Author Archives: admin

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…

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 of “Julian and…

New Year, new you. It’s that time where you reflect on your failings and resolve to improve. For me, it’s something of an annual tradition to commit to resurrecting my fading, and frankly never brilliant, Spanish skills. Last year I made a good stab at it and lasted several months…

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…

Translation is different from other forms of writing in that the basic material already exists when you start. The translator’s job is to reproduce the content so the target audience can access the text. But in other respects translation has much in common with creative writing, journalism and commercial copywriting.…

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,…

With Halloween just around the corner, this week’s blog is inspired by a tweet from the wonderful @tweetolectology. This language and geography focused Twitter account is the brainchild of an ESRC funded collaboration between the universities of Cambridge and Lancaster investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media. The…

The body achieves what the mind believes*. Or so the saying goes. It is widely accepted that the mind has a far greater role to play in endurance sports than, for example, when running the 100 metres. October will see another attempt by Eliud Kipchoge to run a marathon in…