Idioms dont travel well - Emphasis

Idioms dont travel well Idioms dont travel well When writing anything for a global audience, its best to leave idioms out of it. Idioms are groups of words whose meaning is usually metaphorical and cannot necessarily be deduced from looking at each component word. Unsurprisingly, this can make them problematic for anyone who may be attempting to translate word by word. What might you make of these turns of phrase? Spanish: I have an aunt who plays the guitar. (Yo tengo una tà ­a que toca la guitarra.) French: Its the end of the beans! (Cest la fin des haricots!) Arabic: The sky doesnt throw chicks. (El samaa la tohadef katakeet.) Spanish: To leave Guatemala and arrive in worse cornstalks. (Salir de Guatemala y meterse en guatepeor.) [Youll find the answers at the foot of this blog post.] Talking nonsense Not that English idioms are any more sensible. On the face of it, theres no obvious reason why feline nightwear (Its the cats pyjamas, for our readers who speak English as a second language) should indicate the highest of standards. Nor is it clear why a taut top lip (Keep a stiff upper lip) is a desirable feature in the face of adversity. Every country has its own idioms, which tend to reflect back on the culture they come from. Spend long enough studying translations and you might be able to hazard a guess at the meaning of other countries sayings, and sometimes find the odd crossover. Spanish: Everyone has their own way to kill fleas. (Cada quien tiene su manera de matar pulgas.) English: Theres more than one way to skin a cat. German: From a mosquito make an elephant. (Aus einer Mà ¼cke einen Elefanten machen.) English: Make a mountain out of a molehill. The question is: do you want or expect your reader to take that time? Can you be sure they wont dismiss your communication as gibberish rather than work out you dont want them literally to push an envelope, put a project in their bed or extract something from a horses mouth? Dont make work for your reader And much of the time, we dont even know where our own languages idioms came from, or why they mean what they do. We use them based on the context weve heard them in and out of habit. Little wonder, then, that they so easily trip up international readers. In the UK, we may talk of taking a rain check. But how many of us know the expression is borrowed from baseball in the US, where a rain check is the receipt from a ticket, which may be reused if rain prevents play? Lets get literal So lets not beat around the bush. When writing for global audiences, being as literal as possible is the best method by a long chalk. Anything else just wont cut the mustard. Answers: Whats that got to do with the price of tea in China? Thats the last straw! Money doesnt grow on trees. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 7

Business - Essay Example However, it is the customer base which determines pattern and content of the network. Both international and domestic travelers go through a given transport hub. Thus a wide network of retailers – commercial banks, tour operators, airlines, taxi-cab operators, insurance companies, healthcare providers, restaurateurs, hoteliers, transporters, liquor sellers, motel owners and so on – could be seen operating at different points. Paddington, as a pivotal train interchange, in London in particular and the United Kingdom in general, provides one of the most important focal points for the analysis of the retail marketing business in this transport hub. Paddington is part of the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. The township, along with the station, provides a much needed boost to the Central London’s economy and way of life. Paddington station has a commuter service to the west of London, connecting Slough, Swindon, Reading, Maidenhead and so on. There is also a main-line service to Bristol, Bath, Oxford, Exeter, Taunton, Plymouth, Cornwall, South Wales, Swansea and Cardiff. Then there is the main bus route to Elephant and Castle. Finally there is also the Heathrow Express service to Heathrow Airport. The Elephant and Castle is a major road interchange in the interior of the south London area. In short it is called â€Å"The Elephant† and has of two big roundabouts which in turn are connected by a short road called â€Å"Elephant and Castle†. The Castle Shopping Centre is at the northern roundabout, with Hannibal House, a shopping centre on top. It also has a large residential block known as â€Å"Metro Central Heights†. The Heathrow Airport is located 24 kilometers west of central London and has five Terminals. The 3rd Terminal is connected to both the Elephant and Castle by bus and to Paddington by train/tube. The retail marketing sector plays a much wider significant role here.

