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Most of the world’s alphabets are at least a thousand years old and we often take them for granted. The first alphabet is thought to be the Proto-Sinaitic script, which is the ancestor of most modern alphabets including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. An article published in 2016 in…

Reports about literacy levels among UK prisoners make for stark reading. The most recent Ministry of Justice figures show that 57% of adult prisoners had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old (prior to any education or training in prison). A quarter of young offenders in the UK have…

The trouble with being a linguist is that your familiarity with the source language can sometimes distract you from conventions in the target language. Or at least that’s my excuse when faced with translating place names. I instinctively want to resist removing the umlaut on Zürich to create a more…

Just occasionally the linguistic culture wars offer us a glimpse of unexpected unity. Such was the case in response to news that Penguin Books would be updating Roald Dahl’s children’s books to remove or rewrite “offensive” passages to make them more suitable for the modern reader. The updates were first…

In his book The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver talks about the proliferation of information following the invention and history of the printing press and the potential for misinformation and errors. One example he picks out is a 1631 edition of the Bible containing the unfortunate typo “Thou shalt…

The previous blog took us on a tour of some rather shameful translations that seem to have either been created by a human or, at the very least, slipped past whoever was responsible for the quality-control process in post-editing a machine translation. To cheer ourselves up, this week’s blog looks…

“To err is human, to forgive divine” and that is the spirit we will adopt for this week’s blog post, which delves into some decidedly second-rate translations. We all have bad days, but some of the examples of human translation errors here crop up sufficiently often or are so clunky,…

  As the data collected in the 2021 census is gradually processed and released by the Office for National Statistics, interesting patterns are emerging about the changing linguistic landscape in the UK. Covid caused the Scottish census to be delayed by a year, so the findings reported here focus exclusively…

I’ve recently been immersed in Kate Fox’s book Watching the English, a popular anthropological tour of English idiosyncrasies. Much of her assessment of the English national character is rooted in our linguistic habits; indeed, a good half of the book is dedicated to what she calls “conversation codes”. It makes…

In addition to needing a translation service to follow the suppertime conversation between our teenagers, pity my teacher husband who faces similar linguistic challenges at work. He has long since realised that attempting to adopt the latest youth argot is a sure-fire way to attract ridicule from your students. But…