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Rather belatedly on September 1st I stumbled upon an article informing me that August had been Women in Translation Month. In a spirit of “better late than never”, this blog post looks back at some of the highlights from the social media and newspaper articles written to celebrate the literary…

  Unless you have been living under a rock for the past seven years, it will not come as a shock that the fantasy world of Game of Thrones, created by the genius of George R. R. Martin and brought to life – or rather, TV – by David Benioff…

  Each year as we drive into Wales to visit my parents I marvel at how the landscape genuinely transforms as soon as you cross the border. The moment you leave England the first lumps and bumps rise up in the land. Depending on your route into Wales these first…

  Scanlation refers to the process where foreign language comics are scanned, translated and then edited to make them available to a wider audience beyond their country of origin. It is most commonly associated with the production of English language versions of Japanese “manga” comics, particularly in the USA. The…

A recent blog post looking at the differing international conventions for number formatting prompted me to revisit the topic of different cultures and their approach to number concepts. While it might be inconvenient for the translator to tackle the reformatting required to turn commas into decimal points and full stops…

  What could be more British than an afternoon cup of tea and a scone with jam and cream? Visitors to Britain need to be aware that this innocent baked item is the source of all sorts of contentious debate: jam or cream first, double cream or clotted, is it…

Any translator working from French or German to English or vice versa will surely have cursed softly under their breath at the different number conventions used in these languages for writing out numbers. Where US and British English use a full stop/period to do the job of marking the decimal…

  My recent blog about John Le Carré’s paean to the German language prompted me to revisit the rather contrasting essay by American writer Mark Twain in which he humorously details his almighty tussle with German. His full essay is well worth reading, particularly for students of German, but many…

  This week’s blog post is a shameless exhortation to go and read something else! Specifically a beautiful piece by John le Carré (real name David Cornwell) which was originally delivered as part of this year’s award ceremony for German teachers held at the German embassy in London. The speech…

    On a friend’s recommendation I recently read The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas. This delightful and hilarious book recounts how a dissatisfied journalist walks away from his job, his wife and his home in Helsinki to care for a…