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 […]
