Around the web – October 2018

Last Sunday was International Day of Creole. How much do you know about Creole languages? In the meantime, here’s a look at the most popular stories about language and translation for October.

• Do you agree a translator should only ever translate into their native language?
• Why did Netflix shut down its Hermes translation portal?

Hermes was billed as “the first online subtitling and translation test and indexing system by a major content creator”

• What’s the difference between rewriting, editing, and proofreading?

Do you need to see the whole flower or examine the nitty-gritty detail? asks colleague Patricia Lane

• Acclaimed translator Anthea Bell passed away on 18th October. Read her obituary, and an article about her work here.

Anthea Bell changed the name of Obelix’s small, evil-tempered dog from Idéfix to Dogmatix and named the local druid Getafix. (Photograph: Courtesy of Jewish Museum London)

• Why does the fifth-most-spoken language in the world have such a low profile?

Part of the reason is that the language in question is not really a single language at all

• When I first saw that the French were taking on a stand on ‘fake news’ I cheered. Then I realised it was only the Academie Française suggesting a more Gallic term be used.

French protestors accuse President Emmanuel Macron of spreading fake news. (AFP PHOTO / ALAIN JOCARD)

• In a depressingly regular slot, the language fail of the month goes to Coca Cola in New Zealand who attempted to combine Maori and English. They clearly didn’t check with a native speaker of Maori, so their advertisement “Kia Ora, Mate” translates to “Hello, death”.

Coca-Cola made an embarrassing Māori faux-pas

• Language use: should you avoid employing the adverb ‘presently’? Stan Carey takes a look.
• Why does the letter Q almost always need to be followed by the letter U? And what’s the origin of the F-word? Find out here and here.

Q is the second most rarely used letter in the alphabet

• These 15 humorous images show why the letter-spacing of words is always important (NSFW).

 

Further reading:

• Around the web – September 2018
• Around the web – July & August 2018