STAR TS Translation Services Blog

If you are struggling to choose which female honorific is the most appropriate to address the modern woman, be sure that you are not the only one. It is not an easy question.

Below we have detailed an explanation of Mrs., Ms., and Miss that should help you to address ladies correctly.

The three nouns Mrs., Ms., and Miss appeared in the 17th century and come from the female English title Mistress which was used to refer to all women. The full stop of the abbreviations is generally used in the USA and Canada whereas in the UK the abbreviations are commonly written without any full stop.

Ms. is slightly old fashioned compared to the two other titles but has been revived in the 20th century.  This English honorific is mostly used in business and public life to address a lady. This is generally used when her marital status is unknown. It is neutral regarding marital status. The plural for Ms. can be  Mss. or either Mses.. You may also use the French plural “Mesdames” abbreviated Mmes.

Miss is used to refer to an unmarried woman, or girls under eighteen in some countries. Miss alone is frequently used by schoolchildren to address a female teacher no matter what her marital status is. The plural for Miss is Misses or you may use the traditional French “Mesdemoiselles”.

Finally, Mrs. is strictly used to refer to a married woman. For the plural you can use the French plural “Mesdames” abbreviated Mmes like for Ms.

Some women may have a preference for Ms., Miss, or Mrs. and if a woman has a professional title, it is more appropriate to use that title such as Doctor, Professor, or Captain instead of Ms., Miss, or Mrs.

So what is your favorite Mrs., Ms., and Miss?

STAR Translation Services

Here at STAR we are often asked…

“What is the best language to translate our website into?”

More and more people are using the Internet everyday in many different languages, so we designed this chart to help you decide based on the number of internet users and the language they use online.

As English is a global language, the analytics from “Internet World Stats” show that most people use English when surfing on the Internet. Indeed, English speaking Internet users increased by 5% – from 537 million users to 565 million between 2010 and 2011.

Chinese ranked second with about 510 million of Internet users of the language. The number of Chinese Internet users increased by 14.6% – from 445 million in 2010 to 510 million in 2011.

Then, Spanish ranked third with a growth increase of 7.8% between 2010 and 2011. The number of Spanish Internet  users grew from 153 to 165 million.

Internet users by languages 2011

STAR partners with companies selling worldwide to help them grow their global business. We provide translation services, global consultancy and multilingual SEO advice in over 44 languages.

By STAR Translation Services

STAR’s Monday Question : Is it “Data” or “Datum”?

Data comes from Latin. It used to be considered as a collective singular noun. In formal documents for scientific or scholarly writing data is mostly used as a plural and datum is the singular form. When you choose one or the other check that the nouns and verbs tally with the selected form.

Yet, for non-scientific use data is nowadays commonly used as a singular noun. So it is acceptable to write a sentence like: “STAR’s Translation’s data was available on its website”.

Definition

“data n, pl. 1 Facts on which a decision is to be based. 2 Facts to be processed by computer.
datum n. (pl. data) item of data”
Reference: Oxford Quick Reference Dictionary and Thesaurus – Oxford University Press

In addition, here are a few more words whose the plural form don’t ends in -s.

Plural >>>>>>>Singular

Bacteria                   Bacterium

Dice                           Die

Formulae                Formula

Graffiti                      Graffito

Candelabra            Candelabrum

Data                          Datum

Media                       Medium

Opera                       Opius

Paparazzi                Paparazzo

Men                          Man

Women                   Woman

By STAR Translation Services

Among or Amongst ?

We are often asked what the difference is between two words and which is most appropriate for a given text.

So this Monday our question is: Among or Amongst, which is correct?

For once it is an easy answer: You can actually use both of them. Either “amongst” and “among” is correct.

“Among” seems to be more appropriate and popular in modern writing. Indeed, when writing news “among” appears the most used one.

On the other hand, you can use amongst when writing fiction like fairytales.  It is a bit old-fashioned so it suits the context and style of fictional stories.

By STAR Translation Services

Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in business after english

Mandarin is the official spoken language in China. It is spoken by 845 million people. According to Bloomberg Rankings, it is now scored highest in a ranking of languages for business usefulness, excluding English.

The Rankings takes into account:

-the number of speakers,

-the number of countries where the language is official,

-economical rates,

-educational rates…

Doing business in Asia will call more and more for language abilities to be successful in non-English-speaking countries. It provides advantages by being closer to the culture and habits and it also favors connections in a faster and more complex business environment.

French with 68 million speakers and Arabic with 221 speakers are ranked second and third. Spanish came in fourth ranking with 329 speakers worldwide.

Source: Bloomberg.com

Mandarin and Cantonese are often confused when people request translation services for China. It is easy to confuse them as the written form can be different depending on the country you are in. We’ve produced a simple table explaining the differences between Chinese languages and dialects for you.

by STAR Translation Services

As we are midway through Seachtain Na Gaeilge we thought we’d ask – just how popular is Irish?

STAR as a translation company we provide translation in over 45 languages including Irish from our offices here in Dublin 3.
We did an analysis of all our translation for 2011 and are happy to publish the results for our Irish readers.

Top 10 Languages 2011

As you might imagine our closest international neighbours are top with German and French being the most popular languages we translated last year.

Irish follows closely at number 3. Into English translation is number 4 (from various languages).

Our Japanese teams are kept very busy at number 5. Japanese is very specialised and the quality demand of the market is exceptionally high.

An interesting one in the mix is Swedish which comes in at number 8 in the list. Maybe this is the IKEA influence in Ireland.

By STAR Translation Services

If you’ve ever wondered what the longest word in the English language is, hopefully we can help with the answer.

We won’t take into account chemical names (because there are endless protein names, for instance, with over 1000 letters) or place names, because they can be created under different rules like the name of Bangkok (Krungthep) in Thai : Krungthepmahanakonbowornratanakosinmahintarayudyayamahadiloponoparatanarajthaniburiromu
domrajniwesmahasatarnamornpimarnavatarsatitsakattiyavisanukamphrasit. Sorry – its so long we had to split it over 2 lines!

The longest word we found in a dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis with 45 letters.  It is a coined term (technically letter-by-letter “transcription” of a Greek word) for a lung disease.

The longest non-coined word in a dictionary is pseudopseudohypoparathyroidismwith with 30 letters. It is a variation of the disorder known as pseudohypoparathyroidism.

Following scientific and technical names, the longest non-technical English word may be floccinaucinihilipilification. This 29 letter word is direct derivative from Latin and is defined as the act or habit of estimating something as valueless.

Antidisestablishmentarianism is commonly quoted as one of the longest words in the English language with 29 letters.

You can also accept supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as one of the winners since it also includes 34 letters. Thank you Mary Poppins for that one.

At STAR Translation Services we love the English language. We provide professional translation and English proofreading services. Call us today for a quote.

Effect and affect can each be used as both a noun and a verb. They are easily confused as they sound similar and the two main usages are associated with something being changed or altered.

If you’re not sure which to use, a good rule of thumb is that effect is more often used as a noun and affect as a verb. This holds true for almost all situations in Standard English.

The two more common words
-Effect (Noun): A result or impact, something caused by something else.
“The new teacher had a positive effect (impact) on the school.”

-Affect (Verb): To alter or change (or have an effect on)
“The new teacher affected (altered) the way the school was run.”

The two less common words
-Effect (Verb): To cause something to happen or occur.
“The new teacher effected (brought about) curricular and disciplinary change.”

-Affect (Noun): A psychology term for an external display of emotion.
“The new teacher noticed that the boy had flat affect (showed no emotion).”