En EspañolAn Idea For Discussing Vocabulary on Twitter
If you’re learning a language, teaching a language or translating between two languages, you have little discussions about vocabulary all the time.
Could Twitter be a good place for translators and language learners to learn new vocabulary?
A good place to follow each other on real-time, 140-character lexical adventures?
I think it could.
The other day, @alunjohn tweeted me about the Spanish word ‘bitácora‘ (‘blog‘ in English): “@matthewbennett I was always find the word “bitácora ” an odd one!”
Twitter vocabulary conversations
Now ‘bitácora‘ and ‘blog‘ are both perfectly acceptable words in Spanish to refer to a blog. It depends on who you ask. Many Spanish newspapers and blogs use the word ‘blog‘ and others use the word ‘bitácora‘.
I usually use ‘bitácora‘ because I think it’s right to try and use native words in a language where there’s a choice and because I’ve always used ‘bitácora‘ here in Murcia when talking about blogs with a close friend of mine who is a tenured journalism lecturer at Murcia University – and whose specialist subject happens to be Journalism and New Technolgies.
Then I thought: “Twitter could be a great place for sharing small linguistic adventures every day to discover new words and etymologies” and tweeted about it. @Mtranslator, @parkbenchps, @ArnaudJacobs, @_Zotikos_and @debra47 , all replied and offered interesting thoughts, which led to:
“Maybe we could use a hashtag like #lingo-es-en, #word-fr-de or #vocab-fr-es for following vocabulary tweets.“
Lack of space is a first-order problem with only 140 characteres, as @alunjohn wisely pointed out: “why not #eng-sp #sp-eng?“
Quite right.
If we further develop @alunjohn’s brevity with the two-letter language codes we normally use for websites and file naming (‘es’ instead of ’sp’ for Spanish, ‘en’ instead of ‘eng’ for English), we can save even more characters and add further clarity: #eng-sp becomes #en-es, for example, which would lead us to things like:
French – English > #fr-en
Dutch – Chinese > #nl-zh
This would also allow for different language variants from the different regions of the world:
Spanish Spanish + British English > #es-es-en-gb
Additionally, we could follow more specific vocabulary fields (typically medicine, law or finance) and do things like:
#es-en-lex, #es-en-med or #es-en-$$
What do you think? Is it worth the effort?
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It's definitely worth our time. GREAT IDEA.
But that hashtag is just devoted to translation issues, what if it's not a translation issue but just a lexical or semantic one?
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BTW: I've never liked “bitácora”…bitácora es el armario al lado del timón dnd se guardaba el cuaderno…No sé ni cómo ni pq el continente pasó a ser el contenido…y la gente habla de bitácoras, entonces are we bitacoreros who bitacorean? :S
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Greetings from VLC.
Thanks, that's one vote for giving it a try then!
Do you mean a monolingual issue or for a language learner as opposed to a translator? I think language learners/teachers could use this in the same way as translators and maybe for monolingual things you could just do #es or #en?
That's what I found so interesting about the word 'bitácora' the other day with @alunjohn. In English it comes from the log bit – which I think was once a piece of wood used to measure things on ships – and in Spanish it refers to wood but a with a different use – the place they where they kept the log out of inclement weather as you point out. 'Bitacoreros' vs. 'blogueros', 'bitacorear' vs. 'bloguear'
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It is great to develop better structures for the usage of these hashtags. For this purpose I just opened http://www.lnglrn.org
Maybe we can collaborate to provide the best possible support for learners.
Wow, cool, a whole site devoted to this kind of idea. How are you thinking of developing it?
I saw http://twitter.com/search?q=#wordkill on Twitter yesterday which is a fun language-related hashtag too.
Sorry, at the moment I am a little bit in a hurry. But, we can talk about it on Sunday. Enjoy your weekend!
I've been using Twitter for some time now as a tool for learning vocabulary in other languages. I began by searching for francophone users in and around Paris, Lille, Bruxelles, etc. and followed their tweets. Before long I was getting a sense for informal language that I hadn't had before.
A standardized system of hashtags would be a great way to expand my personal database of lexical tweets, as well as to connect users with similar langauge interests. En avant !
Hi Festus: that's great. As for hashtags, I'm not sure it's something we can organise; it seems more like something that people will either start using or not.
http://www.grafitter.com and http://www.hashtag.me are impressive examples of what application developers can also do with standardized tags …
Gave it a go today with one for fr-eng. Just C&Ped as… um… no hashtag on my iBook keyboard. Too dumb for words, or common problem??
Is bitácora used in Latin America as well? So Twitter is a micro-bitácora? I just wrote a blog on ¨twittereando¨here and Twitter translations if you wanna check it out. Keep up the good work.