Languages as they is spoke, by Catherine Tate

A little light relief for anyone working or sitting exams on this Spring Bank Holiday. And for long-suffering language teachers! and With thanks to Jill Sommer – I found these links on her Translation Musings blog, where I also learned that today’s a public holiday in the US too: Memorial Day. By Marian Dougan

Begging the question

An e-flyer arrived in my inbox last Thursday from the Italian Tourism Summit organisers. It read: La tripla crisi del turismo italiano: come uscirne, soluzioni e formule 4 June 2009 – Ascoli Piceno Consulta il programma e… …Partecipa! Did this tell me what the triple crisis afflicting Italian tourism is? No, it did not. So …

Translators’ time warp – again

Once again my work days are out of kilter with the rest of the country – it’s a bank holiday here in the UK but business as usual for my clients in Italy. Today, however, my kids are out of synch too – like many of their schoolmates they’ve got Scottish Qualifications Authority exams. Why …

Faster typing and fewer typos

A productivity tip on typing expansion software “From the Desk of David Pogue” at the New York Times. Typing expansion applications work like Microsoft Office’s “AutoCorrect” feature but are system-wide and include a web-address shortening function: “Just copy some huge address, for example, and then type ‘/bitly’ into any program; TextExpander pastes in a tiny …

Art sublime

The Blessed Angelico: The Dawn of the Renaissance – the largest exhibition entirely dedicated to Beato Angelico since 1955 – is at Rome’s Capitoline Museums until 5 July 2009. If you’re planning a visit to Rome this summer, this is a unique opportunity to see these beautiful paintings in one place. And if not, you can …

Ideas worth translating (2): a web that speaks your language

More from the New York Times on Web translation projects (this time from Leslie Berlin, writing in the Business pages). Projects featured include Lingua, the Global Voices translation project; Google in your language; Meedan.net and TED. As a professional translator, I have mixed feelings about such projects. Not that I fear for my job: Machine …

Art, seaside style

I wrote recently about the Coastal Treasures project highlighting the architectural gems of Bexhill-on-Sea, St. Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings. And now there’s another reason to consider the South Coast of England for the summer hols: the new Towner Gallery (web site pending) in Eastbourne, by Rick Mather Architects. The artists on show (on a rotating basis) …

Holey moly!

Dutch creative communications company Spranq has developed an ecofont that they say saves money and helps the environment by using less ink than other fonts. You can download the font free here. A professional version is also available for large organisations (Spranq will essentially punch holes in your corporate typeface to produce an environmentally-friendlier version). For people …

Ideas worth translating

TED: Ideas worth spreading is a web site featuring “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. To give you a flavour of the quality of the talks, you can rank them on the home page as: jaw-dropping, persuasive, courageous, ingenious, fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, funny or informative. The “Wow!” factor indeed. TED (which stands …

Worth two thousand words…

If the world were a village of 100 people, 9 would be English-speakers and 14 would be unable to read this post, no matter what their language. Toby Ng Kwong To’s “If the world were a village of 100 people” project uses information graphics to re-tell a statistical story in a creative, simple and accessible …