History of the Sicilian Mafia Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

History of the Sicilian Mafia - Essay Example A mafia was a person who would not comply with the rule of the central government, but remained suspicious about it. At the end of 19th century, mafia groups advanced and formed private armies that would force landowners to pay money for the protection. Eventually, this group developed and became bigger to form the current-hostile criminal organization called the Sicilian Mafia (Varese, 2011). The American mafia, formed in 1920, does not have some link to the Sicilian Mafia. However, the Sicilian Mafia and the American Mafia share a system of loyalty and conduct, which guides the behaviour of their members. Mafia-type Organizations Today, the term Mafia, refers to any organized illegal group. The mass media describes the mafia as a worldwide evil that controls all illegal activities (Allum 2007, p. 125). For example, they involve in drug trafficking, sale of radioactive substances and arms dealing. The Sicilian mafia has enjoyed the legacy of the most successful Mafia in the world du e to it long-standing duty in the civilization and its complexity. The strength of the Sicilian mafia emanates from the ability of the group to grow and spread to national, international and transnational levels, and still maintain its novel cores in the Sicilian community. The Sicilian Mafia continued to unite innovation and continuity of its traditional activities (Dickie, 2011). For example, the group continues to extort people, but today they use sophisticated methods that are technology-aided. They also select activities that will yield the group the most economic benefits. After the Second World War, both the American mafia and the Sicilian mafia groups linked in trafficking drugs, but they retained their autonomy. For the past couple of decades, the Sicilian Mafia has extended to numerous regions of the globe, and it covered all continents. This has enabled the group to deal heroin with Turkey, Asiatic clans, Middle East and France (Allum 2007, p. 127). Today the group trades Cocaine in the company of Cartels of Latin-America. Sicilian Mafia utilizes the global channels to launder money to tax havens from Switzerland. Several illegal organizations, which are similar to the Sicilian mafia, are also there in Italy, and the organizations include Camorra and the Sacra Corona Unita among others. There are also other global-historical groups like the Japanese Yakusa the Russian Mafia and the Chinese Trieds, which formed in line with the Sicilian Mafia (Jamieson 2008, p.57). It is not likely to settle on the precise amount of earnings that are obtained from organized crime activities. However, illegal capital is always above 500 billion dollars per annum. Most of this capital is obtained from arms deals, extortion and drug trafficking. Currently the illegal market has grown in complexity due to well articulated illegal deeds, as well as, the increased number of criminal groups (Jamieson 2008, p.59). This implies that no single Mafia Group enjoys the privilege of monopolizing the area of crime profession. There are many factors that facilitate the growth and development of criminal groups in society. However, the most pertinent include capitalism globalization, economy financialization and acquittal of circulation of assets. Further, drugs prohibition in many countries of the world makes the Mafias the only means of trafficking drugs (Jamieson 2008, p

Happiness Paradox Essay Example for Free

Happiness Paradox Essay This chapter, titled Feeling Free, is all about freedom and humans need to feel it. Ziyad Marar begins the chapter comparing happiness to freedom, saying how â€Å"[freedoms] current expression has a relatively recent and local† (Marar 39), which is similar to his view on happiness. Marar goes on saying how people have been striving for freedom, but claims more freedom brings bad consequences. People are blinded by mass media, the consumer society, management gurus, therapists and Hollywood who all relentlessly preach about freedom and self-expression. He ends the first section by stating that people need to â€Å"celebrate freedom without denying its corrosive qualities; even to admire those very qualities† (Marar 43). Since freedom is a something humans naturally strive for, and the main driving force in modern civilization, it has a strong impact on most things that humans do (Marar). The next two sections talk about how humans find freedom in the wild and in self-creation. Society is a form of conformity, which â€Å"loses you time and blurs the impression of your character† (Marar 46) and it is human nature to not be held down by conformity. This creates a need to be in the wild, away from everything society has to offer, an escape. Marar connects this to the idea of becoming lost in one’s imagination, or the lack of it. As children we are consumed by our world of imagination, using our creativity and self-expression in its purest form, something lost in adults. Children are free to do and say as they please, they are not tied down by the conformity that adults are. This lack of freedom and expression in adults can be compared to a restriction of our humanly instincts, since it is human nature that we find the need to be free (Marar). Marar goes on to relate freedom to sex, death, and the ‘search for strange’. â€Å"Perversion, obsessions, the apparent mutability of the most mundane objects into the stuff of erotic fantasy, all remind us that the realm of eroticism is dominated by the need to walk on the wild side. † (Marar 53). Sex is something that, like freedom, is something humans instantly strive for, and like freedom is restricted through civilization trying to make us conform to the social norm. Humans seek freedom in sex, it is a time when our inner most instincts come out. This freedom comes in two forms, the freedom to and the freedom from. We all have the freedom to discover, create, and fantasize, but only some are free from structures, schemes, codes, and above all other people. Freedom of people opposes the claim that humans need to feel justified, since justification is all about other people. The section ends by stating how death is the ultimate form of death, and agrees with Freud and his though of the death instincts and how all human life is striving towards death, for it is the final escape to freedom (Marar). The last section of the chapter is about the freedom from language, or the perspective of others. He uses the holidays as an example, the way we remember them though pictures and stories. Through retelling we move away from the personal aspect the memory has, it seems â€Å"to create a concept to flee from language† (Marar 57). To pursue this freedom, to the point when you are uninterpretable to others, is when people start to see you as crazy or insane. This is where the paradox lies, for we seek freedom and justification but to be free is to stop caring for the justification of others. On the other hand with justification of others you are giving up your freedoms (Marar).

