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Home | Reference & Education | Language A fundamental part of this communication is, of course, language. There are 6809 known languages spoken in the 200 countries of the world. 2,261 have writing systems (the others are only spoken). As of 1997, at least one portion of the Bible had been translated into 2,197 different languages, showing that translation services for popular texts are as alive and well as ever! However, not all languages are easily translatable, and this is one of the greatest challenges faced by translation services. Many of the world's dialects are spoken in remote regions, not widely studied by outsiders, or encountered frequently by translation services professionals. A region of especially great linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, for example, where you'll find approximately 832 languages spoken by a population totalling around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of speakers of these dialects around 4,500 - quite likely the lowest of any region on earth. Linguistic diversity is not only found in remote and far-flung places. For hundreds of years, French governments have striven to make their nation uniform linguistically. However to this day, at least ten distinct Romance languages are spoken in France, including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, and several more in addition to standard international French. Another reason certain languages might be a challenge for translation services professionals is that they are part of an ancient and nearly extinct form of phonetics, being replaced in urban areas by modern kinds of parlance. The constantly changing and dynamic nature of language is one of the most exciting, but most difficult aspects of the work carried out in modern translation services. In addition, languages are not uniformly distributed across the globe. Out of the 6,809 languages in the world, for instance, only 230 of those are spoken in Europe, and yet 2,197 of them are spoken in Asia. Greater attention is given to the study of languages in wealthier regions, with higher numbers of translation services professionals engaged in work involving these languages. In fact, as the pace of communication speeds up in our 24-hour global working culture, the rate of change in language increases concomitantly. Only around 300 languages are represented by on-line dictionaries and automatic translation services, for example, demonstrating that technology simply can't keep up with the complexity and speed of change in a multitude of modern languages. As the global economy takes shape and adapts to the communication needs of the world's 6.6 billion people, there will be an increasing demand for professionals working for translation services. Communication has never been a more important aspect of commerce, and translation services professionals are among those leading the way in our dynamic new global culture. Article Source: http://www.articlewheel.com
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