Foreign Languages Could Slow Down the Effects of Old Age

The benefits of learning a foreign language are not new; economic, social, educational or cultural arguments abound. For instance, being able to communicate and negotiate in another language may make new international markets accessible to a company. Socially, it can improve relationships, foster inclusion and enhance understanding within mixed-origin communities. Culturally and educationally, your experience of the world becomes richer and more stimulating.

What about medically, and from a health point of view? Scientific bodies carry out regular research on this topic and an article published in The Times in February 2011 caught my eye. According to recent scientific research, bilingualism can slow down the symptoms of ageing by boosting brain performance, and can particularly delay the onset of dementia or Alzheimer's by five years on average. These are the results of a research study recently published by Ellen Bialystock, a psychologist at York University (Toronto, Canada). Bilingual people are found to be able to cope with the disease for longer. Bialystock compares the brain to the petrol tank in a car, and more precisely the safety, or reserve, tank. The more the brain is stimulated, the better the 'cognitive tank' gets, and manages to keep you going for longer. Regular switching between two languages seems to do exactly that - strengthen your brain potential. The research now focuses on whether brain size changes as a result of bilingualism.

Bilingual children should also be better at multi-tasking than their monolingual peers. Another study (by Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn State University, United States) shows that bilingualism boosts multi-tasking and prioritising skills. According to this study, multilingualism does not confuse the brain and does not hinder cognitive development.

We often hear how our ageing population is putting a strain on NHS resources. If these scientific findings are indeed true, wouldn't this constitute an extra argument for the promotion of language learning? The government is very good at telling us how much fruit, vegetables, salt, sugar, fat and alcohol we should or shouldn't consume, and how much physical exercise we should include in our daily routine, so how about guidelines on cognitive aspects of our lives to regularly top up our brain reserve, e.g. how many crosswords and sudokus we do, how many books we read, and how much of our compulsory education we spend on learning foreign languages, and subsequently as a life-long component of our daily existence? Food for thought anyway...

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Chinese: The Trickiest Language To Learn And Its Effects On The Challenges Of Chinese Translation

To begin with there really isn't any one single Chinese language. There are a number of languages that are home to China which are completely different from each other. While two languages like Ukrainian and Chinese, or Spanish and Italian, hold a number of similarities and are largely intelligible to each other, this doesn't hold true when it comes to the various languages that were born within China. However in general when people speak about the Chinese language they are speaking about Mandarin Chinese, so let's focus on that one. Mandarin Chinese translation is difficult enough as is without considering all the other potentially relevant languages.

One of the biggest difficulties when it comes to the Chinese language and its complexity is the fact that there is a significant amount of tension between the language as it is spoken compared to the language as it is written. A big reason for this is the fact that the Chinese spoken language has changed significantly and continues to evolve and grow and adapt, taking on new characteristics and losing others as time goes on, while the written Chinese language has not changed to quite the same degree. To oversimplify the issue even further for the sake of brevity, over the lifespan of the Chinese language its spoken component has changed more rapidly and more significantly than its written component.

The written language of Chinese also plays such a significantly difficult role in Chinese translation due to its most apparent characteristics- written Chinese is still heavily indebted to and in entrenched within the nation's earliest hieroglyphics. While many other world languages have adopted a more pared down alphabet revolving around the combination of letters, the Chinese system of writing still revolves at least partially around a system of somewhat abstracted pictographs. This statement once again oversimplifies the point as there is a system of phonics within the written Chinese language, but overall the difference between written English and written Chinese is SIGNIFICANTLY different than written English and written Spanish, or even written English and a language that utilizes a different alphabet such as written Russian.

All of this is to say nothing about the many other significant differences between the languages, such as the importance of tonality as it ascribes to meaning within the different languages, the differences of grammar, etc.

Overall due to the difficulty of the Chinese language it is far better to simply hire on a professional to perform Chinese to English translation for you than it is to attempt to learn and understand the language within a very short period of time. Learning the Chinese language to the degree where you'll be able to produce a clear and accurate translation requires a truly significant amount of time, and unless you choose to learn the language for your own purposes it's almost always better to stick with a qualified and trained Chinese translator from a translation agency.

Charlene Lacandazo is a marketing executive for Rosetta Translation, a leading full-service translation agency in London, UK.

Rosetta Translation specialises in Chinese translation worldwide.

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