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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…

These days I rarely manage to stay awake long enough to watch BBC’s Match of the Day live on a Saturday night. Instead, we tend to record it, and this has the bonus that you can fast-forward if the post-match interviews and analysis gets a bit dull. But this season,…

I recently noticed journalist Oliver Burkeman questioning the subtitling of the Netflix Series “Call my Agent”, (original French title Dix pour cent; "ten percent"). Burkeman asked “Is it a much-commented-on thing already that Call My Agent seems to switch subtitlers halfway through season three? That's where we are, and suddenly…

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…

I had been intending to write a blog post about language, epitaphs and tombstone translation for a while, having always been entertained by Spike Milligan’s request to have “I told you I was ill” on his gravestone. Following his death in 2002, he was buried at St Thomas’s Church in…

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”, which is itself…

Translation is not often top of the news agenda but that is exactly what happened over the Dutch translator selected to work on Amanda Gorman’s first collection of poems, including “The Hill we climb”, which she read at US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The Dutch publisher Meulenhoff approached author Marieke…

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…

German is renowned for having a word for everything. Even non-German speakers know how brilliant the German compound noun system is if you need to create the right term for a very specific situation. German has been described as the Lego of languages, expertly assembling smaller components to create something…

If the current state of the world is tempting you into expletive-laden outbursts, fear not, apparently this is entirely healthy. In her fascinating book, a true celebration of expletives, “Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language”, Emma Byrne explores how swearing can be an effective stress…

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…

Recently this blog discussed language extinction and its impact on cultural diversity. This post highlights a beautiful children’s book that tackles a similar theme, but with a focus on the loss of vocabulary used to describe our relationship with the natural world. Once again, we look at the link between…

Twitter is a great distraction and a veritable timewaster, but every so often it leads you to an undiscovered gem that makes all those lost hours seem worthwhile. So it was that, as I was musing about the relationship between language loss and cultural diversity, I stumbled across this lovely,…

My family spent Christmas in Covid quarantine, with my husband receiving an unwanted early gift in the form of a positive test result late on Christmas Eve. It was time to raid the kids’ toy cupboard for games and jigsaws to keep us entertained, and first to emerge was every…

I always have an eye out for linguistic curiosities that might entertain readers of this blog, so this week I bring you a round-up of talking parrot news (as a little bird told me to)! The first story that caught my eye was about Nigel, an African Grey parrot, who…

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…

Having mulled over the review process in a previous blog, this week I take a tour through some classic linguistic features that are red flags when reviewing German to English translations. Every language has its own formulaic features, expressions that often have no literal meaning but may be added for…

Reviewing translation work is an essential part of the QA process to ensure no errors have slipped through and the text is of a sufficiently high quality to deliver to the client. It’s tricky work for a freelancer to take on because when you agree to a review assignment you…

I cannot pretend to be a cricket aficionado but, many years ago, on returning from a spell living in Germany, I found myself obsessed with the radio commentary. It seemed to supply a quintessential British ingredient that had been missing during my time abroad. Undoubtedly, much of that pleasure was…

I was recently summoned to stand on the pavement and inspect the newly installed roof-mounted bike rack on our car as my partner took it on a test drive round the block. Unfortunately, we had not worked out a signalling system for what I would do to communicate any kind…

My daughter recently revealed that a friend had become an unlikely corona virus lockdown hero by adopting two geckos that were due to be “disposed of” due to the closure of her local pet store. This was the perfect excuse for my husband to recount for the thousandth time the…

When the world undergoes rapid change, language also evolves at pace to keep up. As the obvious recent example, Covid-19 and language change have gone hand-in-hand. Over the last few months, we have all seen our vocabulary enriched with various scientific and sociological terminology to describe the experience of dealing…

Typos can crop up even in documents that have been carefully proofed, particularly if the typographic mistake involves a real alternative word. So, translators should not be surprised to come across them in their source texts. The number of typos can be a good indication of how much care the…

Instead of scrolling blankly through Twitter during my solo lunch hour, I am now surrounded by stuck-at-home family with the result that actual conversations take place. A new favourite activity is “Where’s that word from?” and I have been appointed chief etymologist with research responsibilities, in charge of taking the…

The recent blog post about portmanteaus could have included the ubiquitous “podcast”, a blend of iPod and broadcast, coined in about 2004 to describe digital audio files available to download for listening. You might be less familiar with another portmanteau phenomenon: the “podfasters”. These are people whose time is so…

Vocal fry has been my latest experience of frequency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, as it is sometimes known. In other words, the experience of learning about something new then encountering references to it absolutely everywhere. Maybe this blog post will trigger a similar experience for you. Anyway, back to…

When reading accounts of seismic historical events, I have always been struck by the extent to which ordinary people go about their daily business in a way that is remarkably unchanged. As we witness exactly this kind of tumultuous period in real time, I am sure the same observation will…

