Category: News

This week’s blog may well be overtaken by events as it looks at a translation-related story which has been rumbling in the news for some time and a final decision is still pending. The case in question involves Afghan interpreters who served alongside the British army during their engagement in…

It is over a year now since the Northern Ireland power-sharing agreement collapsed in January 2017 with Sinn Fein’s withdrawal from cooperation with the DUP. The original source of the disagreement was the alleged involvement of DUP leader Arlene Foster in the ‘cash for ash scandal’, the botched renewable heat…

I sometimes wonder if the Winter Olympics are the sporting event watched by the greatest number of people with absolutely no knowledge of the sports involved. Or maybe this is a peculiarly British perspective because our lack of snow and ice hampers any skiing, skating or snowboarding aspirations. At any…

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…

The death of Dick Bruna, the creator of Miffy, in February this year was widely reported. Obituaries dedicated to the Dutch illustrator and author appeared all around the globe, underlining the truly international appeal of his most beloved creation. Less widely reported was the death of the award-winning and extraordinary…

  Chinese school students regularly top the world rankings for their performance in mathematics. So perhaps it is not surprising that the publishing company Harper Collins is looking to Chinese maths textbooks for inspiration. In a deal with the Shanghai Century Publishing Group, the education division at Harper Collins have…

  “For want of a comma, we have this case.” David Barron, Boston federal appeals judge   Grammarians, punctuation pedants, eagle-eyed copy editors and other language enthusiasts took enormous delight in the recent US court ruling, in which a group of dairy delivery drivers were awarded millions of dollars owed…

  Can prejudice against a dialect potentially influence decisions made in the criminal justice system? That is the question at the heart of a fascinating paper by John Rickford and Sharese King published in Language: A Journal of the American Linguistic Society. The paper investigates whether a jury’s attitude towards…

Excitement is mounting in the film industry at the prospect of the annual Oscars ceremony on February 26th and there is one award category in particular which will be of interest to those working in translation: the Best Foreign Film award. To be eligible for the award each film must…

We have written previously about Facebook and their research and development in the areas of AI and ANN (artificial neural networks) and it appears now that Google Translate is following closely in Facebook’s ANN footsteps. Ten years since the launch of Google Translate and the search engine giant has announced…