Blog Archives

Lunatics, lovers and poets in translation

In honour of Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ 400th anniversaries, twelve authors have written a new story inspired by their work – six each in English and Spanish – with an introduction by Salman Rushdie. As Rushdie points out, since England was still

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Posted in books, literature, short stories, translation

Do Geese See God?

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

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Posted in language, translation, words

Workers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose in translation

Billy Bragg had a 24-hour job at a moment’s notice. He was not going to get paid for his overtime. But he was on a mission. And he made the deadline. Hear him tell the story and sing his translation.

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Posted in international, 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

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Posted in film, international, language, translation

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,

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Posted in language, translation

Rilke’s Advent

No-one does Advent better than the Germans. The Leo German dictionary usually has an excellent online advent calendar (in German, with poems and pictures for every day). So who better, I thought, to start Advent, than the German poet Rainer

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Posted in 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

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Posted in language

keeping the language alive: polari, manx, cornish

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

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Posted in international, translation, words

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

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Posted in history, international, language, words

moral language?

If you speak a language well enough to get along, but not really well, it’s an effort. You need time to think and process and a lot of energy can go into making sure you get the grammar right. As

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Posted in international, language, translation
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