These days, everyone has a website. In certain cases it is not always clear why a company needs a website - not to mention a social networking presence - but the fact is that being behind the curve in web technology almost invariably loses you business. For most...
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Neopolitan 2: past, present and future
I have just got back from a visit to Naples, and I wanted to share some opinions I heard there about the past, present and future of the Neopolitan language. Living in Barcelona, this is a subject that I am particularly interested in, and it seems there are a number...
Neapolitan 1: Stu core analfabeta
Stu core analfabeta tu ll'hè purtato a scola e s'è mparato a scrivere, e s'è mparato a lleggere sultanto 'na parola: "Ammore" e niente cchiù. Italian speakers will have recognised that this poem is not in Italian, although it looks a lot like it; it was in fact...
My happy days…
I have just finished Gyorgy Faludy's My Happy Days in Hell, recently republished as part of the excellent Penguin Central European Classics series. The translation was made by Kathleen Szasz in 1962, which is presumably why Penguin didn't think it was necessary to...
Translators without borders needs you
Just a few words about an organisation that we at QuickSilver are big fans of: Translators Without Borders. In crisis situations such as the earthquakes in Japan or Haiti, the language barrier that can exist between aid workers and the local population can cause...
Three new coinages
I want to share three new coinages that I have come across this week. The first is 'easyjetset'. A fusion of 'jetset' and the name of the low-cost airline Easyjet, it refers to the new generation of Europeans who are used to travelling around the continent at the drop...
Reviewing translations: preferences vs. mistakes
Just as each word, sentence and paragraph in a piece of marketing collateral must be weighed up carefully, both to judge its individual impact and its relation to the document as a whole, so it is with the translation of that document. And if it can be a long process...
What noise does a rooster make?
We blogged recently on the fact that most languages have their own word for 'butterfly', even when they share most of the rest of their animal vocabulary with neighbours or a common source language. A similar phenomenon adheres in the case of transliterations of the...
Memories of Hadrian
I have just started reading Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien (Paris, 1951) in Julio Cortázar's Spanish translation, Memorias de Adriano (Buenos Aires, 1955). It is a beautifully written book, and doesn't seem to have suffered too much in the transition from...
Ted Hughes on translating poetry
Today I want to share an extract from an essay by Ted Hughes in the third issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (Spring 1967), a journal he set up in order to...well, the name says it all. Italics mine: "In the present fertile period of translations, it is right that...