February 2012
2 posts
2 tags
January 2012
3 posts
2 tags
The appaling work habits of David Ogilvy,... →
I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
Letters of Note: I am a lousy copywriter, 1955 letter from advertising legend David Ogilvy
3 tags
“For Penguin, and most US and UK publishers, it seems that, until now, Spanish...”
– Spain’s literary giants are lost in English translation | Iberosphere | Spain News and Portugal News
December 2011
1 post
4 tags
How are British people taught to expect failure... →
“cheer up, it might never happen” VS. “you can do anything if you put your mind to it”. An interesting Ask MetaFilter thread pondering the meaning of “Englishness”, the differences in attitude between Americans and the British, and the “anything is possible” mentality.
November 2011
4 posts
3 tags
British and American English: Americanisation survey: the results The Economist asks Britons living in the US what words they have adopted.
*Original post with comments: British and American English: Let me know when you are good
Fake English videos
Skwerl, a short film designed to sound like English to foreign speakers.
See also: Prisencolinensinainciusol
August 2011
1 post
7 tags
June 2011
4 posts
1 tag
2 tags
Richard Mabey on the art of giving species their... →
Common names are a kind of time capsule, a record of the powers of observation and literary inventiveness of ordinary people. They log resemblances, uses, sounds, mythic associations, smells, seasonal appearances, kids’ games, superstitions, habitats. They’re witty, concise, evocative, sometimes even satirical.
The litany of moths whose caterpillars feed on species of willow (aka...
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“The 275 spellers who gathered in Maryland this past week for the 2011 Scripps...”
– Imagining a world without standardized spelling
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“It took Peter Gilliver, the O.E.D. lexicographer working on the letter R, more...”
– ‘Run,’ a Verb for Our Frantic Times - NYTimes.com
May 2011
3 posts
2 tags
“When I started my clinical clerkships, I began to hear the verb “expire” more...”
– Doctors and the ‘D’ Word - On using euphemisms for dying
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What the British say vs. what the British mean
April 2011
1 post
1 tag
February 2011
3 posts
"It’s a heady time for language. Here’s to all the...
Gigantic corpora, probabilistic computer-aided translation, “culturomics” (taking the “-omics” from “genomics” and applying it to the study of language and culture)… The New York Times Magazine drops its language column. Here Ben Zimmer says goodbye.
1 tag
It is not uncommon, if you are of a certain cast of mind, to fling a book across the room and wonder if there is anyone still alive who cares about hanging participles, or the difference between that and which, or the fact that “whose” is a relative pronoun. Neither is it unusual to find a slender volume that seems short-changed by its brevity or an enormous one stuffed with extraneous...
Iceland could be the first country to have its...
The total literature of Iceland is under 50,000 books, which is easily scannable in 2 years by 12 people using the scribe scanners of the Internet Archive.
January 2011
2 posts
Xiuxiuejava, She whispered | Granta Magazine →
Poet and translator Rowan Ricardo Phillips explores his experience of translating from Catalan to English, and argues that, while enriching and culturally important, translation also has unfortunate limitations.
“Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science...”
– From A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists
December 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Watch“Translation Transition #1”, Maarten Steenhagen
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Jessica Francis Kane on finding time.
If you never take a water aerobics class, you’ll have more time than some. Give up all hope, and you might get a little more. Read poetry. Poetry gives time back, but most people don’t know it. Never watch television. Movies are fine. Documentaries are better. Sometimes, read novels in translation. Just consider it. Don’t remodel your kitchen. Don’t remodel anything. Give...
November 2010
5 posts
1 tag
Map of the world rearranged by population
If all the countries in the world swapped positions based on population, then…
Australia’s 22.5 million inhabitants would move to Spain, the world’s 51st largest country. This would probably be the furthest migration, as both countries are almost exactly antipodean to each other. The UK migrates from its strategically advantageous island position off Europe’s western...
4 tags
On the other side of the lacuna
Frank Bures on the nuances and undercurrents of foreign languages:
Words in other languages are like icebergs: The basic meaning is visible above the surface, but we can only guess at the shape of the vast chambers of meaning below. And every language has particularly hard-to-translate terms, such as the Portuguese saudade, or “the feeling of missing someone or something that is gone,” or the...
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‘Through the Language Glass’: Why the World Looks...
An interview from the Paris Review about how language influences our thoughts.
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey, not in what they may convey (for in theory, every thought can be expressed in every language). Languages differ in what types of information they force the speakers to mention when they describe the world. (For example, some languages require you to be more...
3 tags
“Writing, there is no voice.” Art critic details...
