02/07/2007 - 02/08/2007

The Expat Syndrome

Life can only get better abroad: The new opportunities and friends, the freedom, the chance to reinvent yourself where nobody knows you.

With these thoughts, Anna, a psychologist from Poznan, Poland, left for Eindhoven in the Netherlands with her husband. He had a three-year placement there, and she'd given up her job to go with him.

But the move didn't herald a feeling of exhilaration -- just six months of depression. "The first morning was terrible," said Anna, 32, who has lived in Moscow since 2005. "I woke up, and it was like, 'OK, this dream is coming true, because we wanted to move here, but what now? I'm so far from my family, from my mother, my sisters, friends. What am I doing here? I don't have anything to do.

Australia: Home carers who speak their clients' language more culturally friendly

Home carers who speak their clients� ethnic language will help make services more culturally friendly, Community Services Minister Gavin Jennings said today.

Presenting certificates to 25 aged care graduates speaking a total of 23 community languages, Mr Jennings said home and community care ( HACC ) services need to be responsive to our culturally diverse community.

"As people age and grow frail, they seek comfort from what is familiar, such as their own languages," Mr Jennings said. "One in five Victorians speak a language other than English at home, using 180 different languages and dialects. Within four years, so will nearly one in four senior Australians. For home carers, speaking the language of the people you are supporting can be one way of providing more culturally responsive care."

French fight English's "linguistic hegemony"

French pressure groups have demanded an end to the dominance of the English language in business in France.

A group of trades unions and language lobbyists say the French language is being reduced to a local dialect. They have organised a press conference in parliament to demand the right to work solely in French. One campaigner has dubbed the battle to preserve the supremacy of the French language as a fight against "linguistic hegemony" of English.

Word of the Day: buss

buss \BUS\, noun:
1. A kiss; a playful kiss; a smack.
transitive verb:
1. To kiss; especially to kiss with a smack.

Lucky guesser gets a buss upon his plucky kisser. -- William H. Gass, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas

Exchange a random peace greeting during Mass with a stranger in the next pew and the odds are roughly one in fifty that you shake the hand or buss the cheek of a parishioner who has had at least one marriage voided by a diocesan tribunal. -- Robert H. Vasoli, What God Has Joined Together

Improve your language skills on Air France flights

Travellers on selected Air France flights will soon be able to polish up their language skills whilst jetting around the world.

From April passengers on the airline’s Boeing 777-300s will be able to improve their language skills by taking part in short lessons delivered on individual screens. People can learn more than 23 different languages through the in-flight entertainment system, so you can polish up your skills in Korean, Portuguese, Russian and many others.

Campaign to make French sole legal language in EU

A group of senior European politicians on Wednesday called for French to be installed as the language of reference for all legal texts in the EU in an effort to offset its gradual disappearance as a working language in Brussels.

The campaign for French to become the only source language for translations of legal texts into the other 22 official EU languages is led by the former prime ministers of Bulgaria and Romania, government ministers from France, Belgium, Poland and Italy, EU lawmakers and scholars, who argue it is the most precise and analytical European language for legal texts.

New students 'should speak second language'

Students should be able to speak a foreign language as a requirement for university entry, the British Academy has said in a submission on the decline of modern languages.

The British Academy, the national voice of the humanities and social sciences, warns in its response to Lord Dearing's interim report on language policy that the decline in language study at secondary school was harming the UK.

RantNetwork, Inc. Introduces Breakthrough Image and Text Translation Service

RantNetwork, Inc. is now providing real time mobile Image Translation with embedded text translation for BlackBerry® Pearl™ customers around the world. The "Communilator" allows mobile subscribers to take a picture of a document, newspaper headline or sign and have the text translated in up to 16 currently available languages . Mobile customers also have the option to manually translate the text on the handset with the text translation feature.

The Live Connection feature is a partnership with TeleLanguage that allows customers to speak directly with a live interpreter in over 150 represented languages.

Word of the Day: idee fixe

idee fixe \ee-day-FEEKS\, noun:
An idea that dominates the mind; a fixed idea; an obsession.

The reality of obsession -- its incessant return to the same few themes, scenarios and questions; its meticulous examination and re-examination of banal minutiae for hidden meanings that simply aren't there; the cancerous way an idee fixe usurps other, more interesting thoughts -- is that it is confining, not rebellious, and not fascinating but maddeningly dull. -- Laura Miller, "The Streetwalkers of San Francisco", New York Times, August 20, 2000

It became an idee fixe that he stubbornly adhered to in spite of the plain evidence . . . that obviously contradicts it. -- Edwin G. Pulleyblank, "Prosody or pharyngealization in old Chinese?", The Journal of the American Oriental Society, January 12, 1996