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 a search of the internet comes up with a number of possible origins. The modern version of Cinderella has its roots in Lo...
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Government translation budgets
A typically Iberian controversy is animating the opinion pages of the Spanish broadsheets. The Spanish parliament recently voted to allow any one of the five official languages of Spain to be used in the Senate (the upper chamber), and has employed interpreters to...
Verbs for tranferring data
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....
Translation memory: the basics
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...
‘Culturnomics’
Everyone who's everyone in the world of language, from David Crystal to the London Review of Books, is blogging furiously about Google's latest project, the Books Ngram viewer, a.k.a culturenomics. You can see why. This is a mindbogglingly grandiose effort, involving...
Booting and browsing
Every wondered why it is that you 'boot' a computer? Especially considering that the only other meaning of 'boot' as a verb is 'give something a good kick'? The answer lies in a very nice bit of contemporary etymology: the great Catch 22 of the early days of computing...
Georges Perec: not as easy as one assumes
Georges Perec was a French man of letters, the author of a famous novel that doesn't use the letter 'e'. He was a lover of puzzles and patterns, and often chose to create strange structures for the novels he wrote: for example, the movement of the horse on the chess...
Picaflor, luli, tznuum, da-hi-tu-hi
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...
On the day of the day of this day
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...
Jabberwocky I
How do you translate something which doesn't mean anything? How can you translate into another language words or passages which don't, strictly speaking, make sense in the original language? This is one of the many linguistic questions provoked by Lewis Carroll's...