For Guernica, Elisa Gabbert explores the incorporation of emoji into language and fiction. Gabbert also addresses the idea of diachronic translations, i.e. translating fiction from one historical era to another,…
Nothing connects you with a text or an author like being a translator. Book Riot contributor Rachel Cordasco reached out to twelve literary translators and asked them what inspired them to…
We need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts…And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that…
But the truth is, it might not be travel so much as languages that inform and inspire me. It’s the defamiliarization that foreign languages provide that makes me want to…
At the Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, though she is a non-native speaker: A week after arriving [in Rome],…
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the popularity of invented languages, ranging from the mystical language created by a 12th century abbess to contemporary constructed languages such as Esperanto…
At the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance defends teenagers’ ever-maligned contributions to the lexicon, citing a recent student that examines the extent to which teens influence linguistic change: And the thing about…
In the American imagination the black woman, whether light skinned or dark, is already a sexualized entity, a character upon which so many stereotypes are projected. But as a black…
The Oxford English Dictionary, the first comprehensive catalog of the English language, took seventy years to compile. Volunteers aided the project, and one of the biggest contributors happened to be…
Based on the available evidence, if you want to write one of the fifty most important novels in the next half-century, then by all means avoid sentimental language. But if…