By now everyone has heard the announcement that the United States’ president Barack Obama is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The announcement, which was made at 5 am Eastern Standard time, even surprised President Obama. Of course, criticism from conservatives in the U.S. has already reached fever pitch levels.

Defending their choice, the Peace Prize committee cited Obama’s efforts to create a “a world free from nuclear arms…[Obama] has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.” NYTimes

This led me to do a little digging on the etymology of “peace.” The word is steeped in strong images and connotations, it is historically and culturally significant to all peoples in all societies. So what is in the word that brings us all to the same ideas of well-being, harmony, and quietude?

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Last night I had the pleasure of hearing Ronny Cox, the actor who played Drew Ballinger in Deliverance and Richard “Dick”� Jones in RoboCop, perform his country western music at a small venue. While Cox has played hundreds of roles in tv and film, I wasn’t expecting his music to be worth a listen, but it was.

One of the songs that piqued my interest was an old cowboy song, “Diamantina Drove” from Australia about the drovers, the equivalent of a cowboy. The song could have been about an American cowboy, it heralded the usual tropes of cattle and open spaces and the call of the frontier, so it got me to thinking about cowboys everywhere — what are they called, what sets them apart country-to-country, when did we first start talking about cowboys etc.

Our term cowboy was first documented in the English language by 1725. A direct translation of the Spanish word vaquero, one who manages cattle from horseback, cowboy has come to mean the same thing — a man employed to take care of grazing cattle on a ranch (OED). Vaquero, of course, is rooted in the word vaca, or cow, and stems from the Latin vacca. Another English word for cowboy, buckaroo, has a debatable etymology. It is generally attributed to an Anglicizing of vaquero, but, apparently, one scholar has suggested that it possibly stems from the Arabic bakara or bakhara, meaning heifer. Other terms include cowpoke, cowhand, and cowpuncher — all originating in the mid- to late-1800s. Regionally specific, cowboy is a term common throughout the west and particularly in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, Buckaroo is used primarily in the Great Basin and California, and cowpuncher mostly in Texas and surrounding states�,Wiki.

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The field of animal cognition has been rapidly expanding since the mid-twentieth century. In the March 2008 issue of National Geographic, Virginia Morell explored the various animal cognition studies currently being run in labs and research centers around the world in her article Minds of their Own.� One study of orangutans shows that orangutans can communicate with abstract keyboard symbols; another example, this one in pop culture, pertains to a dog named Rico who, when he appeared on a German TV show in 2001, showed that he knew the name of 200 toys. A scientific report on the dog after the show showed that “he could learn and remember words as quickly as a toddler.”� It has been suggested that Rico, and all dogs’ ability to learn and recognize human words is linked to the canine evolution alongside humans.

“Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.”

But what about animal language itself? All of the studies highlighted by the National Geographic article focused on animals’ ability to learn and comprehend human language. Many people agree that animals themselves have a type of language specific to their various species’ chirps, squawks, barks, howls, and yips. Even Doctor Doolittle suggested that we should “walk like an animal, talk like an animal.”� So what do animals talk about?

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So you’ve decided to take that next big step, to apply to graduate schools for a Translation Studies degree. But the big questions are rolling around in your head — which of the U.S. schools that offer translation degrees are the best, and what sets each program apart?

As we mentioned in the Translation Degree Overview, graduate degrees and certification programs in translation offer a great foundation in the skills you need for a career in translation or interpreting, but each program is different, and not every one is tailored to your specific goals.

While making the best choice is difficult, it’s always made easier by having the right information. Here’s an explanation of how we researched and ranked the best programs, followed by the top rankings:

Ranking Methodology:

The Top 5 Graduate Programs in Translation, and the Top 5 Certificate Programs were determined, first of all, by the mission of each program. Some universities only offer a Master’s or a Doctorate degree, some only offer graduate or professional certificates, and some offer all of the above. We found it necessary to separate the various translation and interpretation programs by degrees or certificates before analyzing any other factors.

