Blog

In her book Sleeping Beauties, neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan explores the phenomenon of culture-bound illnesses around the world. The conditions she is interested in are psychosomatic disorders which arise due to a complex interaction between the mind and body, but also the cultural context in which an individual finds themselves. And…

Having recently got sucked in to the joy of cycling, I have found myself adding long weekend bike rides to my existing schedule of regular runs and swims. That’s how I ended up cranking out a 60 mile lumpy bike ride one Saturday followed by a short run, then a…

One distinctive difference between English and German is the greater flexibility over word order and sentence structure in the latter language. German is described as having a V2 word order “which allows any constituent to occupy the first position as long as the second position is occupied by the finite…

“This is why you need to go on TikTok mum, you are missing out on quality content for your blog”. That was the advice of my middle daughter after she had patiently translated her reference to “the cozzie livs guy”, which had left me baffled. Now that cozzie livs has…

The need to translate English into English is more common than you might imagine, where phrases of English are deployed in a foreign language and have taken on an alternative meaning that isn’t appropriate in actual English text. There are lots of examples where the meaning has diverged completely from…

Prompted by the long dark evenings that dominate January and February in the UK, I am finally catching up and watching David Olusoga’s highly praised 2023 BBC series “Union”, which describes the historical origins and evolution of the country we refer to as the United Kingdom. Olusoga examines the threads…

The topic of false friends comes up regularly in translation, and this week’s collection of translation glitches are similar but perhaps better described as “friends that might lead you astray”. All the examples we discuss here have what seems to be an obvious solution in the target language, but this…

Previously, this blog touched briefly on the importance of punctuation when reviewing translation work, especially the need to adapt punctuation style from the source language style to your target language. But this topic is worth revisiting in greater depth as it seems quite a few translators regard the typographical symbols…

Language — or rather text — played a key role in the recent high-profile departure of the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay. The simple story is that Gay was found to have plagiarised other scholars’ work on multiple occasions both in her doctoral dissertation and in several published articles…

In 2014, the BBC’s Panorama programme reported on what was described as widespread cheating in English language tests that formed part of the international student visa approval process by the UK Home Office. This complex legal immigration story has been back in the news recently as new evidence has been…

This blog previously described the pleasure a translator can find in perusing multilingual instructions for a new domestic appliance, which often feature some entertainingly dismal translations. Having said that, the consequences of attempting to dodge translation difficulties by providing an illustration-only user manual suggest manufacturers are best advised to stick…

One of the greatest pleasures in working with language every day is the appreciation you develop for neat turns of phrase or vocabulary possibilities in your non-native language, so this week’s blog brings you a little collection of “Germanisms” that have recently brought me delight. We begin with the application…

We’ve had a New Zealand visitor with us for the last few months, which has provided a great opportunity to revel in regional linguistic differences, in the guise of New Zealand slang. In the UK, our main exposure to dialectal variation is through interactions with US media and culture. So,…

Proofreading Checklist Part I: Vocabulary One of the benefits of doing regular review work as a translator is that it offers useful reminders of things to watch out for in your own translation tasks. It is always easier to spot errors or stylistic glitches in someone else’s work, so this…

One of the first things I noticed many moons ago when working as an au pair in Germany, was the way the definite article was frequently stuck in front of people’s names “Die Petra …”, “Der Klaus …” etc. With certain regional variations, this definite article plus name formulation crops…

My ever-expanding list of language topics I should know more about has long since had sign language on it, and my interest increased when my middle daughter selected a university credit in British Sign Language as part of her liberal arts degree. So I was primed to notice a recent…

Back in 2018 Rhodri Williams, the outgoing director of Ofcom Wales, warned that the growth of streaming services such as Netflix could have a detrimental impact on original language content aimed at a “geographically-specific audience”. The power of the market means that global players are most interested in content that…

Every translator understands that dictionaries have their limits when it comes to selecting the right word. A fascinating example of this cropped up recently in a piece I was working on for a German financial services company. The topic was cryptocurrencies and particularly the evolving technologies in this rapidly changing…

Words do not have neat one-to-one mappings between languages. You do not need to be a very advanced language learner to be aware of that phenomenon, so it’s surprising how often this seems to trip up the unwitting translator. For example, German legal documents frequently distinguish between Schriftform and Textform,…

After another immersion in the world of fashion translation, I have once again emerged in awe of the repetitive and often vacuous nature of fashion marketing texts. Sorry fashion people, but it’s true. Once you get past the basic fact that you are promoting a pair of trousers, a dress,…

A few years ago, my eldest daughter and I set ourselves the task of hiking the North Downs Way, a long distance trail which takes walkers from Farnham to Dover via the Surrey Hills and over the Kent Downs. The aim was to do a couple of days at time,…

Yorkshire dialects are an endangered species In the grand tradition of “things aren’t what they used to be”, discussions of globalisation and an increasingly mobile and interconnected world regularly bemoan the detrimental impact on linguistic diversity. The negative ramifications range from the annihilation of entire languages, allegedly “disappearing faster than…

Duolingo: an addictive language learning tool I have a track record with new technology: phase one involves scepticism and refusal to engage, phase two is full-blown addiction and obsession (a third phase of disengagement often follows during which I wonder what all the fuss was about). Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter…

The allure of the smartphone makes it difficult to focus on reading an old-fashioned book. Even with notifications turned off, the tantalising prospect of the latest Twitter updates or WhatsApp messages easily win out over the printed word. In a bid to spend more time reading actual books rather than…

