Author Archives: Alison Tunley

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…

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,…

Novelists are well aware of the peril of giving two characters names that start with the same letter because readers have a tendency to get them confused. I sometimes struggle to keep track of who’s who in a book even when the name of both characters is not remotely similar,…

The Saturday Live show on BBC Radio 4 features a slot called “Inheritance Tracks”, in which a guest shares a piece of music they would like to recommend to future generations and a piece they have themselves inherited from a previous generation. I think this format would work well for…

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 the duvet. This led us on to the now lost…

The previous blog describes getting to grips with speech recognition tools for successful dictation. In terms of using speech recognition for translation work, certain types of projects lend themselves more easily to be being handled by a dictation application. The very first project I took on was relatively straightforward from…

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…

A little while ago this blog covered my failure to correctly pluralise the noun kohlrabi. I described some of the reasons why I wasn’t particularly happy with the proposed plurals found in the dictionary, but since then I have wondered whether my dissatisfaction with the plural form was because I…