Lingo24 Company Blog

The late, great educator, philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan achieved much during his lifetime, but will be best remembered for popularising the term ‘global village’ back in the 1960s.

The Canadian professor was perhaps a little ahead of his time in realising that electronic mass media would eventually break down the barriers of time and distance that had thus far inhibited global communication from reaching its full potential.

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From Shakespeare and Dickens, to Orwell and Wilde; the English-speaking world has produced some of the finest and most celebrated writers ever known.

Indeed, William Shakespeare’s work alone has been read, performed and analysed by millions of people across the globe and has been translated into every major living language – and some minor ones too, including Albanian, Yakut and even Zulu.

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It was previously reported here that due to a drastic shortage of competent Arabic, Farsi and Pashto translators private hire linguistics companies had sprung up in the USA and were offering up to $210,000 in annual salaries for suitable volunteers to ply their trade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, a Christian Missionary organisation is also appealing for volunteers to make up a similarly desperate shortfall, but this time for already able, partially able or trainee interpreters to go out on mission for a nominal salary.

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Fancy a salary of between $130,000 and $210,000? Well your luck could be in if you fill certain criteria.

Firstly, you have to be fluent and preferably also qualified (to attain the top salary band) in Arabic, Farsi or Pashto; secondly, you have to be a US Citizen and pass a security vetting process and finally, you will have to be prepared to serve in Iraq alongside US Forces. That being said, the chance for most linguists to earn over $1 million in less than five years is too good an opportunity to miss.

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Every time we listen to the news, we might be forgiven for concluding that in these recessionary times, every business is about to, or actually has hit the skids. But as the old saying goes; “It’s an ill wind…” and so it appears; for far from hitting a terminal decline, some businesses are doing quite well BECAUSE of the challenging economic climate.

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In translations, accuracy is absolutely everything…but of course as linguists we are well aware of this fact…it is one of our basic tenets. Failure to ensure such accuracy can have many consequences ranging from embarrassment and loss of professional reputation, right up to more serious consequences…as the News of the World newspaper found out to its cost.

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The advent of the Internet has brought a wealth of opportunities since its rise to primacy as the world’s primary business and communications medium; indeed many translation services companies now rely on the internet as the basis of their business model. It is fascinating then, to see how a business opportunity has arisen for even amateur translators, from what originated as a free service provided by film fans.

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Now over the years we’ve all heard and been amazed by the stories; they originated in America in the 70’s and first started with the ambulance chasing Lawyers. Of course, since then, stories of ridiculous legal claims being upheld in US Courts continue to abound…how about the firm that was sued under health and safety legislation when a woman tripped on a child in the store…and the child was actually her own!

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Although the outlook on the domestic front of late has seemed bleak, with the threat of both Banking collapses and now the threat of recession; the term ‘worldwide recession’ often bandied about by all sections of the press, may actually be somewhat misleading.

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As all linguists are aware, language is never static but constantly evolves with vocabulary and usage constantly evolving to adapt to milieu. Perhaps though, some parents in Australia might be feeling that evolution could have taken a wrong turn with regards to their children’s linguistic direction, because it seems that it has proved necessary to publish a new dictionary designed to assist them in understanding their children’s jargon.

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