Around the web – February 2015

Have you done any professional outreach recently? For the second year running this month I went to speak about the profession of translator and interpreter to six classes of 13-15 year olds at the Careers Morning at a local junior high school. (You can read here about my account of it last year). And February 25th was Smart Translate’s 21st birthday! Anyway here’s my round-up of articles about language and translation for the past month.

• Lisa Carter’s Intralingo blog often features questions from readers. Recently an author asked: Why should a translator get royalties when the story is mine?
• If not for the fame and fortune, then why do translators translate? asked the poet and translator Herbert Lomas in this essay, originally published in 1982.
• No Peanuts for Translators! showed us that when you work for mega translation agencies, like Transperfect, Here’s Where All the Money That They’re Not Paying You Goes.

The Long Island home of Liz Elting (cofounder and co-CEO of TransPerfect)

• Have you seen the film The Imitation Game? It turns out those World War II code breakers also mastered the art of the palindrome. This article includes what is possibly the best-ever palindrome in English. (And Oxford Dictionaries recently wrote a blog post on how to make palindromes).
• Seemingly a mundane subject, exactly how does sentence segmentation impact translators? asks Kevin Dias.
• Colleague Rose Newell knows how to make us wait! Here is the long-anticipated second part in her series 12 traps newbie translators fall into.
• Humour is notoriously difficult to translate. Some volunteer TEDtalk translators discuss The art of translating Maysoon Zayid’s hilarious talk into 33 different languages.

What’s funny in one language isn’t always funny in another.

• When the US state of Vermont, decided to change its Latin motto, some conservatives started bashing Latinos …

Fun:

• 10 things freelancers would say in text messages if they were being completely honest.
• The British accent is the world’s most attractive, according to a poll.
• The New York Times recently offered a short, 12-question internet language quiz for you to find out how linguistically en vogue you are.
• Finally, 27 hilariously bad maps that explain nothing.

CNN goes to Hong Kong which In fact, appears to be the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, which as of this writing is fortunately not under attack by giant killer hornets.

Related articles:

• Around the Web – January 2015
• Around the Web – December 2014
• Around the Web – November 2014
• Back to School!