Graduate and professional certificate programs vary in length and goal. Some programs offer general translation/interpretation certificates while others focus on medical or court translation. Our rankings attempt to emphasize this diversity of certificate programs.

In order to generally rank the programs, we looked at each program’s enrollment data (as available), the number of languages represented in each program, the varying types of degrees or certificates offered, and the general ability of each program to address a certain field of translation and interpretation (number of courses offered, number of faculty members, department resources, etc.).

It must be emphasized that our rankings are holistic, not reductive. They are not based on statistical analysis and they are not intended to produce a #1 or a #5 program. Instead, the rankings highlight the top translation and interpretation programs in the nation in alphabetical order in an attempt to offer the most unbiased information possible. Here are the Top 10 U.S. Translation Programs:

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For those not in Atlanta and who have not heard any news about what is going on right now, we are in the middle of the biggest flood on record. Although it has been raining for over a week now in Georgia, over the past thirty-six hours more than thirteen inches of rain has accumulated in the metro-Atlanta area. Bridges have collapsed, several hundred people have been evacuated, major expressways are underwater (or under mud due to mudslides), and hundreds of thousands of people are without water. For a city fairly protected from the harsher elements—we rarely receive any snow, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, etc.—this flood has put everyone in a rather apocalyptic mood.

Although parts of the city are in near-crisis situations, it does seem fitting to sit back and take a look at where the word flood comes from etymologically. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun as “the flowing in of the tide;” as “a body of flowing water; a river, stream, usually, a large river;” as, in a wider sense, “opposed to land, often contrasted with field and fire;” and finally as “an overflowing or irruption of a great body of water over land not usually submerged; an inundation, a deluge.” Interestingly, the first three definitions are related more to the property of water as different than land—i.e. the fact that water flows—than of an over-swelling of water, as would be our common definition today. I think I’m going to have to start using flood when I’m referencing a river in general, just to switch things up a bit.

So our modern flood hails from a Teutonic background with the Old English flód predating the current spelling. Flod stems from the Old Frisian and Old Swedish flôd. Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Elbe on the European North Sea coast. The Middle Dutch vloet and the Dutch vloed also stem from the Old Frisian and Old Swedish flôd.

Going further back to the 6th to mid 11th centuries in the Old High German, we find flout which manifested in the Middle High German (1050-1350 CE) vluot and then the German flut. In Old Norse, pre-sixth century CE, flood was flô(o with an ‘x’ above it) and in Gothic it was flôdus. Finally, the farthest flood can be traced is to the Old Teutonic flô (o with an ‘x’ over it) and the pre-Teutonic plōtús.

It is with the pre-Teutonic plotús that we see why the action of flowing is so important to the definition of flood. Plōtús comes from the Aryan verbal stem plō, “whence flow, in the primary sense, in accordance with the original function of the suffix -tu, is ‘action of flowing’, though the concrete uses are found in all Teutonic languages.”

I know this little etymology won’t help anyone stay high and dry over the coming days, but I hope it is interesting to know that flood holds so many benign connotations in addition to its overpowering one. Hopefully the rains will stop soon and the city will catch a breath of air from its swimming. Until then, just remember that flood originally refers to the action of flowing—gerunds are everywhere.

Over the past year or so I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon: people are showing up in cafeterias and break rooms carrying tiny plastic boxes or tins filled with elegantly arranged or cutely flourished lunch items. Their sandwiches may look like mice one day, cats another; the fruit resembles a bouquet of flowers—everything has a cup or a slot or a handmade wrapper. It’s a little disconcerting, I’ll admit, when someone bites off the cat ears of their carrot, but it’s also comic and cute. For some reason, the Japanese bento is taking over America.

Bento (弁当 or べんとう) is the art of arranging one’s lunch. A single-portion meal, a Japanese bento typically contains rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables. While stores (anything from a train station vendor to a grocery store to an actual bento store) often carry bentos, the bento is most often associated with the homemade, with the time-intensive process of slicing, shaping, and packing a single meal at home to take to school or work.

