Posts Tagged ‘translation’

  • A real babel fish?

    Posted by on November 12, 2010

    This link from last week’s Language and words in the news caught my eye; it talks about the idea of a ‘universal translator’, and how difficult it is in practice to produce one (though science fiction has never had a problem coming up with them, for example the babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to [...]

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  • Use with caution

    Posted by on November 05, 2010

    It’s quite common these days to use foreign words or phrases to make your speech or writing sound a bit more interesting, cosmopolitan or even learned. It should be done with caution, though, as this article in the Guardian demonstrates. There are just so many opportunities for error and embarrassment; you might find you’ve completely [...]

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  • How quality translations can enrich Indian literature

    Posted by on August 13, 2010

    Haresh Pandya is a freelance journalist and teaches English in a college in Gujarat in India. _________ Of all nations, India can boast of having the richest and most diverse literature. This is not a recent phenomenon. It has been so since time immemorial – long before the written word came into existence. The tribe [...]

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  • Sayings: lost in translation?

    Posted by on May 19, 2010

    Over on Facebook we asked fans to translate – word for word – sayings from their language into English where the translation really doesn’t make sense in English. This turned out to be quite entertaining for a day at the office, and I’m sure there is a lot more fun to be had in this [...]

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  • Found in translation

    Posted by on April 12, 2010

    Have you noticed how, in the past 10 years, a whole bunch of completely unrelated words have become totally interchangeable, all thanks to predictive texting? Predictive texting is now a feature of pretty much every mobile phone on the market, and love it or hate it, we’re all exposed to it in one way or [...]

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  • King's English

    Posted by on October 26, 2009

    I’ve had an enlightening week reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I’ve avoided his books – and most of the resulting movies – all my reading/watching life, as …  well, I’m hellishly easy to scare (seriously, Ghostbusters scared me senseless). But his approach and his advice is straight-up and liberating rather [...]

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  • Buon appetito! Why are there no words in English to express my culinary triumph?

    Posted by on June 16, 2009

    It would be no exaggeration to say that I have a history of both triumph and tragedy in the kitchen. Delia Smith I am not. I don’t believe in recipes; I’m not going to be told what to do by all those egotistical, narcissistic celebrity chefs; I cook by my own rules. The result is [...]

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  • Translators and Dictionaries

    Posted by on June 15, 2009

    As a translator, I use dictionaries nearly every day. But contrary to what many people might believe, I don’t simply look up words in a bilingual dictionary and then write down the first definition offered. Translation is about much more than approximately equivalent words. That’s why actual people are needed to carry out translation, rather [...]

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