Living With A Brain Tumour, Tom Lubbock (The Observer). A moving piece on loss of language.
My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.
This is curious.
My true exit may be accompanied by no words at all, all gone.
The final thing. The illiterate. The dumb.
Speech?
Quiet but still something?
Noises?
Nothing?
My body. My tree.
After that...
October 2010
1 post
Lydia Kesling, on reading in a foreign language.
This reminds me of that summer (2000?) when I read Possesion in German:
Setting aside the dictionary I bought in my first week in Turkey, a tiny yellow Langenscheidt, the inside of which is coated with an archaeological film of loose tobacco, I obtained a big-league dictionary. A grown-up, non-smoking dictionary, which weighs 10 pounds and has words I don’t know in English, like “eryngo”...
August 2010
2 posts
1 tag
That wraparound translation effect
Sometimes, what happens in translation can have its own unmistakable richness. Take Z Guinaudeau’s wonderful recipe for mchoui [whole spit-roasted lamb] given to me by my friend, the cookbook writer Alice Sherwood: “Choose a young sheep, fat but not too big. Bsmillah. Plunge the knife into the carotid and let the blood spout out to the last drop. Wash the gash in the throat seven times. Make a...
July 2010
2 posts
And you thought native speakers knew it all…
Misspellings, mispronunciations and much more on this great Ask Metafilter thread: What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along?, where people confess things like these: Primadonna was pre-Madonna to me until I was about 19. It took me a few decades to figure out that the “Champs Elysees” thing I was reading about was the same...
May 2010
1 post
April 2010
1 post
March 2010
2 posts
Borges, on the differences between English and...
In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words. For example, if you saw slowly, quickly, in English, what you hear is the meaningful part of the word: slow-ly, quick-ly. You hear slow and quick. But in Spanish you say lentamente, rapidamente, and what you hear is the -mente. That is gratis, so to say. A friend of mine...
I consider Joyce has meant his idioms to be...
An interview with Lauri Niskanen, the man who retranslated Ulysses into Finnish
February 2010
1 post
“Let’s face it: An English verb grown in Chile may look perfectly connoted, but...”
– Author Michael Erard offers his readers artisanal words, locally grown, hand-picked, minimally processed, organically prepared, and sustainably packaged.
The Morning News -A Pledge to My Readers [Spoofs & Satire]
January 2010
1 post
December 2009
2 posts
If you translate from German, it´s always good to...
The Year in Media Errors and Corrections, collected by Regret The Error
Best Translation Error:
BERLIN (Reuters) – Visitors to a tourist attraction in Berlin have been making off with an unusual memento — the 30 cm long penis of a Lego giraffe. The Lego phallus belongs to a six metre tall model that has stood outside the entrance to the Legoland Discovery Centre on Potsdamer Platz since...
The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa... →
Interview with Pevear and Volokhonsky, husband and wife and award-winning translators of sixteen works of Russian literature.
On how they work:
Richard is a native speaker of English. I’m a native speaker of Russian. My task is to explain to Richard what is happening in the Russian text. Then it is up to him to do what he can. The final word is always his. I can say this is not quite what the...
November 2009
2 posts
The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary
Do you wonder where your co-workers picked up all the ridiculous things they say? From fresh-faced interns to top management, everyone drops one of these gems occasionally. We can only hope that you’re not here to actually add these buzzwords to your vocabulary.
All Sorts, collective nouns gone wild
All Sorts is a collection of collective nouns that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. If you think that a charismatic collective is far superior to a dullard ‘bunch’ or ‘flock’ then this is the place for you.
Some examples:
a whooshing of deadlines a complexity of change requests a firewall of rules a need of context a ...
October 2009
3 posts
Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
Some Ask Metafilter threads:
What does English sound like if you don’t speak it?
How does one speak “pretend English”?
Imitation English
What are the stereotypes of the native English speaker’s accent as perceived by non-English-speakers?
what does babbling in english sound like?
Linguaesthetics: What does English sound like?
Where we learn from user jozxyqk...
“What qualities make a person a good candidate for copy editing?
Self-doubt....”
– An Interview With Mary Norris, page O.K.’er for the New Yorker.| Red Room
August 2009
2 posts
Some links
- Hated words and loved ones [The Guardian]
- People´s favourite idioms [The Guardian, comments section]
Where we learn that: ‘She was very near to herself’ means that she wouldn’t tell you anything. When you´re Swedish, you ‘suspect owls in the moss’ when you think something isn’t true. In Germany, people who live in luxury ‘live like a maggot in...