Around the web – February 2022

Here’s your February 2022 round-up with the month’s most popular news articles, blog posts, and stories about translation and language.

• In this article, AFP’s Head of the French Desk for North America talks about the challenges of translating political figures’ swear words (blog post also available in French)

How do you translate a profanity said by an American president for the benefit of non-English speakers?

• Can a literary translation be better than the original book?
• Philip Crowther, a Luxembourg-born British-German works as a broadcast journalist in English, German, Luxembourgish, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. A montage of his coverage for different outlets has received almost 25 million views and 200,000 likes on Twitter.
• From humans to animals: is your dog bilingual? A new study suggests their brains can tell languages apart

Kun Kun the border collie takes a test to tell if dogs can distinguish languages from each other

• A new gender-neutral pronoun is likely to enter Norwegian dictionaries
• Colleague Kate Stansfield explores ways in which translators and interpreters can make their practice more environmentally sustainable
• Lexicographer, slang specialist, and new language recorder Tony Thorne looked at the themes of 2022 so far through 10 keywords
• Do you play Wordle? From Cantonese to Hebrew, the race is on to translate the popular game into different languages
  • By the way, did you know Google has hidden an Easter Egg? Simply search for “Wordle” and see for yourself
• February 2nd was Candlemas (when the French eat pancakes) and March 1st is Shrove Tuesday (when the Brits eat pancakes). North Americans do eat pancakes, although they don’t celebrate Shrove Tuesday (see comments), and this blog post from Lynne Murphy looks at US vs UK differences when talking about flapjacks and pancakes.

Easy honey flapjacks

• February was also the month of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, so here are 9 Winter Olympics terms and their origins

Opening ceremony of 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games

On a final note, I celebrated a landmark 500 followers over at Instagram!

Elsewhere on the blog:

• Around the web – December 2021 & January 2022
• In honour of Valentine’s Day: 7 things only those in a bilingual relationship can understand
• Reunion experienced two cyclones during February (not too much damage, fortunately), so here’s a post from the archives about cyclones and their names