Catalogues, brochures, billboards, inserts Online marketing, social networking, eCommerce sites Point-of-sale text, in-store displays, merchandising, signage User manuals, packages, after-sale materials Human resources documentation (training materials etc) The...
Most people are probably familiar with the basics of tone languages, and Mandarin Chinese is the usual example. Briefly, such languages use pitch to contrast vowels (including diphthongs and triphthongs), in the same way that all languages use contrasting phonemes to...
Today, the first of two posts on translation and music... In the early 20th century, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (= beautiful mountain) devised a famous composition system based on giving equal weight to each of the twelve notes of the modern European...
The Latin hodie, today, was an amalgamation of hoc (this) and die (day). The Italian oggi, the Spanish hoy, the Catalan avui and the Portuguese hoje are all direct descendants of hodie, via Vulgar Latin. The French aujourd'hui has a slightly more convoluted relation...
Translators and localisers often get confused when converting American units to SI units (see Notes). Temperature conversions are not as simple as they look. Fahrenheit and Centigrade conversion different depending on whether the temperature is absolute or relative....
I came across the word picaflor in Javier Marias' novel Corazón tan blanco. A rather lovely word which is apparently on the brink of extinction, un picaflor can refer to one of two things. The principal meaning is hummingbird, although this animal would today be more...
"The original is unfaithful to the translation." I came across this characteristically gnomic utterance in an essay by Borges on French writer William Beckford's Vathek (1782). For Borges, translation was both a primary literary act and a primary metaphor for the...
Computer Aided Translation (CAT) software splits a source text into manageable units known as “segments”, and builds databases of equivalent segments in different languages. A segment is the basic semantic unit of a text: ‘the red house’, for example, or...
After a recent trip to Budapest I decided to engage in a short survey of English translations of Twentieth Century Hungarian literature. Here is my progress so far... I started with Sándor Márai, who wrote in his diary in 1949 that "the world has no need of Hungarian...
Translators seem to have a huge problem with the word "flow", which is important in fire protection, and I find myself correcting it over and over again. The problem is distinguishing between flow as a phenomenon and rate of flow, which is a vector with a magnitude....