Humans are inherently tribal. We seek out other people like us and our sense of belonging is often reinforced by the language we use to communicate with our chosen group. This is the premise for Susie Dent’s wonderful exploration of the language used by Britain’s “Modern Tribes”. Whether these groups…

English is a global language and inevitably has influenced vocabulary in other languages. For whatever reason, there often seems to be a certain cachet associated with English phrases and lexical items. In German, marketing texts in particular have a fondness for lobbing in English vocabulary. Unfortunately for the translator, these…

  In 2002 David and Ben Crystal published “Shakespeare’s words: a glossary and language companion”, a detailed linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, giving up-to-date definitions of vocabulary and links to source quotations. Professor Jonathan Bate praised the book as “the most comprehensive guide to Shakespeare's astonishing linguistic inventiveness”. The book…

    Over the Christmas season this blog debated politically correct seasonal greetings, reflecting on a phenomenon that has been referred to a as a “manufactroversy” or manufactured controversy (or more pithily perhaps a “nontroversy”). Both these lexical items are fine examples of portmanteaus, “a linguistic blend of words, in…

  “Liberty … means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” George Orwell   This week’s blog considers freedom of speech and the right to hold unpopular opinions. As the world waits to see how the coronavirus outbreak will unfold, the extent to which the…

The fun of colour etymology: the colour orange or the fruit My previous blog on the differences between languages in the way they categorise the colour spectrum prompted an exploration of the etymological origins of colour words in English. Maybe you’ve always wondered which came first: the colour orange or…

  A while ago, esteemed linguistic tweeter @HaggardHawks recounted: “Not all languages have words for all the basic colours. But a study in 1969 found that some constants in translating the colour spectrum: all languages have words for BLACK and WHITE—and if a language has a third colour in its…

It’s almost as traditional as the tinsel, mince pies and yule log. No, I’m not talking about Christmas stockings, I’m referring to the debate about inappropriate festive greetings. Whether it’s claims that “Seasons Greetings” is offensive to Christians for failing to refer to the true reason for festivities, or suggestions…

Even the most diligent translator occasionally needs some distraction from work. This week’s blog takes a trawl through linguistic Twitter in search of entertainment and education that might even tenuously be described as working. Of course, you can dutifully follow whichever agencies you work for and use your Twitter profile…

I have recently been immersed in the Neapolitan Novels, a series of four books written in Italian under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Sadly Italian is not a language I speak, so I have been dependent on the translations by Ann Goldstein. In fact, it was really my interest in Goldstein…

Earlier this year, women’s rights activist Maria Beatrice Giovanardi found herself looking for synonyms for the word “woman” using various online search engines. She was unimpressed with the results and reports on her experience in an article for the online publishing platform Medium. Describing the dictionary outputs as “patronising, misogynistic,…

A trip abroad offers ripe pickings for the travelling translator. On our recent trip to Spain my kids developed a real knack for tracking down comedy English text, usually in the form of a dodgy translation from the original Spanish. Amateur translations in hotel rooms are always worth a chuckle:…

In this week’s blog post I take a look at one of the most useful translation tools in the English language – Roget’s Thesaurus. Often the skill of the translator lies not in their comprehension of the original language but in the way they recreate the text in the target…

Let me introduce Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation. Who knew we translators even had one? Not me, that’s for sure. I first stumbled upon Jerome in a casual mention by David Bellos in his book “Is that a fish in your ear? The amazing adventure of translation”. Jerome…

The mystique of untranslatable words A while ago a friend gifted me a little box set of “Untranslatable words”. Inside is a set of cards, each with a word in a foreign language describing a concept for which there is no direct equivalent in English. Even non-linguists seem to enjoy…

Over the years I have translated a number of cookery books and back in 2017 I wrote about some of the challenges involved in this area. My most recent immersion in the world of food and recipe translation prompted me to reflect again on how subject-area expertise is crucial for…

The British Council has just published its annual Language Trends report, which surveys language teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools in England. Previous reports had already documented the general decline in language learning, with a 19% reduction in entries for GCSE languages over the past five years. The…

Imagine being there to witness the birth of a word. Could anything be more thrilling for a linguist than seeing neologism in action by tracing the origin of a word back to a single moment. According to an article in the Guardian, lexicographer Bernadette Paton experienced exactly this. Paton tracked…

What on earth is a malaphor? At school I remember rather tedious lessons learning the distinction between a metaphor and a simile. How much more fun it would have been to devote some time to exploring the wonderful world of mixed up metaphors. So I was delighted to stumble across…

When it comes to translations, turning to an external partner isn’t always a company’s first move. So why outsource my translations, and to whom? For businesses with international offices, multilingual staff and overseas distributors, it often feels like the logical thing to keep the work in house and leverage the…