I have worked in the Santo Tomás University for two years now, and lived and worked in Tunja, Colombia for almost three.  As a foreigner I get asked many questions by my English students.  I love questions!  I especially love questions about my country, my culture and the differences between England and Colombia.  The first one is usually, "Teacher, do you have a girlfriend?"  I always tell my students that if they can ask me a question in English, I will always answer their questions.  Probably the second most frequently asked question is:
“Teacher, how do you say arepa in English?”

Mistakes like the one above are commonplace on live TV.  What I think they meant to say is "the year of the horse".  But I'm sure that you've all been in the situation where you're watching a foreign film with English subtitles, and you know enough of the foreign language to know that what is said in the dialogue isn't always the same as what's in the subtitles.  Many people find this frustrating, especially when using foreign films to learn a foreign language.  So why does this happen?  Why are subtitles so different from the spoken dialogue?  Here we tell you why...

Many people may think that this ship has sailed, but I have felt strongly about this for a long time now, and the straw on the camel’s back came after the Luis Suarez biting incident, when a friend of mine posted:

“What a horrible person Suarez is - and on top of that he’s racist”

In this post I would like to briefly present the argument that Luis Suarez is not racist. Or at least, that we have no evidence to suggest he is. I will try and justify my argument from a cultural linguistic perspective. But first, let me present a little bit about myself, so you can judge the extent to which what I say might be worth taking into consideration.