Blog

Everyone makes mistakes. Even translators. I will admit there is a certain pleasure in seeing how a translation error can take on a life of its own, sometimes even becoming the preferred phrasing or vocabulary choice. The use of shared glossaries can exacerbate this problem – the client will emphasise…

We are all familiar with references to cybersecurity and different forms of encryption to ensure digital information can be exchanged without being intercepted by a third party. But the desire for secure methods of communication has its roots many centuries before the first computer was even dreamed of. Letterlocking is…

These days I rarely manage to stay awake long enough to watch BBC’s Match of the Day live on a Saturday night. Instead, we tend to record it, and this has the bonus that you can fast-forward if the post-match interviews and analysis gets a bit dull. But this season,…

I recently noticed journalist Oliver Burkeman questioning the subtitling of the Netflix Series “Call my Agent”, (original French title Dix pour cent; "ten percent"). Burkeman asked “Is it a much-commented-on thing already that Call My Agent seems to switch subtitle translators halfway through season three? That's where we are, and…

As a dabbler in just two languages (German and English) I have always admired those who master many. Despite my best efforts at school and university my French, Spanish and Welsh skills never got much beyond very basic comprehension, so I have an appreciation for what it takes to become…

Recently I have done several assessments of machine translation output to evaluate the overall quality of the MT engines before they are used. These evaluations can also help a translation agency calculate the likely effort required for post editing the machine translated text by allocating a score to each segment…

Translating idioms is a tricky business at the best of times. But even greater caution is needed when a saying is almost identical in the source and target language. I was on my second proofread through an English translation before I realised that I had referred to a cat having…

I had been intending to write a blog post about language and epitaphs for a while, having always been entertained by Spike Milligan’s request to have “I told you I was ill” on his gravestone. Following his death in 2002, he was buried at St Thomas’s Church in Winchelsea, however…

An interesting linguistic debate has been raging over the drafting of the UK government’s “Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances” (MOMA) bill, which is being rushed through parliament because attorney general Suella Braverman is currently pregnant and her party want the new maternity provisions in place before she gives birth (in…

Mishearings are a common source of amusement to anyone with young children. We have friends who still refer to “school insect days” rather than INSET (in-service training) days, and who eagerly go “trickle treating” rather than trick-or-treating. This kind of idiosyncratic substitution is referred to as an “eggcorn”, which is…