‘Historic’ Day as First Non-Latin Web Addresses Go Live

Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Net regulator ICANN has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

Read  more about the first Arabic domain names in Arabic script>>

Champs-Elysées Audiomagazines Cease Trading

A couple of avid Champs-Elysées audiomagazine subscribers emailed us recently saying that they hadn’t received their latest magazine.

We were obviously concerned about this, but hadn’t known anything about it.  We searched the web to find that most of their websites had been taken down and no-one was answering their phones.   Read more

Learning Languages Can Boost Your Career

Foreign language skills were ranked as second only to IT skills in a poll conducted for the National Centre for Languages (CILT) in the UK. The survey also reports that one in four of the of 500 companies canvassed said the ability to speak a second language would give a candidate the edge when applying for a job. Candidates in the UK were losing out to employees from other countries with additional language skills. Read more

Election Manifestos go Multilingual

While trying to decide which way to vote in the UK General Election on 6 May 2010, I decided to browse through all the election manifestos of the major political parties.  I was pleased to discover on the Green Party website that they have their Mini Manifesto in Arabic and Bengali.   Read more

Transparent Languages – Save 15%

The sun is out, the spring is here – time to plan your holidays and more importantly time to brush up on your language skills!

To help you we have a special offer from Transparent Languages to purchase one of their language learning software courses:

Save 15% on any order. Use LANGUAGE15 at checkout. Expires 05/31/2010

For those of you in the UK:

Save 15% on any order at the Transparent Language UK Store – use UKLANG15 at checkout. Expires 05/31/2010

Transparent Language is a leading provider of best-practice language learning software for consumers, government agencies, educational institutions, and businesses. Since 1991, Transparent Language has helped millions of individuals learn new languages quickly, easily, and effectively. More than 12,000 schools and universities, as well as top government language schools, such as the Foreign Service Institute and the Defense Language Institute, use our products. Working with distinguished language acquisition experts and thousands of native speakers around the world, Transparent Language is committed to producing language learning solutions of the highest quality at reasonable prices.