Black Boy-Oppression :: essays research papers

*Black Boy Essay: Oppression Growing up as a Negro in the South in the early 1900's is not that easy, some people suffer different forms of oppression. In this case, it happens in the autobiography called Black Boy written by Richard Wright. The novel is set in the early part of the 1900's, somewhere in Deep South. Richard Wright, who is the main character, is also the protagonist. The antagonist is no one person specifically, it takes many different forms called "oppression" in general. The main character over comes this "oppression" by rebelling against the common roles of the black, society. Richard Wright's character was affected in early childhood by the effects of society oppression, but he became a great American author despite the negative factors in his life. Today everyone encounters some form of oppression. One of the forms Richard is encountering is called societal oppression. As an example, after Richard sees a "black" boy whipped by a "white" man, he asks his mother why did the incident happen. His mother says, " 'The "white" man did not whip the "black" boy...He beat the "black" boy, '. This quote is showing racism, which is one way of society keeping Richard, and all other blacks in the South down. Another example is when is at the rail road station with his mother, and as they are waiting for the train, he sees something he has never seen, "...for the first time I noticed that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a "white" line and a "black" line†. This is demonstrating how laws keep a certain group of people apart, which is also another form of society oppression. Society oppression occurs again when Richard is "hanging" out with his friends, and their conversation with each other leads on to the subject of war. One of his friends gets really into the subject and says, " 'Yeah, they send you to war, make you lick them Germans, teach you how to fight and when you come back they scared of you.’ This means that the "white" people put the "black" people on the front line to defend our country, and when they come back, they can not accept them, therefore they oppress them in different ways, which is society oppression. These are examples of society oppression that Richard overcomes and rises to the top on his own.

