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  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…

Previously in this blog I wrote about the Oscars Best Foreign Language Film and, in particular, the somewhat arcane nomination process for this award. Here I thought I would look more closely at the three main approaches taken by the linguists who make these films accessible to foreign audiences: subtitling,…

  Leaving all politics aside, this week’s blog attempts a little survey of some of the more interesting linguistic quirks of the current President of the United States of America. Neologisms and other unusual choices Trump’s now infamous “Covfefe”, which caused a near internet meltdown for 24 hours, may have…

On the 1st of July the 104th edition of the Tour de France got underway and British cycling fans are already refreshing their knowledge of French from the comfort of their sofas. This year the riders will cover approximately 3500 km during the race, an average of 167 km per…

Wimbledon fortnight sees Britain in the annual grip of an all-consuming tennis obsession. So this week’s blog takes a look at some of the quirkiest tennis terms and explores their etymological origins: Deuce The first word on our list of tennis terms is borrowed from the game of real tennis and…

  Translation always involves something of a tussle between remaining loyal to the original text and creating something new, which reads as if it was originally written in the target language. Never more so than for literary translation where the end product must be a work of the greatest creativity.…