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Editor and translator Katy Derbyshire poses the question to ten practitioners and stresses why we need to be talking about it.
If you don't know a perigee syzygy from a hole in the wall, you need to bone up on your astronomy.
Mignon Fogarty won't weep if you forget when to use "whom."
Espresso, latte, macchiato. The coffee bean didn't even originate in Italy, so why do so many coffee drinks have Italian names?
I open the creative writing courses I teach with this vow: “I’ve seen far too many workshops become an indoctrination into an instructor’s taste—a semester-long exhortation to love what the instruc…
Switzerland’s government has decided to recognise the dialect spoken in canton Jura as an official minority language.
When Marcel Proust died in November 1922 only The Way by Swann’s, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah had been published; The Prisoner, The Fugitive an…
We are starting a new year and, with it, new projects and goals. What if one your goals is to become a professional translator? What if you already are one and are looking for a way to improve your performance, followed by your income? You can find a few great tips in this article here, which was wr
EDMONTONâWhen Brandi Morinâs kohkum (Cree for grandmother) passed away, her aunties were cleaning her house and found pieces of paper scattered throughout that had short stories and memories on them in their motherâs handwriting. They found the elongated, cursive writings on scrap bits, papers, and even flyers. They compiled all her writings in a mini …
A bunch of South Africanisms have been added to the Oxford Dictionary. We'll tell you about them just now.
From Jenny Holzer to Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner, these artists have taken the written word off the page and into the museum.
A large number of birds received their names through the imitation of their cries. Some bird names, however, have a more intriguing linguistic history.
It was a tough year for deciding on Separated by a Common Language Words of the Year, and so I am very grateful to those who nominated US-t...
Yesterday I announced the US-to-UK Word of the Year (click for details!) , and so today is the turn of the UK-to-US WotY. The 2018 US-to-...
The success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies brought the languages that JRR Tolkien invented for the Elves to the attention of a much wider public. There are now numerous books and websites that allow devotees to learn Quenya and Sindarin.
People who speak languages missing from Google Translate, Siri, and Wikipedia will face future crises—leaving aid organizations scrambling.
As we mentioned in a previous post, cleaning the translation memory (TM) of one of our largest and oldest clients was a task that required the use of Xbench and a consequent report which we imported into an Excel spreadsheet, and finally choosing Olifant to edit the TM. The TM had thousands of segments, and …
David Skinner on why the American Heritage Dictionary closed its usage panel this year—and why it existed in the first place.
The future of work is neither fully human or fully machine. It's something in between.
Brigitte Nerlich and Carmen McLeod at the Synthetic Biology Research Centre at the University of Nottingham have given ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ a new twist, by focusing on responsible language use. As everybody knows by now, words matter in politics as well as in science. Here is a brief account of how this new focus came about and how it led up to a new thematic series now fully published in Life Sciences, Society and Policy.
The English language can be a hard language to grasp fully because it has so many idioms. | Learn how to properly localize and translate marketing content.
People who speak languages missing from Google Translate, Siri, and Wikipedia will face future crises—leaving aid organizations scrambling.
Approximately 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, but only about half are expected to survive this century. One factor contributing to this loss is climate change.
When proofreaders take out their red pens, their main purpose is to get rid of any errors that may hinder comprehension or sidetrack the reader. One aspect of this task is a certain economy of corrections: a proofreader should spend their time on warranted changes. These changes have to do with grammatical errors and with …
The number of people speaking Italian, Hungarian, German and Greek in the US is dropping precipitously.
Over the past 15 years, Yiddish has gotten hip, and an unprecedented wave of cultural expression—including a popular Folksbiene production of 'Fiddler on the Roof'—is the result.
These films make protagonists out of the ultimate supporting actors in history, the translators.
What do Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto have in common? They are all explicitly constructed languages -- some for fictional worlds, some for the real world. Some are created to entertain, others have such lofty goals as achieving world peace. Some have dictionaries, grammars and language academies.
Recently heard a rumor that Klingon had surpassed Esperanto as the most commonly spoken conlang (constructed language, sometimes called artificial language). This is a massively unlikely possibilit…
The world is experiencing a state of unprecedented connectivity thanks to technology. But language remains a barrier. Even though technological devices can quickly and easily connect, humans from different parts of the world often can’t. Translation software may be the solution, but it isn't yet perfect—here's why.
https://youtu.be/zHYlNNV-etQ I've been enjoying watching The Miniaturist on PBS. You might well think that "miniature" has something ...
