language

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…

Imagine being there to witness the birth of a word. Could anything be more thrilling for a linguist than seeing neologism in action by tracing the origin of a word back to a single moment. According to an article in the Guardian, lexicographer Bernadette Paton experienced exactly this. Paton tracked…

At school I remember rather tedious lessons learning the distinction between a metaphor and a simile. How much more fun it would have been to devote some time to exploring the wonderful world of mixed up metaphors. So I was delighted to stumble across an article by Oxford Dictionaries on…

Were you one of those kids who effortlessly scored 10/10 in spelling tests at school? Me too! My husband, on the other hand, has an uncanny ability to remember phone numbers, vehicle licence plates and passport numbers, but still struggles with getting the double letters correct in “carrots” and “broccoli”…

Liberal linguists love to gang up on pedants who obsess about split infinitives and the death of the subjunctive. Language changes after all, and a language that fails to evolve is dead. I still remember my fury as an 8 year old being hauled up in front of the class…

“Language poisoning” is a term used to describe a phenomenon I’m sure all translators will have experienced, namely the insidious influence the source language can have on your skills as a writer in the target language. Examples of foreign language poisoning are rife in poor-quality translations. In fact, if you…

“So, are you fluent in X?” Translators have surely all been asked that question by their non-translator friends. Personally I’ve often wriggled around these queries in a way that disappoints the questioner. Because the truth is that fluency means any number of things. And fluency in the source language isn’t…

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…

Most of us working in the translation industry will have long since forgotten the journey to acquiring a second (or third, or more) language. Quite honestly, learning a new language can be painfully dull. Before you become reasonably proficient, you can’t say anything particularly interesting because you lack the vocabulary…

It is probably safe to say that not many people employed in the translation industry regard Brexit as an ingenious strategy destined to be the UK’s ideal path to prosperity. At times it’s hard to see much cause for hope or humour amid the political wrangling and uncertainty. Let me…