A Chinese Valentine’s pod

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Hundreds of language programs at public schools have become victims of shrinking budgets. Not Chinese. We visit an inner city high school where 400 students are learning Chinese. Also, don’t be fooled: the language of love is not universal, not unless you keep you mouth shut. That’s the view of an American woman who endlessly misunderstands the amorous words of her German-speaking lover. Plus, bodice-ripping our way out of the recession: romance novels are more popular than ever.Download MP3

New York’s polyglot cops, Arabic online, and the planet’s most difficult language

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Our top five language stories this month: best and worst words of the year and the decade; Georgia launches a Russian language TV channel to counter the Kremlin’s message; new ventures and technologies give a boost to Arabic online; just how many cases, genders and moods it takes to make one Amazonian language the world’s most difficult; and the New York Police Department, now enforcing the law in nearly a hundred languages.Download MP3

Bilingual metaphors, place name changes, and interpreting for the Dodgers

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In this week’s World in Words podcast, Nobel literature prize winner Herta Mueller dreamed up metaphors in a mix of her native German and the Romanian she learned at school. Try translating that into English. Also, a conversation with the author of “Whatever Happened to Tanganika? The Place Names that History Left Behind.” And a profile of the man the Los Angeles Dodgers hired to interpret for the team’s Japanese players.

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Gaddafi’s translator and Nazi slogans in English

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In the latest World in Words podcast, the top five language-related stories from the past month. Among them: the sad tale of Muammar Gaddafi’s translator at the United Nations; the quixotic tale of the real estate mogul who is trying to export Korean Hangul script to Indonesia; and a German court’s decision to permit Nazi hate speech, so long as it’s not in German.

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