Typos and misspellings: the bane of a writer's existence Typos send a chill down the spine of any translator or proofreader. Catching an unintended slip-up at the last moment before submitting a project always combines an element of relief with a sense of dismay at nearly allowing an embarrassing mistake…

In a recent blog about the limitations of ChatGPT, this blog touched on the often mundane nature of the chatbot’s output. Having recently been immersed in Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, I suspect good writing is characterised by surprises…

This week’s blog will boost the spirits of any translator feeling demoralised at the growth of machine translation by reminding us that a bit of human intervention goes a long way when it comes to quality. Machine translation struggles with passages of text that are amenable to literal translation but…

Attitudes to corporate language policies might best be summed up by the quote attributed to John Lydgate, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the…

Contemporary concerns over climate change and the threat of extreme weather conditions may not be entirely new. Researchers attempting to decipher the runic inscriptions on the Rök stone from Scandinavia now believe it may refer to fear of an impending climate crisis. They suggest that the 9th century stone alludes…

Like most kids, my three offspring regard parental advice with a hefty dose of suspicion, including when it comes to book recommendations. So, one of my proudest parenting successes was listening to the gales of laughter from my youngest child’s bedroom after I had cajoled him into reading my ancient…

Recently I have done several projects which involved translating recipes. On the face of it this seems like a simple task: take the list of ingredients and convert into the target language; then simply do the same for the recipe method. Recipes tend to be very well structured, written in…

Obsession with the marathon This blog post on the language of the marathon is shamelessly influenced by your blogger’s obsession with running! April is the month when Londoners and Bostonians turn out in their droves for two of the finest city marathons. And this year I will be attempting to…

Most of the world’s alphabets are at least a thousand years old and we often take them for granted. The first alphabet is thought to be the Proto-Sinaitic script, which is the ancestor of most modern alphabets including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. An article published in 2016 in…

Reports about literacy levels among UK prisoners make for stark reading. The most recent Ministry of Justice figures show that 57% of adult prisoners had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old (prior to any education or training in prison). A quarter of young offenders in the UK have…

The trouble with being a linguist is that your familiarity with the source language can sometimes distract you from conventions in the target language. Or at least that’s my excuse when faced with translating place names. I instinctively want to resist removing the umlaut on Zürich to create a more…

In his book The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver talks about the proliferation of information following the invention and history of the printing press and the potential for misinformation and errors. One example he picks out is a 1631 edition of the Bible containing the unfortunate typo “Thou shalt…

Worst human translation errors “To err is human, to forgive divine” and that is the spirit we will adopt for this week’s blog post, which delves into some decidedly second-rate translations. We all have bad days, but some of the examples of human translation errors here crop up sufficiently often…

  As the data collected in the 2021 census is gradually processed and released by the Office for National Statistics, interesting patterns are emerging about the changing linguistic landscape in the UK. Covid caused the Scottish census to be delayed by a year, so the findings reported here focus exclusively…

Who can resist a new gadget? The shiny box, the gleaming device, the prospect of some cool new technology to play with. But for translators there is an additional thrill in the form of the instruction manual or user guide, inevitably translated into multiple languages with varying degrees of success.…

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." Wise words from American popular historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough. The challenge of marshalling your thoughts into lucid text will be familiar to anyone who wrangles with the written word for a…

Historical language shifts are easiest to describe after the fact when you can track how a particular usage has evolved over time. Spotting language change in action can feel like trying to capture lightning in a bottle due to the unpredictability of linguistic habits. A shift in usage might be…

Etymology shows us that German has the honour of having loaned some spectacular vocabulary to English. Where would we be without Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist and Wanderlust? Some of the borrowings are more mundane in the sense that they have been fully absorbed into the English lexicon and would not strike most…

Recently this blog looked at updates to English language requirements to facilitate recruitment of medical professionals to the UK from overseas. In India, the government has also been attempting to address linguistic barriers to the medical profession by offering medical degrees in Hindi for the first time. Until now, medicine…

I take up yoga on a regular basis and drop it again just as regularly in despair at my less than flexible limbs. There is only so much humiliation a person can take in an exercise class! Despite my inauspicious track record when it comes to sticking to a yoga…

As a former student of German at Cambridge University, the Times headline “Cambridge seizes Zeitgeist with gender-neutral German” immediately caught my eye. Despite the bold claim in the introductory paragraph that the university is saying “Auf Wiedersehen to teaching gendered German”, the reality is somewhat more mundane. Contrary to wild…

False friends are a favourite topic for linguists and translators and something this blog has covered previously, describing them as lexical con artists. In this week’s blog, we immerse ourselves in the world of fashion, where false friends seem to be particularly abundant. Fashion vocabulary in German is sprinkled with…

What are retronyms? The world changes and language races to keep up. Sometimes a word that had a very clear meaning becomes more ambiguous as a result of new inventions or discoveries. Enter the retronym, a type of neologism in which the new name helps distinguish between an existing form…

Ambrose Bierce (1842 – ca 1914) was an American author and journalist, best known to language lovers as the creator of the Devil’s Dictionary, first published in 1911. The dictionary is a collection of irreverent and amusing definitions, which began life in Bierce’s various contributions to magazines and newspapers in…

A discussion of the specialised terminology and catchphrases used in different professions prompted my writer/director brother to give me a rundown of some of the jargon used in the film industry. I’ve picked my favourites to include here and am now trying to find ways to re-engineer some of these…

This blog previously delved into the question of foreign diacritics and whether or not to include them in English text. Mulling this issue again recently led me off down another rabbit hole to investigate linguistic purism in English. Some time ago, I came across the piece “Uncleftish Beholding” by American…