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Typos send a chill down the spine of any translator or proofreader. Catching an unintended slip-up at the last moment before submitting a project always combines an element of relief with a sense of dismay at nearly allowing an embarrassing mistake to slip through to publication. I am still slightly…

In a recent blog about the limitations of ChatGPT, this blog touched on the often mundane nature of the chatbot’s output. Having recently been immersed in Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, I suspect good writing is characterised by surprises…

This week’s blog will boost the spirits of any translator feeling demoralised at the growth of machine translation by reminding us that a bit of human intervention goes a long way when it comes to quality. Machine translation struggles with passages of text that are amenable to literal translation but…

Commercial translators regularly work with specific constraints imposed by the client, but few will have faced the kind of challenge taken on by John Deathridge in creating a new translation of Rhinegold, commissioned by English National Opera. Rhythmic adjustments to fit the music, including extra syllables or slurring to accommodate…

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT, and the brief snippets I glimpsed initially gave me the heebie-jeebies. Game-changing, human-erasing, or a fun gimmick with a limited range of applications? The AI language model seemed capable of producing plausible text in a way that might well affect those of us who spend…

Attitudes to corporate language policies might best be summed up by the quote attributed to John Lydgate, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the…

Contemporary concerns over climate change and the threat of extreme weather conditions may not be entirely new. Researchers attempting to decipher the runic inscriptions on the Rök stone from Scandinavia now believe it may refer to fear of an impending climate crisis. They suggest that the 9th century stone alludes…

Like most kids, my three offspring regard parental advice with a hefty dose of suspicion, including when it comes to book recommendations. So, one of my proudest parenting successes was listening to the gales of laughter from my youngest child’s bedroom after I had cajoled him into reading my ancient…

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…

This blog post on the language of the marathon is shamelessly influenced by your blogger’s obsession with running! And this year I will be attempting to run both, a total of 52.4 miles with just six days in between. Looking for inspiration I delved a little into the etymology and…