Actually - another of my favorite false friends. In normal English it means "in fact", and the adjective "actual" means "real". But - just like "eventually" - it means something different in EuroSpeak. Most western European languages have a look-alike word - actuel,...
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False friends – eventually
I'm fascinated by false friends between languages - those words or expressions which look like they are the same in two languages but turn out to mean something quite different. Like Spanish "embarazada" and "constipado", which actually mean "pregnant" and "with a...
Spelling: -ize or -ise?
Is it -ize or -ise in English? Most translators and editors work on the basis that the -ise suffix is British and -ize is American. So we have realise/realize, advertise/advertize, analyse/analyze, as well as the derived forms realisation/realization and so on. As...
Quality in Translation Part 2 – the translator’s view
How to ensure quality in translation part 2: Had the translator been given direct access to the final user, he would have explained how the quickest and most efficient way to implement changes is for them to do it (for the client to re-translate the document directly...
El papel de la traducción en la usabilidad web
Llamamos usabilidad web al hecho de que una web se lo ponga fácil a sus visitantes para navegar, encontrando la información que buscan sin impedimentos. Por tanto, si mejoramos la usabilidad mejoramos la experiencia del usuario y así conseguiremos que nuestra página...
Quality in Translation Part 1– the translator’s view
How to ensure quality in translation: It is always good to receive feedback on a translation, even if it is not always positive. It is unfortunate how often clients do not like a translation, as it creates a great deal of frustration for both the client and the...
What makes a language service provider outstanding?
The key differentiator between language service providers (LSPs) is the value they add to the translation process. At one end of the scale, you have the classic ‘broker’, which outsources projects to freelancers at exploitative prices, and then forwards the finished...
Eskimos, snow, blah, blah, blah
The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter is rather a superficial, self-consciously zeitgeist-y book, the literary equivalent of one of the less good HBC series. He is on the right track about one thing though. One chapter starts: 'Turns out there are only four...
Cinderella
The central motif of Cinderella is a story of astonishing antiquity: the image of the missing slipper stretches back as far as Ancient Greece, but the internet comes up with a number of possible origins. The modern version of Cinderella has its roots in Lo cunto de li...
Basque words in English
Basque is a fascinating language. Despite speculations that it may, somehow, be related to language groups from Eastern Europe, it is essentially that rarest of linguistic phenomena, a language that emerged independently of its neighbours, and preserved its...