February 21st was International Mother Language Day, and this year’s theme was “Towards Sustainable Futures through Multilingual Education”. Without further ado here’s your February round-up of popular articles about language and translation.
- The most popular post this month on my Twitter feed was Jo Rourke’s article about tracking non-billable time.
- In her continuing Greatest Women In Translation series, Caroline Alberoni interviewed Kim Olson.
- In The Economist: ‘The advantages of having a scholarly lingua franca (English) should not obscure the disadvantages’.
“The giant shoulders of English”
- Words Without Borders recently held a panel discussion on “Tipping the Scales: Addressing Gender Imbalance in Literature in Translation.” Also at WWB is this Translation Dispatch from the Jaipur Literature Festival.
- ‘Hit and miss’ or ‘hit or miss’? Lynne Murphy looks at the US and UK English differences between the two expressions.
- This edition of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth discussed dog names and the revealing language we use to talk about animals. *
- Another interesting radio programme was World in Words programme about Frisian, the language most closely related to English, and which is alive and well in the Netherlands. *
This is the oldest fragment of Old Frisian, circa 1100-1125. It was sold by Sotheby’s in 2014 and bought by a private collector in Belgium. Credit: Courtesy of Han Nijdam
- These maps by Jakub Marian show the most common destination countries and percentage of emigrants from each European country.
- Here are 10 English words with unfortunate meanings in other languages.
A beginner’s guide to which words to watch out for where
- Finally in this heartwarming news story we learnt that a US Army officer brought his former Afghan interpreter to live with him stateside.
By the way, mid-February saw me back at a local junior high school’s Careers Fair for the fourth year running, talking about the professions of translation and interpreting to six different classes of 13 to 15 year olds. And on a more personal note an interview I recently did with Expat.com was published online.
*available as a podcast
Further reading:
A Smart Translator's Reunion 