Since its creation, Twitter has been a worldwide phenomenon that has connected everyday people with their favorite celebrities, friends, and everyone in between.  Although the service has been provided worldwide, the company has been trying to translate the business tools into 33 languages in order to reach an even broader audience.

These languages include: Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu.

At the Twitter Translation Center, translators can sign on using their Twitter account and help translate various blocks of text for the company. The upside for the translator is experience in the field, as well as their name possibly on the “Top Ten Translators” for those who have been translating the most.

The @MRYLanguages Twitter account isn’t in this top ten just yet, but it does connect directly with Director of Translation Mei-Ling Chen where she will gladly answer questions posed about the company, translation services, or any other related topic in the industry.

Monterey Language Services was out in the park at the celebration of Marina’s 35^th Anniversary, among cultural groups such as Kiwanis International, Youth Leadership Forum of Medicine, Our World Peace Park, and many others. 

People who speak different languages came by and talked to us, Czech, Pashto, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, etc.  People shared with us their experience dealing with interpreters.  We also got interviewed by local TV.

This was a great day to witness our community’s incomparably rich culture diversity.  It’s hard to grasp the significance of the culture mix until you come out and see it for yourself. 

It’s wonderful for Monterey Language Services to be out and reach local resources & make translation and interpretation services accessible to the people in the community. 

Why do we translate Deutschland into Germany
in English?

By Emily Frye

While studying abroad in France my sister and I decided to take a trip to Munich, Germany. While crossing the border by train a policewoman asked what we were doing in Europe.  I said that we were students in France and were visiting a friend in Munich.  She replied in English, “So you are studying in Frenchland.”  Frenchland? We thought she obviously didn’t know English very well.  However, later I realized the policewoman had been quite logical.  After all, Germany in German is Deutschland, so the term Frenchland didn’t sound strange anymore.  But, it did get me thinking…

Why do we translate Deutschland into Germany in English?  A little research unveils that it’s not really a translation, but a consequence of the geopolitical history of the region.  Julius Caesar had borrowed the term “German” from the Gauls. They had used it for the tribes who tried to invade their territory from across the Rhine.  It most likely meant “neighbor” or “men of the forest.” Caesar used the term to coin “Germania,” which simply described the entire region beyond the Rhine and Danube (present day Germany).  This led me to question the origin of many other country “translations”, such as:  Hungary for Magyarország, Croatia for Hrvatska, or Finland for Suomi.

One of the most intriguing however is in the Czech language.  In Czech, Germany is Německo.  The old Slavic tribes called the groups of people that lived by the Rhine River, the Nemetes.  In old Slavic, Nemetes literally means “mute.”  For the Slavic people, the language of the Germanic tribes was incomprehensible, so they appropriately named the region after its “mute” inhabitants.

Source: Schulze, Hagen (1998). Germany: A New History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 4.