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In the grand tradition of “things aren’t what they used to be”, discussions of globalisation and an increasingly mobile and interconnected world regularly bemoan the detrimental impact on linguistic diversity. The negative ramifications range from the annihilation of entire languages, allegedly “disappearing faster than species” to the loss of individual…

I have a track record with new technology: phase one involves scepticism and refusal to engage, phase two is full-blown addiction and obsession (a third phase of disengagement often follows during which I wonder what all the fuss was about). Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or Strava, the pattern has been…

The allure of the smartphone makes it difficult to focus on reading an old-fashioned book. Even with notifications turned off, the tantalising prospect of the latest Twitter updates or WhatsApp messages easily win out over the printed word. In a bid to spend more time reading actual books rather than…

Typos send a chill down the spine of any translator or proofreader. Catching an unintended slip-up at the last moment before submitting a project always combines an element of relief with a sense of dismay at nearly allowing an embarrassing mistake to slip through to publication. I am still slightly…

In a recent blog about the limitations of ChatGPT, this blog touched on the often mundane nature of the chatbot’s output. Having recently been immersed in Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, I suspect good writing is characterised by surprises…

This week’s blog will boost the spirits of any translator feeling demoralised at the growth of machine translation by reminding us that a bit of human intervention goes a long way when it comes to quality. Machine translation struggles with passages of text that are amenable to literal translation but…

Commercial translators regularly work with specific constraints imposed by the client, but few will have faced the kind of challenge taken on by John Deathridge in creating a new translation of Rhinegold, commissioned by English National Opera. Rhythmic adjustments to fit the music, including extra syllables or slurring to accommodate…

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT, and the brief snippets I glimpsed initially gave me the heebie-jeebies. Game-changing, human-erasing, or a fun gimmick with a limited range of applications? The AI language model seemed capable of producing plausible text in a way that might well affect those of us who spend…

Attitudes to corporate language policies might best be summed up by the quote attributed to John Lydgate, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the…

Contemporary concerns over climate change and the threat of extreme weather conditions may not be entirely new. Researchers attempting to decipher the runic inscriptions on the Rök stone from Scandinavia now believe it may refer to fear of an impending climate crisis. They suggest that the 9th century stone alludes…