Most people have probably received an email in which a humorous anecdote ends with "LOL", and we’ve learned that it means "laugh out loud". But this is just the tip of the iceberg — the phenomenon of text messaging is everywhere these days!

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Chinese efforts to provide signage in English as the 2008 Olympic Games approach inspired Wired Magazine writer Michael Erard to speculate about the future of English as a global language.

The expected “Chinglish” translation boners are cited, but the author also looks at some of the ways English is being changed in different ways in different parts of the globe, similarly to the way Latin and Arabic splintered into a number of locally-influenced dialects.

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

English is “mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue—what’s coming to be known as Panglish.”

Portugal’s parliament has voted to phase in over six years changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way, as reported in a BBC News story. 

The agreement standardizes numerous spellings and adds the letters k, w, and y to the alphabet. Silent consonants will be deleted to spell words more phonetically. For example, "optimo" (great) would become "otimo."

Seven Portuguese-speaking countries agreed on a unified form of Portuguese in 1991. More than 230 million people live in the eight countries that constitute the CPLP, the Community of Countries of the Portuguese Language (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa): Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and of course Portugal itself, which has approximately 10 million speakers.

AATIA members qualify for specially discounted $20 tickets (usually $35) to two concerts by Peruvian Jorge Caballero and the Axis String Quartet on Friday & Saturday, June 20 and 21, at 7:30PM.

The evening of South American music at the new Mexican American Cultural Center on Lady Bird Lake will include the premiere performance of a new quintet by Argentine Tango Maestro Jorge Morel, who will be present. The quintet was commissioned by the event’s sponsor, the Austin Classical Guitar Society.

Call ACGS at 512-300-2247 before the June 12 discount deadline and mention this offer when you order your tickets.

Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.
— Goethe, 1827.

This belief that international literature plays a vital role in book culture is one that is shared by all the publishers and booksellers involved in Reading the World, a celebration of literature in translation to be held at BookPeople on Friday, June 6.

Noted Russian translator Marian Schwartz will moderate the hour-long program, which begins at 7 p.m. and will consist of three parts:

1. Liliana Valenzuela reading from her translation from English into Spanish: Cristina Garcia, A Handbook to Luck/Las Caras de la Suerte

2. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey reading from her translation from Portuguese: Teeth Under the Sun by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Dalkey Archive P, 2007).

3. Michele McKay Aynesworth presenting Beacons, the literary journal of the American Translators Association, with readings by the following: Liliana Valenzuela, Tony Beckwith, and Rob Cogswell and his translator, Horacio Peña.

This event is hosted by the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association. 

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin has acquired a rare Plantin Polyglot Bible, containing parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic with translations and commentary in Latin.

"The Plantin Polyglot Bible is the Ransom Center’s single most important rare book acquisition in the past two decades," said Ransom Center Director Thomas F. Staley.

It joins a sizable collection of Bibles at the Ransom Center, including one of the 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, a 1476 Jenson illuminated Bible on vellum, several copies of the original King James Version of the Bible, and two Coverdale Bibles, the first complete English translation of the Bible.

The New York Moon, an Internet-based publication, is a collection of experimental, reflective, and imaginative projects that unfold in any medium. The just-released April 2008 issue focuses on translation.

Translation is usually considered a practical activity. Someone who speaks one language needs to understand something in another language. But in our polyglot world and city, it can also be a challenge, a game — the intersection of a dozen cultures. In this edition of the Moon, our correspondents approached the theme from widely different vantages, but each showed that there is a hidden movement to “translation.” After all, the Latin word, translatus, means “carried over.”

In observance of World in Translation Month, the American Literary Translation Association (ALTA) has created a poster that contains a quotation from scholar, theologian, and bibliophile Miles Smith (1554-1624), known for his mastery of Biblical languages. Smith was an integral participant in the translation and publication of the King James Version of the Bible. Download the poster (pdf), print up a couple, and post them on your favorite bulletin boards.

Related:
> Wikipedia article on Miles Smith
> Who were the King James Version translators?