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Earlier this year, women’s rights activist Maria Beatrice Giovanardi found herself looking for synonyms for the word “woman” using various online search engines. She was unimpressed with the results and reports on her experience in an article for the online publishing platform Medium. Describing the dictionary outputs as “patronising, misogynistic,…

With Halloween just around the corner, this week’s blog is inspired by a tweet from the wonderful @tweetolectology. This language and geography focused Twitter account is the brainchild of an ESRC funded collaboration between the universities of Cambridge and Lancaster investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media. The…

The body achieves what the mind believes*. Or so the saying goes. It is widely accepted that the mind has a far greater role to play in endurance sports than, for example, when running the 100 metres. October will see another attempt by Eliud Kipchoge to run a marathon in…

Wednesday October 16th marked the second International Pronouns Day. Organisers hope to make “respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace”. Harnessing language to bring about cultural change is nothing new, nor are the impassioned opinions voiced as a consequence. Pronouns are little words that pack a big punch. If…

A trip abroad offers ripe pickings for the travelling translator. On our recent trip to Spain my kids developed a real knack for tracking down comedy English text. Amateur translations in hotel rooms are always worth a chuckle: “Don’t let the balcony open. We are not responsibles if there is…

In this week’s blog post I take a look at one of the most useful translation tools in the English language – Roget’s Thesaurus. Often the skill of the translator lies not in their comprehension of the original language but in the way they recreate the text in the target…

Let me introduce Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation. Who knew we translators even had one? Not me, that’s for sure. I first stumbled upon Jerome in a casual mention by David Bellos in his book “Is that a fish in your ear? The amazing adventure of translation”. Jerome…

It’s been a while since this blog delved into the wonderful world of new entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Updates to the dictionary are made four times a year, with selected highlights summarised at the OED website by one of the editors. It’s worth adding to your diary because…

Only a matter of weeks ago, this blog sung the praises of the linguistic pedant. We extolled the virtues of the stickler for grammatical detail and celebrated punctuation purists. Then along comes Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose many achievements now include being precisely the wrong kind of pedant. Following his appointment as…

A while ago a friend gifted me a little box set of “Untranslatable words”. Inside is a set of cards, each with a word in a foreign language describing a concept for which there is no direct equivalent in English. Even non-linguists seem to enjoy the idea that another language…