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This blog has tackled impenetrable texts before when discussing the mysterious runic inscriptions on the Rök stone in Sweden, but few texts can rival the Voynich manuscript for intrigue. This hand-written tome is composed in an otherwise unknown writing system, which has defied all kinds of cryptographers over the years,…

Part I What to do when a product has no direct equivalent Every translator knows that a standard dictionary has its limits, and never is this truer than when translating specialist terminology in a domain with a specific vocabulary. In an ideal scenario the translator will have direct experience of…

A previous blog revelled in the linguistic joy to be found in eggcorns and mondegreens, which are misheard homophones that can become cemented in standard speech, sometimes even displacing the original correct form. A classic example is “dull as dishwater” rather than ditch water. In written documents, a similar phenomenon…

Are you a productivity geek? Are you obsessed with time-management hacks to pack more and more into your hectic schedule? Maybe you are one of those people who listen to podcasts on 1.5 speed, or who reads up on methods like ‘eat the frog’ (getting unpleasant tasks done first on…

Linguistic false friends are words that appear similar in two different languages but have unrelated meanings. A common example is embarazada in Spanish, which looks like embarrassed but actually means pregnant. Most of the examples of German false friends in this week’s blog do not go quite as wildly astray…

What is linguistic reappropriation? Linguistic reappropriation (also referred to as reclamation or resignification) is the process by which a word intended as a pejorative is reclaimed and redefined by the group at which the disparaging term was originally directed. There are numerous historical examples: from the Impressionists, whose name is…

This blog recently delved into Polari, a form of slang used as a kind of secret language by people working in theatres, fairgrounds and markets and subsequently adopted by some gay people in the early to mid-20th century. This kind of jargon associated with a particular group is sometimes referred…

The quality of machine translation output is undoubtedly improving, and translators may be prompted to question their future with increasing volumes of post editing machine translation (PEMT) tasks among their offers of work. But a quick immersion in the world of PEMT is usually enough to reassure you that humans…

What is Polari? Polari is a form of slang associated with gay subculture, brought to mainstream attention in the UK by Kenneth Williams in Round the Horn, a radio show that had regular audiences of 15 million at its peak in the mid to late 1960s. Williams played one half…

Over the last few months, several news stories about language in the UK have caught my eye and prompted me to wonder if there is a renewed interest in some of the country’s older linguistic heritage, particularly around the geographical margins. In Alderney, the northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands,…

The Knocker-Upper as the human alarm clock of middle ages During a bleary-eyed start to the day recently, discussion at the breakfast table turned to the pros and cons of different alarm clock devices and the tricks people deploy to ensure they get out of bed rather than remaining under…

This blog is brought to you by speech recognition, which I was finally forced to embrace having fractured my shoulder cycling at our local velodrome. Many years ago I studied acoustic variation in speech for my PhD and did a placement with a speech recognition company. So I knew enough…

Let’s face it, getting side-tracked is all too easy. So it’s not surprising that languages have devised syntactic mechanisms of handling linguistic digression without the reader or listener losing the thread entirely. A sentence might begin with a particular topic, dive off into some additional information (which may or may…

Most translators will be familiar with Microsoft Word’s spell-checker, and probably its grammar checker too. Many is the time those tools have saved me from submitting a rogue apostrophe or a finger-fumbled typo. In an idle moment, I found myself exploring the Refinements tools also available via the Editor facility.…

This blog recently described a study investigating sound symbolism, in other words non-arbitrary mappings between phonetic properties of speech sounds and their meanings. Researchers described the way people associate the pseudowords “bouba” and “kiki” respectively with rounded and angular shapes. Now another study has tried to establish whether this could…

Like most translators, I have a love-hate relationship with my spell checker. I begrudgingly admit it regularly saves me from crimes against punctuation and grammar, but sometimes it has a slightly hectoring tone and other times I just downright disagree with it. For better or worse, it was the Microsoft…

