When Work and Fun Come Together

As a translator specialising in visual arts, pictures on my website are a must. The issue is that translation does not quite lend itself to pictures, hence the plethora of translation websites displaying either photos of shelves loaded with language books and dictionaries or images of foreign countries. While both themes are perfectly relevant and can look really good, the first can

Happy 2019!

Sending ‘Happy New Year’ messages to my clients of the past year is a chance for me to reflect on the exciting projects I have been part of and the wonderful people I have had the pleasure to work with through the year in an effort to share inspiring art and interesting events celebrating our shared human culture. Among them:

Milestone: 100 Followers!

Launched in June 2013, Linguistic Alchemy’s blog has recently reached the milestone of 100 followers! Thank you to all my loyal readers. It makes the time and effort to write these posts all the more worthwhile. As work and life seem to have accelerated for me in the past year, the blog has gone fairly quiet, but I still hope to add to it on occasion, so do stay tuned!

Translating Chinese Whispers

We all know the hackneyed expression “lost in translation”. Yet, some seem to expect translation to work like an exact science.

I was recently working on an exhibition catalogue and one of the texts, written by a German artist, had been translated into English for me to translate into French. Not having been offered to see the German text, and my German being limited anyway, I had to

Translation May Not Be What You Need

Just like being able to speak English is not enough to be the next Oscar Wilde, not every job that involves a foreign language can be allocated to a translator. There are times when a translator is the wrong person for the job.

To come up with a snappy slogan or a memorable acronym, you have probably delegated the task to a skilled person within your marketing department or even hired a professional copywriter. Many translators can

Trust Me, I’m a Linguist

Each language has its own logic, sets of rules and exquisite weirdnesses. If something looks strange to you in the translation, it may be due to such idiosyncrasies rather than a translator’s mistake.

For example, in French there is a hard space in front of certain items of punctuation such as question and exclamation marks, colons and semicolons, and quotation marks. Also note that the latter

A Plea for Small Things

Accents are important in life and deserve your respect. They are not exotic decorations that you sprinkle about like glitter over the Christmas tree. They have their place in this world and many languages would not be the same without them. So when writing or typing foreign words, don’t forget to

Teaming up for Clients

Here is an article I have written, published this month in The Linguist, the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ magazine. When looking for translators working in other language pairs on behalf of clients, the response to my search for a suitable candidate can be of mixed quality and standards. This article gives fellow linguists tips on how best to respond when contacted by a colleague.

Give the Cream to Those who Want it Most

Out of the blue, a Toronto-based artist contacted me, asking whether my MA dissertation (on J. M. W. Turner and the Industrial Revolution) was available for purchase. Who would have thought! The artist is currently doing some research on Turner and found my details in the Association of Art Historians’ member directory.

While my translation services are irrelevant in this case, this anecdote illustrates that translators are everywhere, even where you might

OFF TOPIC: Sanskrit Pronunciation

Happy 2015!

Following on from my 2014 New Year’s resolution, my knowledge of Sanskrit is slowly building up.

Last Spring, I started a new advanced yoga class with a fantastic teacher who also introduces us to the Yoga Sutras of Pantañjali. As the Yoga Sutras were originally written in Sanskrit,

It Doesn’t Break Three Legs to a Duck

If you hire an amateur “translator” who speaks French like a Spanish cow, your audience could feel like a hen that has found a knife, leaving you in the cabbages while the crook runs away in the English fashion.

Puzzled?

Idioms make languages colourful and interesting. When using them, we don’t think about what they say literally but non-native speakers hearing them for the first time will

Translation or Localisation?

An agency once sent a translation with some complaints from the client to me by accident. The problematic translation was a Belgian French version of a text that I had translated for them into French French. The agency had commissioned two translators to work on the same text into two different variants of French. While adapting the text to each country is sensible, translating the text twice into very similar variants of the same language is not the most cost-effective way to do it.