Author Archives: admin

Wednesday October 16th marked the second International Pronouns Day. Organisers hope to make “respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace”. Harnessing language to bring about cultural change is nothing new, nor are the impassioned opinions voiced as a consequence. Pronouns are little words that pack a big punch. If…

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…

It’s been a while since this blog delved into the wonderful world of new entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Updates to the dictionary are made four times a year, with selected highlights summarised at the OED website by one of the editors. It’s worth adding to your diary because…

Only a matter of weeks ago, this blog sang the praises of the linguistic pedant. We extolled the virtues of the stickler for grammatical detail and celebrated punctuation purists. Then along comes Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose many achievements now include being precisely the wrong kind of pedant. Following his appointment as…

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 the idea that another language…

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…

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…