
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
(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…