Football and Soccer Compare and Contrast

Football and Soccer Compare and Contrast. Football and soccer have never been really compared before, probably because alot of people think they dont have many similarities. But they actually have alot more in common that people think they do. Having played both sports myself i can tell you that they are very different in varius ways, but also very alike. It depends in what aspects you look at it that you can see differences or similarites. Off field soccer and football share different backgrounds. On field comparisons are never talked about but they actually have somre similarities. Yes football is more of a contact sport, and soccer more of a technique sport. But football does have technique as well, and soccer contact. On the field, both teams rely on team play to move up the field and try to score on the opposing team. Both sports have a total of 22 players on the field, 11 on each team, and passing the ball to teamates is key. In both sports the offensive players take most of the glory and the spotlight, but its know that without a good defense, its hard to win. You can score all the points you want but if they score more points on you then your still losing. Scoring is very different though. On football each time you score is called a touchdown and its given 6 points plus and extra point to try to make it 7. Soccer scoring its only 1 point and its not called touchdown but its called gol. The game of football has alot more breaks during it, and it has 4 quarters. During each play you have small breaks, plus alot of timeouts and tv comercial breaks. Soccer is a non-stop sport with only 2 halfs and no breaks during each half, just the 30 minute halftime break. One of the main differences on both these sports in my mind is that football is only a sport played in the United States, while soccer is a worldwide know sport. Soccer means alot in many countries all over the world, and theres tournaments that bring every teams all over the world together. Football's major event is held here in the United States and it only it involves the one country. United States has soccer, but its one of their least successful sports economacly and physically. It has faild to reach the fan base they wanted, and the MLS (soccer league) was close to be being shut own due to lack of fans and lack of income. Soccer is like a religion in many countries all over the world and it means everything to its fans. Where im from, Argentina, soccer is bigger than anything. Alot of people take soccer even more serious than their jobs. Sometimes a little to serious. There has been a lot of soccer related accidents in Argentina and many other parts of the world. Many of the ac cidents occur during games in the stands. Soccer rivalries are very big in Argentina. Sometimes they seperate towns. Just like gangs here in United States, soccer fans fight for respect and hate towards the other team, a lot of times ending in deaths. Other incidents occur off the field. A good example to show how serious fans take the game, is the incident that occur after a World Cup, when a colombian player scored an own goal during an important game, and he was assasinated a few days later. Things like that usually never happen here in the United States. Not to say that fans are no passionate about football, but its a different type of passion. The United States understands how important soccer is worldwide, and they have tried to make soccer bigger here in the United Sates, but have failed several times. They have tried to publish soccer more by advertising and by trying to bring famous players all over the world to play here in the United States. Living here in the US, i saw that football was the major sport here. But there are alot of competing sports like basketball and baseball, and there is also college sports, which are also very big here. In Argentina, there are of course many other sports, but none come close to soccer. As a little kid, i never knew of any other sport than soccer. Every little kid growing up wants to be a soccer player when their older. And that dosn't sound like a problem, but in my opinion it is. Alot of kids growing up have â€Å"dream jobs†. Some are sports realted some are not. A lot of kids dream of being doctors, lawyers, firemans and of course start athleets. But in Argentina, most of the kids wanna be the only thing they knew growing up, a soccer player. And with most of those kids not reaching that dream, it leaves a lot of confused kids. So like most people think, there are many differences overall between football and soccer. But there are more similarities than people think there are. Maybe in the future wih the growth of soccer in the United States, we will have even more things in common. And maybe the passion for soccer here in US will one day be as big as it is in the rest of the world, but hopefullt without all the violence.

Human Rights Are Interdependent and Indivisible Free Essay Example, 2000 words

Human rights activists observe that it is not possible to enjoy civil and political rights and not also enjoy economic, as well as socio-cultural rights (Koch, 2003). Under these conditions, the poor would not have much freedom of choice. Moreover, even where rich citizens do not have freedom of choice, they may also not be able to avoid hunger and poverty (Koch, 2003). Such conceptualization supports the essence of mostly based on the fact that human rights mutually support and reinforce each other and have equal weight and importance (Koch, 2003). Outside the above conceptualizations, there seems to be no other acceptable understanding of human rights. At present, the focus of international practice has mostly been on specifically in their implementation and importance. This can be seen in terms of human rights principles not having any particular reference to theory or any other associated justification for it. In effect, no significant attempt has been used to delineate between the interdependence and the indivisibility of human rights (Quane, 2007). Instead, the terms have often been applied interchangeably. With time, human rights have been referred to as both indivisible and interdependent, these terms being specific principles calling for the need to treat human rights fairly, equally and on the same footing. We will write a custom essay sample on Human Rights Are Interdependent and Indivisible or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now This is the basic assessment of equality and fairness in human rights, and it is still the dominant understanding relating to the interdependence and indivisibility of human rights. includes economic and socio-cultural rights as these rights are based on the understanding that their effective management can only be ensured in combination with each other. The concept of free human beings being able to secure civil and political liberties as well as freedom from fears and wants can only be ensured if the proper conditions are laid out with all people enjoying their civil and political rights, and their socio-economic-cultural rights.