Following our recent posts on Neapolitan and different varieties of Arabic, it seemed like a good time to look at some of the uses of the term 'dialect', and to try to untangle what it is that linguists mean when they use this term. The primary use of the term dialect...
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The Troubadours 1: entrebescant los mots…
Thanks to my local library, I have been reading the medieval Troubadours. (The Wikipedia entry is in this case excellent, so I recommend you head there if you want a more in-depth overview.) The troubadour tradition had its origins in Eleventh Century Occitania - the...
Counsellor!
I have a strange auditory tic. Every time I see or hear the word 'counsellor', the massed choir of Handel's Messiah [if you are short of time, go directly to 2:45] floods my brain, specifically the chorus based on Isaiah 9:6: His name shall be called Wonderful,...
The Ruined Maid
On Monday, we shared QuickSilver president Colin Whiteley's translation of a sonnet by Lope de Vega. Below you will find Estrella Whiteley's response, a rendering of Thomas Hardy's The Ruined Maid. First, the original: "O Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!...
Soneto de Repente
Today, a treat for poetry lovers: the results of a translation challenge between Colin (polymath polyglot and QuickSilver President) and Estrella Whiteley. The idea was for Colin to render a Spanish poem into English and Estrella an English poem into Spanish. Bonus...
The etymology of Quicksilver
Quicksilver is one of the names of the element Mercury (Hg), also known as hydrargyrum, from the Greek hydr- (water) and argyros (silver). The word quicksilver comes from the Old English cwicseolfor, a calque of the Latin argentum vivum (cf. It. argento vivo),...
Different ways to be elegant whilst sleeping
Yesterday I spent a pleasant afternoon trawling Barcelona's bookshops for Viscount Lascano Tegui's De la elegancia mientras se duerme. The Viscount was not actually a viscount, but an Argentinian writer who lived in Paris in the early Twentieth Century, was a friend...
Curious Constraints 3: fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal
But Georges Perec is the doyen of perverse, lipogrammic constraints. His La Disparition (1969), or The Disappearance, famously avoids any use of the letter 'e', as does Gilbert Adair's prize winning English translation A Void. Other translations impose similar...
Lifting, footing, looping
In Budapest, all of the 24 hour shops advertise themselves as 'Non-stop'. A Hungarian friend of mine said, in English, something like 'don't worry, I'm sure there'll be a non-stop we can go to'. Apparently in Hungarian these shops are referred to as 'non-stops' (using...
Digest of translation journals
There is a wide selection of magazines and journals related to translating, interpreting and linguistics on the outstanding Directory of Open Access Journals. I wanted to share some of the articles I have been looking at - not all of them are directly related to the...