Ukraine is currently in the news for all the wrong reasons. Less controversially it has been hanging out in my folder of “unwritten” blog post ideas ever since I stumbled across this 2014 Time magazine article about use of the definite article “the” in the country’s name. The journalist recounts…

This blog recently examined different strategies for solving Codeword puzzles, including frequency analysis or letter counting. This involves using an understanding of the frequency of occurrence and distribution of different letters to decipher encrypted text. Frequency analysis is a specific type of cryptanalysis, which more broadly means the analysis of…

Recently this blog took a brief tour of three different approaches to interpreting legal meaning in English law. These strategies range from literal interpretations to broader interpretations aimed at avoiding absurd legal results, and an even freer approach to statutory interpretation allowing judges to effectively plug gaps in the Acts…

  Look at the shapes depicted on the right. In a 2001 study on sound symbolism, VS Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard report that 95% of people pick the right image as kiki and the left as bouba. (Subjects are told the words are from a Martian language and are asked…

‘Small men command the letter of the law. Great men serve its spirit.’ J.C. Marino The idea that someone might adhere to the letter of the law while violating its spirit is an acknowledgement that there is room for manoeuvre when it comes to interpreting legislation. Indeed, this principle is…

It is only a short while since this blog examined the fraught history of virus naming, but Covid seems determined to keep this topic in the news, so here we are again. Having recognised the potential harm of naming viruses after the geographical locations in which they were discovered, in…

What is a codeword puzzle? A codeword puzzle is a crossword grid in which each letter of the alphabet has been substituted by a number from 1-26. Usually, you are given 2-3 letters to help you on your way. For example, the codeword puzzle might reveal that ‘S’ is represented…

This week’s blog explores pseudo-anglicisms, words that take lexical elements from English to create a neologism that is unknown in English or used with a different meaning. These could be described as a special subcategory of false friends. They appear to be English, but their meaning may not be at…

Turn-taking is an essential part of any successful conversation, and interruptions can infringe the ability to exchange information on an equal basis. Many studies over the years have noted a gender bias both in the tendency to interrupt, the likelihood of being interrupted, and the way an interruption is perceived.…

Language borrowing involves a fascinating process as words transition from having an unmistakably foreign status when they are initially imported to eventually being very much part of the target language. Sometimes this involves adapting the pronunciation or spelling of the loan word to bring it in line with the native…

“Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional”, as US pastor Max Lucado puts it. Humans may be bound to disagree, but the manner in which they do so and the consequences of having diverging opinions are within our control. So, this week’s blog explores some of the language that has…

The coronavirus pandemic has cast a fresh spotlight on the phenomenon of geographical naming illnesses. Whether intentional or not, the practice often suggests an element of blame and can stoke resentment against people associated with the relevant region. Donald Trump’s insistence on using the phrases “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus”…

It is not often you get a chance to shoehorn a discussion of phonetics into dinner table conversation, but a recent mishearing presented an opportunity to introduce my family to the phenomenon of “yod coalescence”. The initial prompt was my enthusiastic appraisal of Stephen Spielberg’s debut feature-length film Duel from…

Trademarked names can be a tricky problem for translators. It is not unusual to find the source language has a widely used generic term for a particular item, whereas the target language may colloquially use a trademarked term that is off limits in formal documentation. A common example of genericide…

Linguists would normally relish the prospect of a dictionary definition entering the public consciousness and becoming a heated topic of debate. But few have wanted to venture an opinion about the current wrangling over the meaning of the word woman. And who can blame them as the opposing factions each…

To celebrate this year’s Book Lovers Day (back in August) the language learning marketplace Preply compiled a report on The Most Translated Books in the World. The result is a rather charming, whirlwind tour of global literature depicted in a series of maps, highlighting the top text in each country.…

Prevalence of Latin teaching in the UK According to a survey by the British Council, Latin is only taught at key stage 3 in 2.7% of the UK’s state schools compared to 49% of independent schools. This certainly says something about the prevalence (or otherwise) of Latin in modern Britain,…

