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
Tag archives: Language
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 …
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 …
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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 …
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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New York fashion treat
A special Monday treat for me is Bill Cunningham’s On the Street fashion feature for the New York Times . Anorak-clad Bill is an unlikely-looking fashion hero but his feature is a visual and aural delight – from his Bostonian voice to the pleasure he takes in the fashion, the people, and New York itself. …
Getting the name right
Governments around the world are doing everything they can to rename swine flu. They will not succeed and will end up misinforming the public. Gerry McGovern’s latest “New Thinking” newsletter is about Governments’ attempts to rename swine flu. He focuses on the disconnect between government and international agencies’ concerns: national pride, religious sensibilities, business interests; …