The bento dates back to the Kamakura Period of Japanese history (1185-1333) when a type of cooked and then dried rice was developed (hoshi-ii, 糒 or 干し飯). Hoshi-ii , literally meaning “dried meal,” can be eaten as it is, dried, or rehydrated in water. Then, during the Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1568-1600), lacquered wooden boxes similar to the ones used today for the modern bento were produced for use at tea parties called hanamis. During the Edo Period (1603-1867), the bento became more refined, as travelers began to create koshibentō (腰弁当), the “waist bento,” which consisted of several onigiri (rice balls) wrapped with bamboo leaves or in a woven bamboo box. By the 20th century during the Taishō period (1912 to 1926), aluminum boxes replaced the traditional wooden boxes. Social issues arose with the bento—a bento often signaled a wealthier family, so there were movements to abolish the bento in schools—and after WWII the bento practically disappeared. Instead of a carrying a bento, school children identified themselves by uniforms. During the 1980s, however, the bento began to gain popularity, and the boxed lunch’s popularity has soared in the 21st century.

The arrangement of the bento is called kyaraben (キャラ弁), or “character bento.” Kyaraben features food shaped or decorated to look like people or characters (often animals) from popular culture. This style of bento arrangement was devised in order to encourage children to eat varied and nutritious meals—after all, who wouldn’t eat a rice panda or a Hello Kitty sandwich?—but now there are national, and probably international, contests awarding prizes for the most original and most intricate bentos.

Another type of bento is the ekiben (駅弁)or “railway boxed meal.” These specific bentos, as obvious by the name, are sold in train stations and on commuter trains. The meals are composed of the traditional bento elements—rice, fish or meat, and vegetables—but are packaged in a disposable container. One type of ekiben is the Makunouchi (幕の内), the “between-act bento.” It consists of fish, meat, pickles, eggs and vegetables along with rice and an umeboshi, a pickled ume fruit. The name “makunouchi” dates back to the Edo period (1603-1867) when the bentos were served during the intermissions of traditional plays. The bentos, however, are now common at train stations as a quick “in-between meal” that can be purchased on the go.

Like many aspects of Japanese culture, particularly contemporary fads (anime, Hello Kitty, cell phones), the bento has become extremely popular in certain social groups in America (mostly 20 and 30 somethings in urban areas). I’m not sure how many school children are showing up in class with bentos this fall, but I know plenty of adults who spend hours every night fashioning their lunches. It’s the element of surprise, for some—especially mothers packing their child’s lunch (the child never knows what he or she is eating or what it will look like until lunchtime—or the urge to eliminate the brown bag, plain lunch culture we’ve cultivated for so many years. The aesthetic coupled with sustainability, locally grown food, and the recession makes for a pleasant alternative to the peanut butter sandwich and apple of the 20th century. Or maybe it’s just that we can’t deny the appealing nature of anything that is cute. In either case, the newest American fad has a long and rich history.

Today marks the first unofficial day of Fall and where I am, at least, the weather is starting to cloud up and cool off a bit and the kids are back in school. To celebrate the close of summer, the New York Time’s Gail Collins, wrote a summer quiz—what interesting and salacious newsworthy tidbits happened this summer and do we, readers, remember them? The quiz kept current events light—from the armed and costumed political protestors to the ridiculous quotations of certain politicians—but the thing that stuck out the most to me was Collins’ characterization of the season: ghoulish.

Ghoulish—that’s normally a word I associate with autumn, October in particular, red and orange leaves and seven year olds running around door-to-door begging for the candy that we freely give. Yes, Halloween’s goblins and ghosts are ghoulish, but are Sarah Palin’s linguistic blunders or certain governors’ extramarital activities?

