Today Scotland votes on independence. As a Welsh neighbour who lived in Scotland for half a decade, I’d love to be voting, but it’s not for me to decide. It’s still a good day to read some Scottish Gaelic poetry, though.…
Today Scotland votes on independence. As a Welsh neighbour who lived in Scotland for half a decade, I’d love to be voting, but it’s not for me to decide. It’s still a good day to read some Scottish Gaelic poetry, though.…
In just a few weeks time, it will be 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s a quarter of a century… makes a girl think. If you, too, wear glasses from reading too much small print, you will…
When I was a teenager in Cardiff, the family next door spoke Welsh, but most people around spoke English. When I went to babysit, the boys were in shock: how could this other person speak their home language too? They…
Tove Jansson was born 100 years ago today. If you live in Finland, you won’t have missed the anniversary Moomin mugs (with donations to UNICEF), the large and splendid retrospective of her work at the Ateneum national art gallery, or the…
Reading stories in translation opens up the world to places you could never go to. For some people however, the place they can never go to is back home. More and more children are migrating into the US from Latin…
Tired of bad translations? Put the poetry back into translation yourself! At the Modern Poetry in Translation website, you can read submit your own English translation of a poem, based on a literal translation and sound recording in the original…
Here’s another nail in the coffin of Robert Frost’s truism that poetry is what gets lost in translation. The fabulous Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) is celebrating its first decade with My Voice, an anthology of poems translated from 23 languages…
Published in English this month, Slaves of Moscow tells the story of twelve Kazakhstani women enslaved in a Moscow grocery store. The Kazakhstani couple who owned the shop forced them to work 20 hours a day. Some even gave birth…
100 years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot in Sarajevo, triggering what H.G. Wells called the “war that will end war”; it wasn’t long before the irony of that phrase was felt. The Oxford English Dictionary has…