Lunfardo is a species of slang or argot from Buenos Aires. It originated towards the end of the Nineteenth Century as a criminal cant and spread from BsAs to Rosario, Montevideo and beyond. The real engine behind its diffusion was undoubtedly tango, which started off...
I just wanted to share an article from the London Review of Books archive, by the English translator of Roberto Calasso's Ka: great book, great translation, an extremely interesting and thoughtful article: Prajapati was alone. He didn’t even know whether he existed or...
A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) movie or TV program is one which has been subtitled, 'by fans, for fans', independently of the rights holder. Although this phenomenon crops up anywhere on the web that people are watching TV in a foreign language, the real home of...
There is a curious disconnect in the English language which has only opened itself up in recent decades. It is connected to the new electronic media, above all social networks, and it has to do with the transferal of certain types of information between individuals....
A translator's lot is not an easy one... There are some professions - heart surgeon, physicist, deep-sea diver - which generate a sense of impenetrable expertise; no-one would dream of offering a neurophysicist their ten cents' worth on the best way to go about...
Arabic is an interesting word. It is used very freely in the English speaking world (as a noun) to denote the language spoken by people from Somalia to Iraq, with very little recognition given to the fact that, as a language, it is extremely prone to regional...
El grupo español de gestión de documentación multilingüe QuickSilver Translations abre oficina en Miami, Florida. La filial, que ofrecerá los mismos servicios que la empresa matriz, estará enfocada a tres segmentos: el mercado latinoamericano con base en Florida, las...
A creole language is one which arises from the fusion of two or more cultures, typically in a colonial context. It is distinct from a pidgin, which is the name given to the rough-and-ready dialect spoken when people of different language groups are obliged to...
'He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels...He prefers the perverse French esthetes: Verne, Peret, Genet, Perec...Relentless, the rebel peddles these theses, even when vexed peers deem the new precepts "mere dreck"'. A few weeks ago...
Johnny Depp - as Jack Sparrow - is almost certainly the only actor in a Hollywood blockbuster ever to have pronounced the word 'egregious'. I noticed this, because the word has been etched into my brain ever since a sardonic French teacher scribbled it at the bottom...