It’s spring: time to get out on your bike, if you’re a fair weather cyclist, or, take the winter tyres off and carry on riding, if you’re a Finnish cyclist like me. But what has that got to do with…
It’s spring: time to get out on your bike, if you’re a fair weather cyclist, or, take the winter tyres off and carry on riding, if you’re a Finnish cyclist like me. But what has that got to do with…
Happy April Fool’s Day! If you’re English, you’ve only got till noon to play your tricks or you’re the fool. If you’re over the channel, your day may involve April Fish, usually made of paper and attached to someone’s back…
Just three percent of books published in the US are in translation, and less than one percent are literary fiction and poetry. The University of Rochester is trying to change that, with its three per cent website and Best Translated…
The European Poet of Freedom Festival starts in Gdańsk today. The poet’s award is 100,000 złoty (about 24,000 euros), and their translator into Polish wins a tenth of that. Seven nominees, from Kazakhstan to Estonia, face some very sharp judges…
I started teaching English while living in Poznań in 1999. I only knew two other native speakers there at the time, Peter and Peter, who were both from the East Coast of the US. And sometimes, we simply didn’t understand…
Valentine’s Day both loses and gains something in translation. For the Japanese, today is the day when the women give chocolate (and only chocolate) to the men. This is because one chocolate company made a translation mistake, switching the genders, when…
If you google “translators are like”, you get: translators are like ninjas translators are like google bad translators are like big hairy spiders. While this has a lot going for it (we’re saboteurs, expert data crunchers – or terribly self-referential? –…
It’s the 22nd International Translation Day today. The Congolese member of the Federation of Interpreters and Translators chose the theme “Beyond Linguistic Barriers – A United World,” because the work of TTIs (translators, terminologists and interpreters) breaks down global barriers in…
Known as the “pope of literature” to Germans, and self-styled as “Germany’s literary hangman”, Marcel Reich-Ranicki was not an easy critic. He unapologetically followed Fontane’s maxim that “Schlecht ist schlecht und muß gesagt warden” (Erst leben, dann spielen. Über polnische Literatur. Wallstein 2002, p.183). His life was not easy,…