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  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.…

              I’ll confess up front that I’ve always been something of a sceptic when it comes to claims that speech recognition is about to become the next big thing. During my time as an academic phonetician I did a placement with a speech technology…

Rosetta’s London office is located on Whitechapel High Street near Aldgate, very much in the heart of cockney London. The traditional definition of a cockney is someone who was born within the sound of Bow bells, which ring out from the church of Saint Mary le Bow in Cheapside just…