Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak, you speak, we speak). But linguists generally swat down claims that certain languages are "easier" than others, since it is assumed all languages are complex to the same degree.
English and Arabic are today among the 6 official languages of the United Nations, with an estimated 322 and 175 millions of speakers around the world, respectively. Yet these two languages represent two distinct worlds, each having for the most part its own culture, religion and mentality. Tools such as VerbAce may help English speakers to access Arabic text (and vice versa) and thus to bridge some of the gap between East and West.
This text presents translators from different linguistic backgrounds discussing multilingual translation in the European Union. All articles stress the political dimension of multilingualism, and the professional role of the translator as communicator, on which much of the credibility of a union "speaking with one voice in many languages" will ultimately depend.
Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies.
