Tonight, the children of Spain and many other countries around the world will hardly sleep a wink. They’ll be too anxious and giddy, knowing that in the morning a pile of gifts will be awaiting them. Where do these gifts come from? In Spanish, the answer is easy: Los...
It seemed like it would never arrive but 2017 is nearly here and we can finally kiss 2016 goodbye! For those of you who are thinking about your New Year’s resolution, we’d like to make a suggestion: learn a new language! Learning a new language can benefit you in ways...
On 21 December the Northern Hemisphere will celebrate the winter solstice, the longest night of the year (or shortest day of the year, depending on how you look at it). The term derives from the Latin word solstitium, which literally means “point at which the sun...
With the new year just around the corner it will soon be time to change our calendars. Before doing just that, though, let’s take a quick look at which lexeme the Oxford dictionary has deemed word of the year: Post-truth: relating to or denoting circumstances in which...
It’s Clásico time again, when the two biggest football club teams in the world, F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid C.F., come face to face in their twice yearly encounter for supremacy in La Liga. An estimated half a billion people around the globe will watch the game and...
Today, families across the United States gather around the dinner table to celebrate Thanksgiving. The smell of roast turkey and pumpkin pie fill the air, declarations of gratitude ring out, laughter and time spent with loved ones warm the heart. Come Friday, however,...
The Award Goes to… Translation isn’t a topic that often makes headline news, and when it does it’s generally not what we would consider good news, but rather stories of “Oops!” and “I can’t believe nobody caught that!” (See the story about the rather unfortunate...
By the time this post is published, the citizens of the United States will have already gone to the polls and placed their vote for the 45th president. As I write (just five days before the vote), a great deal of people are looking forward to the elections because it...
To summarise the current standards: Decimal separator: - English (as well as most Asian languages) uses a decimal dot, and a comma to separate thousands - All other European languages use a decimal comma, (with a couple of exceptions such as Mexican...
It is quite telling that if you do a Google search for movie title translations, what comes up most often are results that talk about how bad the translations are. Even if you search for “good movie title translations” (try it) you get things like: 51 Hilariously Bad...