabulary. You can do what most people do, and simply Google a term for definitions or images that illustrate what you're trying to understand, and obviously, you can also use the Google Translator.
Many of my students go straight to last option, just to find out what we teachers and all the other more experienced learners already know: Google translation technology is really cool, but when it goes to more specific language things don't work that well.
A good alternative to Google Translator is a very useful tool called Linguee. Basically, it's very similar to other online dictionaries or translators. But there's one huge and essential difference: when translating a word it gives you different extracts taken from the web, so you can actually see the word in different contexts.
Here we have a comparison between these two tools: I wanted to know the meaning of term 'piggyback' when applied to Logistics.
Google Translator showed the following results in Portuguese: "over someone's shoulder"; "to put". As you can see, there's no reference to transport or Logistics.
![]() |
| Google Translator: just the most obvious results |
Linguee results were a lot more interesting: it showed the most common meaning ("over someone shoulders"), but it also furnished the result that was exactly what I was looking for: "railroad combined transport".
![]() |
| Linguee: words in context |
Of course, Linguee won't solve all the problems, but it can be a very useful tool for ESP teachers and students, translators or anyone who has to deal with specific terminology.
Marcadores:
comparison,
English,
English for Logistics,
English for Specific Purposes,
ESP,
Google,
language,
Learning,
Linguee,
resources,
strategies,
Teaching,
technology,
Translation,
Translator
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