Blog

An art gallery might seem an unlikely place to find issues of language and translation being addressed. But two of the pieces in the installations currently showing at The Tanks at Tate Modern do exactly that. The Tanks gallery takes advantage of the huge circular spaces in the foundations of…

“The babel fish is a small, leech-like, yellow fish, and by putting this into one's ear one can instantly understand anything said in any language” Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Techno-geeks and travellers are eagerly anticipating Google’s latest product launch this autumn – the Pixel Buds are “smart…

  Cinema audiences are familiar with watching subtitled films, and the recent wave of Scandinavian crime dramas have brought subtitled television shows into the mainstream. Opera audiences have surtitles to help them follow the action, either because the production is in a foreign language or, at English National Opera for…

  Scandinavian crime dramas hit the big time over recent years with series such as The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen making subtitled TV dramas a mainstream phenomenon. Another success story in the “Nordic noir” genre has taken a very different approach to reaching audiences with different languages. The Welsh…

  This summer’s terrorist attack in Barcelona brought translators into the news for the most tragic of reasons. The location of the attack in the Las Ramblas district, one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations, meant that those affected were from all over the world and spoke a wide…

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…