Sports in the UK – only a cultural aspect of a country or an inseparable part of life?
Sports play an important role in Britain. They are treated as popular leisure activities as well as a reason for national pride, no matter if you are a player, an active participant of competitive tournaments or only a spectator sitting in the stands. Although a lot of people associate the country mainly with football, there […]
Code-switching during conversation? A new current or a natural tendency?
Code changes are relatively frequent phenomena, especially while speaking at least one foreign language. Code-switching, one of the best-known examples of code alternations, can be explained as a practice of moving between languages or language varieties in a context of a single communication act. Code-switching refers mainly to people who can be classified as bilinguals, […]
Why do the British drive on the left?
You’ve just arrived in London from Poland. You’ve come to the city center and now the only thing you want to do is crossing the street, the street without traffic lights. “A piece of cake” you think after quick look at empty street from behind your right arm. “No car, so I can cross it.” […]
Feral children – what would we be like without language?
What is it that makes us truly humans? Is it language? Answer to that kind of questions is certainly much more complicated, but it seems that language is of central importance in who we are and what we can achieve. From time to time the world resounds with news concerning so-called feral (or wild) children […]
The Culture of Lies
Dubravka Ugrešić is a well known author among Polish readers. For many years she was a journalist writing for Gazeta Wyborcza and other newspapers around the world. She was a professor on the University of Zagreb. She specializes in Russian literature, especially avant-garde. She is considered by many as the one of the female authors […]
Language and culture – are they inseparable?
Imagine trying to learn another foreign language – but this time completely independently from its country’s culture. Is that even possible? No literary references, no history, no knowledge of the local customs and way of life… Can you master a language without all those context information? It may actually seem quite possible, at least in […]
The Macedonian Issue
The Balkans for centuries were the place of a cultural mixture, the so called ‘cultural melting pot’. There even exists the term ‘balkanization’ which means the process of fragmentation into smaller parts. That process best describes what was always the case with Balkans especially after collapse of Ottoman Empire. Balkans are now divided into very […]
Technical English traps that translator can fall into.
English is considered as an international language when it comes to technical issues. Technical language is used in the manuals of various machines and appliances or in the guides made by specialist for laymen. Most likely every manual consists of a part written in English. The grammar of that type of text is extremely simplified, […]
