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| Issue #19 | News and Tips for a Multilingual World | January 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||
Archives 2007 2006 2005 2004 |
Happy New Year!
While the Western or Gregorian calendar is now used for most purposes all over the world, in many cultures, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, alternative calendars are still used for determining the dates of important holidays. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar meaning that each year corresponds to the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun, however, other calendars, including the most ancient, mark time by reference to the moon. The Islamic calendar is a purely lunar calendar. Each month begins from the spotting of the first crescent moon after the new moon and is either 29 or 30 days long. A year (12 lunar months) is 354-355 days.
On the other hand, Chinese New Year is a huge holiday with celebrations traditionally going on until the 15th of the month when the moon is at its brightest. Also, Chinese New Year generally falls closer to January 1, because the Chinese calendar is a "lunisolar" calendar. The calendar usually has 12 months, each beginning at the new moon, but every once in a while (about 7 times in every 19 years), the Chinese include an extra month - a "leap" month - to bring their year back in synch with the solar year.
In Chinese astrology, the stems correspond to the five major elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) in their yin and yang forms. The first year of the cycle is Yang Wood the second is Yin Wood, etc. The stem and branch of your birth year is important in determining your character. According to this system, the coming year will be the Earth Rat Year. Colors are also associated with each of the elements (green for wood, red for fire, brown for earth, white for metal and black for water, so you may see the year referred to as the Brown Rat Year.
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Nursery School Site Globalized MTM LinguaSoft recently worked pro bono on globalizing a website for St. Mary’s Nursery School on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The school caters to an international community and they wanted their website to reflect this. MTM LinguaSoft coordinated the translations from volunteer parents and provided professional proofreading and building of the web pages in the various languages. French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish versions are already online. A German version will follow. "Helloh bud:" On-line Translation Sparks Diplomatic Incident Some Israeli journalists apparently used an on-line engine to translate from Hebrew to English questions that they emailed to the Dutch foreign minister in advance of a fact-finding trip to the Netherlands. The introduction read: Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.
Among other problems, the translation engine confused 'ha'im', the Hebrew word for 'if', with 'ha'ima', which means 'mother'.Are You a "Digital Native?"  Now we have new terms to describe the gap between those who have grown up immersed in digital technology and those who had to learn it later in life: "digital natives" and "digital immigrants." Mark Prensky seems to have coined the terms in a 2001 article in On the Horizon. Discussion and research on what difference, if any, being a digital native makes has exploded since that time. One team of international researchers has set up the Digital Natives Project with its own wiki (you natives will know what this is), www.digitalnative.org. Google's International Rivals  Google sites are still far and away the most used sites around the world; however competitors are moving up on it. More important, Google may not be the site of choice in the foreign market you are targeting. comScore, Inc. recently reported on the number of searches conducted on the top 50 search engines around the world. Of the more than 61 billion searches conducted, Google sites accounted for over half, but Yahoo sites accounted for over 8.5 billion searches and, more interestingly, China's Baidu and South Korea's NHN Corporation (Naver.com) are among the top five. In Asia, Google's competition may be even stronger, since another study by comScore found that in most Asian nations – including India, Japan and Taiwan – Yahoo sites had more unique visitors than Google sites, and NHN beat all the competition in South Korea. Checking your ranking on Google may not be enough. |
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The shorter Islamic calendar year means that the start of a new year will only rarely coincide with our New Year’s Day, but the next one will be pretty close - on December 29, 2008. For Muslims, the beginning of the year is the anniversary of the Hijra (or Hegira), Mohammed’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE (AD). (The calendar is also known as the Hijra (or Hegira) Calendar.) This day is not a time for riotous celebration as it is in other cultures. Although traditions differ throughout the Islamic world, the day is traditionally one for prayer and reflection.
Under the Chinese calendar, years are traditionally designated by their place in 60-year cycles. Each 60-year cycle is divided into ten celestial stems, which repeat 6 times in every 60-cycle, and 12 terrestrial branches, which repeat 5 times. The names of the stems have no English equivalents, but the terrestrial branches are the animals we always hear about – rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and big. A year is designated by its stem and branch.
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