A review of the challenges faced by professional translators both in Asia Pacific and worldwide. Translating is a key service in the knowledge economy, an enabler that uses and relies on the new technology of information and communication. But we know that translation and interpreting are processes that can often be by-passed by those who are bi- or multilingually competent. Indeed, if translation and interpreting were always needed, and always used, the sheer cost of global communication in money and time would act as a serious brake on growth.

this paper examines the concept of globalization in relation to terrorism, and argues that the ‘imposition’ of the english language on the world, africa, and in particular nigeria (through the media, information technology, and other means of propaganda, and under the guise of globalization) is a form of linguistic terrorism. it consequently views globalization as another name for imperialism and domination by the west, and argues that the continued use of english in all spheres of life will make the nigerian state stagnant, if not indeed retrogressive, rendering growth and development elusive. as a step in the direction of a cure, it therefore advocates renewed interest in the adoption of an indigenous national language for nigeria.

BY GENERAL consensus English has become, if not a global language, then at the very least a lingua franca. Some commentators on English in the world, like Robert Phillipson (Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992), use the term that serves him as a title to imply that English is itself part of the problem of having just such a global language. The argument here however is that English – like Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic and Examination Chinese – through its political ascendancy (as a result of various waves of colonial activity alongside its use for religious purposes), may have taken on the character of a ‘semi-sacred’ rather than simply an imperial and imperialist language.

The computational analysis of corpora, a body of ‘naturally occurring language texts chosen to characterize a state of variety of a language’ (Sinclair, 1991: 171) provided the opportunity to reveal otherwise unobservable features and patterns across varieties, registers and languages. One such language feature is a ‘lexical bundle’ otherwise known as an n-gram. Vague terms in any language variety can often present themselves in the form of not just individual words (e.g. things, plenty, scores, stuff) but as a group of words that tend to co-occur: a lexical bundle (e.g. loads of, stuff like that, and so on, or what have you). In this paper, the function in Hong Kong English (HKE) of the vague n-gram ‘something like that’ will be explored via corpus methodology to account for its observed hyper-usage in Hong Kong society.

Notes on the compilation of a classic dictionary of law. There are essentially five big questions for the writer of a modern law dictionary – and they're pretty much the same questions faced by lexicographers of old, from Rastell to Jacob to Bouvier to Black, and these are discussed.

The aim of this illustrative paper is to show how words and expressions are coined or changed in Cameroonian speech in English and French in order to insult or stereotype other groups of people. Taken along official language lines, ethnic boundaries and social divides, these lexical elements reproduce some aspect of the addressee's history, social stance, academic achievement, professional background, linguistic and political belonging, and even gender. The expressions are from four major sources: French, English, Pidgin English and various indigenous languages. Some of them capture common social phenomena in the society. For example, Pidgin English supplies a descriptive name for a woman who moves in with a man to whom she is not married, i.e. come-we-stay. This appellation focuses more on the woman and the relationship rather than on the man. Such coinages are also common elsewhere in Africa. For instance, Nigerian Pidgin English supplies the appellation face-me-I-face-you for cramped up residential apartments in which rooms face each other on the corridor. Lexical strategies for naming and derogation are common in these two societies where groups compete with each other for their voices to be heard and respected.

When I launched an online survey last December with the aim of learning about people's practices of looking up usage advice, I anticipated that searching for answers to grammar questions would not differ considerably from what are currently most common practices in searching for any kind of information. The answers are, as a rule, simply looked up online. From a group of 189 respondents, among whom the majority were university-educated language professionals such as linguists, editors, journalists and translators, more than half reported that they preferred consulting online rather than printed sources. The respondents below the age of 25 who reported looking up usage advice in printed books were few and far between (11%). The question that can be consequently raised is what implications this finding has for the future of the printed usage advice literature, which includes usage guides, all-in-one reference books we are researching in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. What is more, the number of sources that are available on the Internet is growing exponentially, and we need to probe more deeply into the matter to ask which of the available sources are in fact consulted.

