English

Linguistic false friends are words that appear similar in two different languages but have unrelated meanings. A common example is embarazada in Spanish, which looks like embarrassed but actually means pregnant. Most of the examples of German false friends in this week’s blog do not go quite as wildly astray…

This week’s blog post delves into the entertaining world of the grammagram (also gramogram), a group of letters which can be pronounced to form one or more words. Texting aficionados will be familiar with examples such as “CUL8R” (see you later) and “B4” (before), and the term “IOU” is so…

Following on from my last blog post looking at the challenges of converting the ingredients used in a foreign recipe into your target language, here I’ll be discussing some of the other issues that arise especially when it comes to availability and different cooking traditions. Ready made products A tricky…

Recently I have done several projects which involved translating recipes. On the face of it this seems like a simple task: take the list of ingredients and convert into the target language; then simply do the same for the recipe method. Recipes tend to be very well structured, written in…

My recent transatlantic travels and associated jet-lag lead me to thoughts of the traditional cures for insomnia. All I can say is, if you rely on counting sheep to fall asleep, I don’t recommend switching to the traditional English language of sheep counting highlighted in a blog post which I…

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…

For some travellers, a phrasebook is the first item in their suitcase when they prepare for a trip to a foreign country, while, for others, learning to say ‘excuse me’ and ‘thank you’ in the target language is deemed a waste of time. Undoubtedly, the view one adopts will depend…

Following the first post in this careers guide series giving examples of some of the inadequate applications we receive on a daily basis; we would like to give some constructive advice in our next two posts. Though admittedly we do laugh on receiving some emails, our aim is not to…

Brits abroad - two words that are enough to make any respectable English person cringe. However, aside from the lager lout behaviour and general debauchery that springs to mind with this phrase, are we really as bad as the stereotype suggests? In particular, are we a country of language novices?…

Can you ever imagine the English language no longer existing? It seems like an unlikely thought, but that is what has happened to an estimated 400 languages over the last 100 years, which roughly equates to one tongue dying out every three months. In addition to this, the BBC reports…