Internet translates into success

The business of translation has taken off with the rise of the Internet, globalization and international conflicts, reports The Pioneer Press. These linguistic quirks can give translators headaches:

There are 137 languages spoken in Tanzania.

Finnish has 15 grammatical cases — changes in a pronoun or adjective depending on the use. English has three.

Hebrew and Arabic are written right to left, but numbers within a text read from left to right.

Chinese and Japanese use ideographs to represent ideas, but Korean has a phonetic alphabet with letters arranged in clusters to form words.

Lao and Thai do not always use spaces between words.