African American Language (AAL) is the most widely recognized – and controversial – ethnic variety of English in the world. In the United States national controversies about the speech of African Americans have erupted periodically for more than a half-century now, from the difference-deficit debates in the 1960s (Labov, 1972) to the Ebonics controversy in the 1990s (Rickford, 1999) and linguistic profiling in the 2000s (Baugh, 2003, 2018). Further, the adoption of performance genres from AAL into languages other than English, such as hip-hop and rap, has given the speech of African Americans even wider international recognition and global status (Omoniyi, 2006). The curiosities and controversies about African American speech symbolically reveal (1) the depth of people's beliefs and opinions about language differences; (2) the widespread level of public misinformation about language diversity; and (3) the need for informed knowledge about language variation in public life and in education.

Yule and Burnell's 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary still fascinates and informs today. It is not the finest of Salman Rushdie's writings, but this is the first paragraph of his essay Hobson-Jobson (italics in original):

“The British Empire, many pundits now agree, descended like a juggernaut upon the barbicans of the East, in search of loot. The moguls of the raj went in palanquins, smoking cheroots, to sup toddy or sherbet on the verandahs of the gymkhana club, while the memsahibs fretted about the thugs in bandannas and dungarees who roamed the night like pariahs, plotting ghoulish deeds.” (Rushdie, 1992:81)

Rushdie points out that the italicised words all appear in the celebrated dictionary Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive by Henry Yule & A.C. Burnell, first published in 1886.

This gem of a dictionary gives definitions and origins of words in common use by the British in colonial India in the late nineteenth century. Some of the entries won't be a surprise to readers – we all know that raj, mogul and memsahib are Indian words. But there are many words with their origins in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit or other Indian or Eastern languages, whose origin is perhaps not quite so well known.

Leading dictionaries do not always provide guidance on the incorporation of exotic words into the English spelling system, as this article abundantly demonstrates.

The dominance of North American (U.S. and Canadian) English is widely prevalent in Korean English language teaching (ELT). Students show more positive attitudes towards American English than any other English variety (Jung, 2005; Yook & Lindemann, 2013), and teachers impart and reinforce American English norms (Ahn, 2017; Ahn, 2011). Administrators and employers consider American English as the sole model for Korean ELT (Ahn, 2013; Harrison, 2010; Jenks, 2017; Song, 2013). Koreans’ preference for American English dates back to the 1950s, when the first national ELT curriculum explicitly favored American English over British English (Lee, 2015). Since then the status of American English as the standard among all varieties of English has been strengthened due to Korea's strong political, military, and economic ties with the US (Harrison, 2010; Yim, 2007).

The introduction from the writer's new book, A Dictionary of Cliches, Bloomsbury 1996, outlining a novel family of kinds of hackneyed and overused expressions

THIS STUDY compares responses to indirect speech acts in a chat room with responses in a telephone conversation. In this instance, the chat room serves as a meeting place for members of a recent undergraduate university course and the telephone conversations are taken from a study done by Clark in 1979. Indirect speech acts are those that have a literal meaning (e.g., ‘Do you have a dollar?’ – the surface question is a request for information) as well as an indirect meaning (in this case, a request for money). Responses can consist of (1) just the answer to the surface question, (2) that answer plus the information indirectly requested, (3) only the information indirectly requested, or (4) some other form of response. The percentage of each type of response was compared in the two forms of communication. Clark found that the majority of responses consisted of only the information requested, and as predicted, the typed environment of the chat room yielded an even greater majority of this simplified form of response.

A discussion towards the teaching and learning of English as a universal medium

Following the articles by Pam Peters (‘Australian Style’) and Arthur Delbridge and Colin Yallop (‘The Macquarie Dictionary’) in ET45, a consideration of what makes English in Australia distinctive

IN SAMUEL SELVON's The Lonely Londoners (set in the 1950s), Galahad, a Trinidadian immigrant into Britain, is talking with an English woman, Daisy. After their first date they are sipping tea in his basement bedsitter:

‘You get that raise the foreman was promising you?’ Galahad ask, for something to say.