RadioLingual: an audio blog found in translation
   

Friday, March 27, 2009

How is this confusing?




"Everytime they pointed to a banana and said 'yellow,' something wasn't clicking."

Marta explains one of her first memories learning English in a Californian elementary school. Ai interviews. Hammad and Emily act out.






Listen in to hear what's so slippery about bananas.

pic from foundphotoslj and music by Bacilos

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

When will they give me bilingual texting?

I used to live in El Paso, Texas, which, paired with Ciudad Juárez, straddles the U.S.-Mexico border. While most people there speak English and/or Spanish fluently, everyone speaks Spanglish, and I became one of those people. Speaking Spanglish was often fun for me, as I got to play with the words of two languages, but it could also be frustrating on occasion, as I use predictive (T9) text messaging, which is impossible when writing in two languages simultaneously.
For example, here's what happens if you have your predictive text set to English, and you have a text conversation with a friend in Spanglish.

Friend: Hey innard, what you up to this taped?
(Hey hombre, what you up to this tarde? = Hey man, what you up to this afternoon?)
Me: Track
(Trabajo = Work)
Friend: No names hue
(No mames guey = Give me a break punk)
Me: Km pheno amigo. Let's get together mananc.
(Lo siento amigo. Let's get together mañana = Sorry friend. Let's get together tomorrow.)

Anyway, you get the gist. And the thing is, sometimes you just wanna speak Spanglish. Like, for instance, "give me a break punk" is a terrible translation for "no mames guey," but I can't think of a good one, which is why I, and many others, would want to say it in Spanish.

So there you have it. I figure it's only a matter of time before one of the cell-phone companies offers bilingual texting, and I hope they hurry up and do it. That day will be, one might say, super chido!

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Ideal Vox-cation


Armed with a mini-disc recorder and a sunny disposition, Ai weathered the Seattle storms by asking people on the University of Washington campus about vacation. She was so slick with the tape recorder that we hardly edited her tape at all.






Make yourself a pina colada and be an audio tourist for a minute.

Sweet vacation photo from rogilde's flickr photostream.

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Flowers? What flowers?



On Wednesday last week, I (Emily) was lucky enough to attend Talk Time, which is a free conversation group for English Language Learners at the Seattle Central Library.

I spoke with enthusiastic learners from around the world, and I got to brag about this website. While I was there, I captured a couple of questions about English that have been bugging some of the participants. Here's the first question:





Over the weekend Radiolingual readers responded, and then we mixed their answers into a short piece.





Listen to the piece here.

Send us your thoughts and comments and stay tuned for our next question--or if you have a question, send it in!


Write from Karen's flickr photostream and Tulip Trees by Rob Costlow.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

How to make an intro


Ai's got mad voiceover skills.

When leading a workshop full of Japanese speakers, avoid calling it "RadioLingual."

This week Ai and Masa recorded their own version of the introduction to our podcasts, but every word was a stumbling block. As if 'RadioLingual' wasn't hard enough, they had to contend with: KUOW. Jack Straw Productions. The Association of Independents in Radio.

For Masa, there's not much difference between Association and Isolation.






Ironies abound in this podcast installment, but beauty too. Ai produced an amazing version of the introduction (or show ID), which will be our default from here on out.

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Monday, March 2, 2009

_______ in the sky with _______



In class last Tuesday, we started talking about words that have multiple meanings. As one of the new Radiolingual producers explained the two meanings of a Japanese word, we had a little bit of confusion over the relationship between those two meanings.






Listen to the above piece to hear an audio exploration of the word and the process I imagined as we tried to understand the actual meaning of the word.

In any language, how do we build mental relationships between the words we know and the experiences and images that those words describe?

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