One of my earliest language-learning memories is of hot summer afternoons in the early years of high school, when even our unquenchably enthusiastic Welsh teacher would give up and just tell us stories. Of a land far far away, where children…
Blog Archives
O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau: Patagonia 150
Tagged with: Language, Patagonia, Translation, Welsh, Y Wladfa
Posted in history, international, language, translation
Posted in history, international, language, translation
tasting translation: Aed
Translators on holiday should not be left free to analyse a menu for too long. But sometimes they are pleasantly surprised. I was in Tallinn for 48 hours only with a fluent Estonian speaker. Delight soon replaced my initial disorientation and…
A language is a dialect with an army
Yesterday was St David’s Day, in self-imposed Finnish exile I’ll have to buy, not pick daffodils and sing the national anthem alone. It includes the immortal line: “O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau” (may the language endure for ever). Welsh…
Tagged with: Basque, dialect continuum, Herodotus, language continuum, language learning, Leonard Bloomfield, Max Weinreich, Translation, Welsh, Welsh Language Society, Yiddish
Posted in language, translation
Posted in language, translation
Visualising the translation: subtitling Pawlikowski’s Ida
Poland’s first Oscar for a ‘foreign language film’ went to Pawlikowski’s Ida this morning. Turning it from ‘foreign’ into English was not an easy process even for a film that the director, Paweł Pawlikowski, himself said in his acceptance speech…
Tagged with: English, Film, German, Ida, Oscars, Paweł Pawlikowski, Polish, subtitling, Translation
Posted in film, international, language, translation
Posted in film, international, language, translation
Happy Chinese New Year! Separating the Sheep from the Goats
The Chinese year of the yang starts today. You can see its horns in the character (taken from the Epoch Times, a committedly independent source of Chinese news) – but is it a sheep or a goat? The distinction is not…
Tagged with: Chinese New Year, Goat, Language, Sheep, Translation, Yang
Posted in international, language
Posted in international, language
The road to love: Valentine’s idioms
St Valentine was martyred in Rome about 1740 years ago today. What better way to honour him than with loving words in many languages? It’s been shown yet again, very entertainingly and by many translators, that idioms don’t translate easily,…
Tagged with: Crewe, Finnish, German, Glasgow, Haloo Helsinki, Idioms, John Clinch, Kouvola, Polish, Rome, trains, Translation, Valentine's Day, Wincher's Stance
Posted in international, language
Posted in international, language
sounds British? Save our Sounds!
If, like me, you still regret getting rid of your lovingly created mix cassette tapes, complete with breath of radio 1 DJ at the end of each song, even though you haven’t had anything to play them on for years,…
Tagged with: British, British Library, English, Language, Save our Sounds, sound, Translation, Welsh
Posted in language, translation
Posted in language, translation
The Newest New Words
(Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, 1872, with John Tenniel’s illustration) To be master or mistress of meanings, you need to be up to date with good sources. You might remember that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will deliver a new…
Tagged with: Alice in Wonderland, English, German, John Tenniel, Language, Lewis Carroll, neologisms, Through the Looking Glass, Translation, words
Posted in language
Posted in language
My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre
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…
Tagged with: Abdellatif Laâbi, Afghanistan, Andre Naffis-Sahely, Dari, French, Mimi Khalvati, Morocco, My Voice, Poetry, Poetry Translation Centre, Shakila Azizzada, Translation, Zuzanna Olszewska
Posted in books, international, language, literature, translation
Posted in books, international, language, literature, translation
100 years of pacifism 1914-2014
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…
Tagged with: Émile Arnaud, English, First World War, French, Language, Oxford English Dictionary, Pacifism, Translation, words
Posted in history, international, language, words
Posted in history, international, language, words
found in translation 