Stories about Language from February, 2013
Kallun: A Platform of Angolan Slang
The Plataform KALLUN (meaning slang), founded by Leocarpo Mário, is a recent collaborative project with the ultimate goal of gathering in just one place all the slang with Angolan origins. Kallun enables interactive search of terms and their meanings.
Bengali Language History Not Lost on Youth
Farah Subhan at Amader Kotha highlights how Bangladeshi youth feel about 21 of February, the day commemorating the martyrs of the Bengali language movement, also known as the The International Mother Language Day.
Russian Opposition, What Are You Doing? Stahp.
The Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition has been a fascinating eDemocracy experiment, conducted in the shadow of Russia's competitive authoritarian status quo. Yet, a recent decision not to nominate candidates for any elections—local or regional—has intensified doubts about the KSO, making it a target for one of the RuNet's more vicious attack memes.
Crowd-Source Subtitles for YouTube Videos
Anyone on YouTube can now sync their account directly to the global subtitling service Amara and invite volunteers to translate videos. Subtitles are created on Amara's platform, but are synced automatically to YouTube.
The Bobs 2013: Now in Ukrainian, Too!
Deutsche Welle's 9th annual The Bobs online activism awards are now open for nominations of Ukrainian-language blogs [uk]. Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Nayyem, who is on this year's international jury panel, noted [ru, uk] on his Facebook page that in the previous years Ukrainian bloggers could only take part in The...
Japan's Corporate Slaves Put Humor to Hard Work
With a twist of comedy, moral and technical support has been pouring in across social media sites for Japan's "corporate slaves" or "Shachiku" as they are referred to in Japanese slang.
Protesting Cyrillic, “Collectivising Guilt” in Croatia
Balkan Anarchist weighs in on the protests against the use of the Cyrillic script in Vukovar‘s public spaces: […] I believe that we, decent and honest Serbs, should be ashamed of what was done in the name of Serbdom during the '90s and condemn it all unequivocally! And I also...
Historic ‘Tanka’ Poem Rises from Japan's Nuclear Ashes
Drawing from contemporary issues, a Japanese blogger writes an adaptation of a famous piece of tanka - a genre of Japanese poetry - originally published in 1957 by an avant-garde Japanese artist, Shuji Terayama. What will you hear in this piece which has been re-created more than half a century after its original?
When Sex is Just the “Room Thing”
Jocelyn Eikenburg from Speaking of China talks about some subtle expressions of sex in Chinese. Doing the “room thing” is one example.
Palestine: Fighting with the Poem
Amira Abd El-Khalek, an Egyptian blogger who studied English literature and anthropology in Egypt and UK, wrote on the Arabic Literature blog about an evening of Palestinian poets, Asma’a Azaizeh and Marwan Makhoul, which was hosted by Banipal magazine and the Mosaic Rooms in London. During discussions that followed the...
Cultural extravaganza in Latin America! Comic books and beyond
Follow us as we visit the arts and the projects that are bridging the gaps and establishing new channels of communication in Latin America. We talk about comics, artworks, collaboration, projects and collectives that are remixing what we know about ourselves in Latin America. Cultural extravaganza guaranteed!