What is the origin of Lorem Ipsum? Translators regularly come across errors, omissions and other indications of documents that are works in progress in the source language. My favourite is when I discover a chunk of Lorem ipsum, the classic placeholder or filler text, which the author has forgotten to…

BBC’s Law in Action programme recently described an interesting linguistic quirk in Scottish law, which is currently under scrutiny. Under Scots law, jury trials can issue one of three verdicts; the defendant can be convicted (found “guilty”), or alternatively they can be acquitted in one of two ways (“not guilty”,…

Such are the vagaries of the Twitter algorithm you can never quite be sure what will pop up on your timeline. Sometimes it successfully manages to supply you with content that genuinely piques your interest and so it was that a tweet by the Northern Ireland Minister of Justice Naomi…

While digging into a bit of historical linguistics, I was reminded of the fact that Frisian is English’s closest relative on the continent, with Scots staking a claim to a similarly close kinship within the British Isles (assuming you are prepared to classify Scots as a language in its own…

This blog has delighted in linguistic pedantry before, but the bar has been set to a whole new height by a group in Quito, Ecuador who go out correcting the punctuation and grammar they find in graffiti around the city. Meet the graffiti grammar vigilantes. The first reports of corrected…

Here we delve into the charming world of the contranym, a word that has two distinct meanings that are contradictory or opposite. These words are also referred to as auto-antonyms or Janus words (after the god with two faces). Classic examples in English include cleave, which can mean to adhere…

Fictional portrayals of translators are not particularly common (although this blog previously reviewed films featuring translators and interpreters), so it was with great excitement that I stumbled upon the character Gen Watanabe in the novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Gen is the multilingual interpreter for Japanese businessman, Mr. Hosokawa.…

Everyone makes mistakes. Even translators. I will admit there is a certain pleasure in seeing how translation mistakes can go rogue, sometimes even becoming the preferred phrasing or vocabulary choice. The use of shared glossaries can exacerbate this problem – the client will emphasise the importance of adhering to the…

We are all familiar with references to cybersecurity and different forms of encryption to ensure digital information can be exchanged without being intercepted by a third party. But the desire for secure methods of communication has its roots many centuries before the first computer was even dreamed of. Letterlocking is…

As a dabbler in just two languages (German and English) I have always admired those who master many and are genuine polyglots. Despite my best efforts at school and university my French, Spanish and Welsh skills never got much beyond very basic comprehension, so I have an appreciation for what…

Recently I have done some comparison of post-editing and human translation to evaluate the overall quality of the MT engines before they are used. These evaluations can also help a translation agency calculate the likely effort required for post editing the machine translated text by allocating a score to each…

Translating idioms is a tricky business at the best of times. But even greater caution is needed when a saying is almost identical in the source and target language. I was on my second proofread through an English translation before I realised that I had referred to a cat having…

What are eggcorns? Mishearings are a common source of amusement to anyone with young children. We have friends who still refer to “school insect days” rather than INSET (in-service training) days, and who eagerly go “trickle treating” rather than trick-or-treating. These kinds of idiosyncratic substitutions are referred to as “eggcorns”,…

I cannot profess to paying much attention to the New Year Honours list, but anything relating to language is always likely to catch my eye. The 2021 awards included a CBE for services to educational research for Professor Usha Goswami, Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the…

English is a linguistic melting pot: much of our vocabulary is derived from Latin, sometimes via French, but other influences include Celtic, Greek, Norman, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Indian languages, German, Old Norse, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic. When borrowing lexical items from other languages, one of the questions writers face is…

Translating idioms is one of the hardest challenges a translator will face. Often there is no direct equivalent in the target language, or you may find the most obvious alternative simply does not work in the relevant context. I wrote previously in this blog about the care needed when deploying…

The world is awash with obscure celebratory days to mark pretty much anything you can think of, and languages are no exception. There’s the European Day of Languages on 26th September, originally conjured up in 2001 by the European Union and the Council of Europe. Specific languages often have their…