In order to determine the rightness of the word ghoulish for Summer 2009, I turned to my trusty OED. After all, if the OED can’t sort matters out, what can? Ghoulish, of course, is an adjective that stems the noun ghoul, “An evil spirit supposed to rob graves and prey on human corpses.” Interestingly, ghoul is from the Arabic ghul (the “U” has a straight line over it—can’t find the symbol on my computer) and first appeared in the English language in the late 18th century in Beckford’s short novel Vathek, “All the stories of malignant Dives and dismal Goules thronged into her memory.” In the Arabic, ghul comes from a verbal root meaning “to seize”—hence the connotation of a spirit that robs, that seizes, human corpses. Ghoulish, therefore, means something suggestive of a ghoul, or, according to Webster’s, something “shocking or repulsive”—as in a ghoulish person would be interested in matters shocking or repulsive. Strangely, it’s hard to pin down an exact definition of the word. Most sources seem to agree on ghoul but not on ghoulish—and the move from noun to adjective is messy with multiple meanings.

I suppose, given Webster’s definition, that ghoulish can imply that which is shocking or repulsive, in addition to that which is suggestive of a body snatcher. The summer’s events were certainly shocking, to some degree, but were they more so than usual? Sarah Palin’s resignation, Mark Sanford’s “hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail,” and Michael Jackson’s sudden but not so unexpected death were certainly interesting stories, but I’m not sure if they were exactly ghoulish. Certain words ought to keep their weight; let’s keep ghoulish for the truly sinister and freaky.

It’s that time of the year again, the application cycle for graduate programs across the nation is about to start. Applying to any program is a daunting task, whether it be a certificate program or a PhD. Simply finding the information about what programs are out there, the length of each program, and how much each program costs seems an insurmountable task which is why I’ve decided to put together a multi-post series on the post-undergraduate options an aspiring translator has available.

The first thing that one has to decide when researching translation programs is what kind of program one wants to apply to. You need to ask yourself first and foremost what kind of translator you want to be: a general translator or a translator with specific credentials (medical, court, literary, conference, etc.). While a plethora of general translation certificates exist, the options telescope when a category like medical or literary translation is added into the mix.

A master’s degree or PhD in translation or translation studies generally refers to a comprehensive, general translation program. These programs are interdisciplinary and allow students to dabble in historical, literary, and scientific areas while at the same time grounding the students in general translation skills. Computer skills are emphasized as an essential tool for translators and classes teaching the use and development of translation computer programs and glossary management are often a key component of translation studies programs. Graduates of translation studies programs are qualified to work for personal and corporate translation services, as freelance translators, as government agency employees, and as translation software developers. PhD graduates often stay in academia and teach linguistics or translation studies. Like any comprehensive humanities degree, a master’s degree or PhD in translation studies allows each student to tailor the program to his or her individual interests.

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One of my favorite web comics is Anders Loves Maria by Renee Engström. The comic follows the story of Anders and Maria, two artists living in Stockholm. I love the complexity of the storyline—it jumps between past and present—and Engström’s beautiful and detailed drawings. The Swedish cast makes for some interesting linguistic quandaries sometimes, like today’s word of the day: “sharking” or “to shark.”

In the final cell of last week’s comic, Anders tells Maria, “I think you may be sharking me.” Like many of the readers I was left a little confused by the word. In the comments section, loyal readers duked out the definition, several of which I’ll highlight.

1. If she means the British English slang term, it may mean “hunting the opposite sex.”
2. I think in this context it means something along the lines of someone not being as clueless or innocent as they present themselves. Like loan sharks or card sharks.
3. He’s using the phrase “sharking” as if it means something – poking fun at the whole issue of using words in a context that Maria doesn’t understand.
4. Hm, the Swedish slang phrase for ‘getting’ (as in understanding) someone is, literally translated, ’sharking’…
5. “Sharking” is a translation of the Swedish word “hajar” (understand).

So does “sharking” mean 1. hunting the opposite sex or 2. getting/understanding? Given that the comic is Swedish in origin but written in English Engström definitely left it ambiguous. Either way, both meanings work in the context of the comic strip. I’m definitely impressed that one little comic strip brought forth such a great linguistic discussion.