This article was written for the December 2024 issue of the Goon Show News,published by the Goon Show Preservation Society, http://www.goonshow.org. I remember the time and place the Goon Show entered my life. It was Dublin in the late 1980s – a long way, culturally speaking, from 1950s East Acton and Sabrina – and I […]
One of the joys of translating from German is coming across a word you’ve never seen before and, on Googling it, realising that no one else in living memory has used it either. And then having to come up with a translation for it. When reading Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue recently – yes, it’s been […]
I remember the very first time I felt drawn to the dark art of translation. When I was thirteen years old, a schoolfriend showed me a script of a French play. A spectacularly dull play, if memory serves, but with one saving grace: the original French was on the left-hand page and an English translation […]
Having English as your native language is something of a mixed blessing. There’s no doubt that speaking the world’s lingua franca from birth is a great advantage. But at the same time, watching as your richly complex mother tongue descends into a kind of makeshift Esperanto is a little like having your vintage Aston Martin […]
When Twitter finally implodes like a neutron star, one of the things I will miss most is having lively discussions about grammar with an online community of fellow language enthusiasts. After twenty years as a freelance translator and copywriter, the lines between a grammatical usage that is actually wrong and one that merely annoys the […]
I’ve never had much luck with websites. Back in the days when fax machines ruled the Earth, I set up my stall as a freelance translator. Having spent the best part of three years working as a project manager in the English department of a translation agency here in Cologne, I’d had my fill of […]
