Being read to isn’t only for children. If you, like me, work closely with complicated texts all day, however much you love reading, it can feel like an effort on workday evenings. But great world literature is just within earshot.…
Being read to isn’t only for children. If you, like me, work closely with complicated texts all day, however much you love reading, it can feel like an effort on workday evenings. But great world literature is just within earshot.…
Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for her “Polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Born in Ukraine to a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father, she worked as…
Happy International Translation Day! This year’s theme is The changing face of translation and interpreting, celebrating the people “who make it possible for the world to be a global village”. Right now, the need is very concrete: translating and interpreting for…
Do geese see God? (English) Knit again and you’ll get a beer (Neulo taas niin saat oluen, Finnish) It was raining bread in the garden (Aias sadas saia, Estonian) Maybe tomorrow that lady will give a cake to the hedgehogs…
The German Book Prize short list is out today! Three women, three Swiss writers and four with other books published in English in the last three years have made the cut. In my very subjective order of preference, they are:…
Yes, I did go to see Antigone at the Edinburgh Festival because Juliette Binoche was in the title role (I loved her work with Kieslowski, though unfortunately this time, images from Chocolat kept surfacing in my mind). And I made a discovery: Anne Carson’s new…
At the end of women in translation month, where are all the women in the translator’s toolbox? Glossarissimo collates glossaries and resources on EVERYTHING from watermark terminology to a dictionary of Victorian slang. It really is useful and comprehensive. When you’re…
The Edinburgh festivals are full of wonderful translation events, but this one may have sold out faster than most. Trafika Europe is celebrating their first anniversary with two poets: a Saami man and an Occitan woman. Trafika is a gorgeous online…
“Why write? It is so much easier to say when I started to write. I fell in love with words, and wordsmiths such as Dylan Thomas… in the ‘fifties, when I was growing up, the Welsh language was still seen…