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 …
Category archives: Translation
Oh, you saucy devil. Translators’ false friends
In my recent (9 May) post on “EU funding to delightful effect”, I used a word that – viewed from an Italian-to-English perspective – can trip up unwary translators. The word is “evocative”. Pretty harmless, you might think. One of the Italian words for “evocative” is “suggestivo”. A word that Italian-to-English translators working on auto-pilot …
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Translators’ time-warp
I work from Glasgow, mainly for Italian clients. My computer’s set to Italian time, because that’s where the deadlines are. My watch is set 5 minutes fast, for punctuality’s sake (doesn’t always work…). I have a radio alarm set 15 minutes fast. It comes on at 6.45am. My alarm clock (again set 5 mins fast) …
Simple words but in an intelligent way
A good day to start a new blog about words and language. Carol Ann Duffy, born into a “left-wing, Catholic, working class” family in Glasgow’s Gorbals neighbourhood, has just been made Poet Laureate. Amazingly, the first woman ever to hold the position here in Britain. It’s heartening to read, courtesy of her BBC profile, that …