Thursday 6 May 2010

Today at Imperial College London's Humanities research seminar series

‘What’s that got to do with anything? Coherence and the translation of relative clauses from Chinese to English’

Thursday 6th May in room S303A, Sherfield Building Level 3, 4pm

More information about the research seminars via the Humanities web page.

From the BBC: 'Historic' day as first non-latin web addresses go live

Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses to contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called "country codes" written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

It said the new domains were "available for use now" although it admitted there was still some work to do before they worked correctly for everyone. However, it said these were "mostly formalities".

Icann president Rod Beckstrom described the change as "historic".

More on the BBC website
thnx Mark!

Wednesday 5 May 2010

Will Self and language learning

Maybe language learning on the one hand and Will Self and French on the other hand not necessarily are related issues altogether, but still: the writer keeps up with learning French. The comments form an intriguing read too.

"I set out on my great adventure to the wilder shores of linguistic competence only six weeks ago – and yet already I feel I'm floundering. Those who read my earlier piece will recall that I had opted for the Berlitz method in order to take my French from the three-year-old-getting-along level: "Train station, where, go now, please?" to one where, by the autumn, when I have a new book out in France, I would be at least capable of conducting a basic press interview.
..."

More on The Guardian's website