Making Sense: language & translation blog

Taking Translation to Clerkenwell Design Week

2010-05-26T09:50:40Z

The signs are up, the windows dressed, the installations in place.“Clerkenwell Design Week” started yesterday and is set to finish tomorrow. Now that’s somewhat short of a week, but no less interesting for it as the streets are full of “design” of all sorts. image: Clerkenwell Design Week This annual shindig describes itself as: “a festival celebrating design’s [...]

It’s all Greek to them

2010-05-25T10:23:55Z

One of our studio spotted a howler on the behalf of his alma mater. Cambridge University classics faculty has just opened a shiny extension building. In keeping with their studies, the doors have been decorated with a quotation in ancient Greek. The quote is Aristotle, meaning “All men by nature desire to know”. Unfortunately whoever was [...]

Indian Alchemy is no fool’s gold

2010-05-25T10:20:31Z

A poster campaign caught my eye recently – for two very different reasons. The Southbank Centre is planning a five day event entitled Alchemy exploring the culture of India, its diaspora and its relationship to the UK. The festival will feature literature, dance, music, food, fashion and debates. This cultural masala was the first reason for [...]

Seeking a French buzz

2010-04-01T16:00:21Z

The extent that other languages are permeated by English is in the news again, with an interesting article in yesterday’s Independent: “France tries to halt march of English”. The French government is keen to replace currently used anglicisms for 21st century phenomena with French-sounding words. This week saw the results of a competition open to [...]

New design for our translation blog

2010-04-01T16:00:00Z

Regular readers will notice this blog has a new look. We have tried to keep a very simple look that is easy on the eye and hopefully a stimulating read. For those of you who enjoy the technical details, we have had to move from the Blogger platform to WordPress after Blogger dropped ftp support. For [...]

Oh! What a lovely translation design

2010-03-23T15:25:50Z

I came across this picture gallery of classic movie posters, as part of a recent Guardian article called ‘The Story of O’, a diverting little piece about the letter O in type and design. Designers would probably start thinking how about how the ‘O’ cleverly combines textual and visual representation to deliver a single message, as [...]

Tragedy of dying languages article raises interesting questions

2010-03-23T09:05:05Z

There’s an interesting item on the BBC News site today about languages becoming extinct. It’s by Professor K David Harrison who some may know from the film The Linguists “The death of the last speaker of an ancient language in India’s Andaman Islands highlights the fact that half of the world’s 7,000 languages are in danger [...]

Burns night: supper, poetry and an ode to a haggis

2010-03-23T09:05:40Z

As a Scot – and an Ayrshire Scot at that – Robert Burns and his poetry have always been important to me and I’ll be raising a glass to his ‘immortal memory’ tonight as Scots the world over celebrate Burns night. The unofficial national bard of Scotland (and voted the greatest ever Scot in a TV [...]

How do you spell Portuguese?

2010-03-23T09:22:54Z

How do you spell Portuguese? In English, many people forget to put in that second ‘u’, but Portuguese speakers across the world, whether in Portugal, Brazil, Angola or Macau, are likely to spell it correctly: português. One reason it’s easy to get correct is because Portuguese spelling, unlike English, is largely phonetic. But what happens in [...]

Translation: to Bengali or not to Bengali?

2010-03-23T09:36:19Z

Our production manager Sanjoy Roy highlights a common confusion about Bengali usage The Bengali language is the language of Bengal, right? Well, not wrong – but it’s not as simple as that. In the UK there’s quite a lot of confusion about what Bengali is, so I’ll try to clarify that here. First, let me illustrate the [...]