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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…

Over the years I have translated a number of cookery books and back in 2017 I wrote about some of the challenges involved in this area. My most recent immersion in the world of food and recipe translation prompted me to reflect again on how subject-area expertise is crucial for…

The British Council has just published its annual Language Trends report, which surveys language teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools in England. Previous reports had already documented the general decline in language learning, with a 19% reduction in entries for GCSE languages over the past five years. The…

Imagine being there to witness the birth of a word. Could anything be more thrilling for a linguist than seeing neologism in action by tracing the origin of a word back to a single moment. According to an article in the Guardian, lexicographer Bernadette Paton experienced exactly this. Paton tracked…

At school I remember rather tedious lessons learning the distinction between a metaphor and a simile. How much more fun it would have been to devote some time to exploring the wonderful world of mixed up metaphors. So I was delighted to stumble across an article by Oxford Dictionaries on…

When it comes to translations, turning to an external partner isn’t always a company’s first move. For businesses with international offices, multilingual staff and overseas distributors, it often feels like the logical thing to keep the work in house and leverage the existing resources available to get the job done…

All too often recently I have withdrawn from following current affairs in a bid to protect my sanity. But when I dared poke my head out to see the latest excitement that Brexit Britain and the Tory leadership campaign has to offer, I noticed that language in the media has…

If you own or manage a UK-based business with an English-only website, you may be missing out on critical growth opportunities by opting not to offer overseas visitors an online experience in their native language. Many UK companies assume that being based in an English-speaking country gives them an in-built…

Were you one of those kids who effortlessly scored 10/10 in spelling tests at school? Me too! My husband, on the other hand, has an uncanny ability to remember phone numbers, vehicle licence plates and passport numbers, but still struggles with getting the double letters correct in “carrots” and “broccoli”…