Author Archives: E Fixmer

In early November 2018, CNN launched another of its banana series of commercials. It features a banana in a number of situations where an apple would be expected, such as on a medical advice notice now proclaiming ‘A banana a day keeps the doctor away’ or a banana falling on…

New Manila Office Perhaps the most momentous event of the year for us in terms of its impact on our future is the opening of our new operations base in Manila. We have had a very successful accounts outpost there for a decade, and we finally decided to roll out…

What is the Moses machine translation system? Recently, I was talking with a translator friend of mine about machine-assisted translation (Google Translate in particular) and she mentioned Moses as a translation tool growing in popularity. I was a little bemused, as Moses, to me, is an important figure in Judaism…

Latin language …. And other things the Romans did for us   On a recent trip to Italy and having visited several Roman historical sites such as the coliseum, Herculaneum and Pompeii, I was struck by how many things in Western civilization have been influenced by the work of the…

Language: it’s child’s play! Part one   At university, for my degree in languages, I studied language acquisition and how this differs depending on whether it is your first or second language, and how old you are when you start learning. There are many theories about how we acquire language…

Aboriginal languages: Maori   Think of New Zealand and you’ll probably picture beautiful landscapes, outdoor adventures, the All Blacks rugby team and perhaps a nice glass of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. These are certainly images that come to mind for me. I also think of the Māori people, their language and…

Rosetta Translation officially started its Shanghai operations in 2008. That’s 7 long years already, and I thought it would be interesting to sit back and think what lessons can be learnt in terms of getting a small service business off the ground in the People’s Republic of China.   Get…

  Well, the short answer is: the Chinese language isn’t so difficult to learn, and here is why. Ease of learning depends on (linguistic) distance The difficulty of a new language that we want to learn is very relative, and is significantly related to how similar it is to our…