December | 2022 | A Smart Translator's Reunion

Here, in ascending order, are the ten most popular* tweets about language and translation that I shared during 2022 on my @Smart_Translate Twitter account:

5 ways the internet era has changed British English

The transformation of UK English reflect changes in technology as well as society

US-to-UK Word Pronunciation of the Year for 2021: “Doon” for “Dune”
50 very bad book covers for literary classics

Just one of 50 bad book covers

The 2021 stronglang award to recognize annual achievements in swearing
Choose your font carefully
My photo of the “southern hemisphere” contingent getting together for dinner before the ITI conference in Brighton (incidentally another tweet about my ITI stick of rock also proved very popular!)

With Timothy Barton and Victoria Mendez in Brighton

My tweet referencing a US vs UK Difference of the Day tweet by Lynne Murphy about “half-staff” vs “half-mast”
A humorous comic panel by ItchyFeet: things Americans don’t realise are American before going to Europe
The five best books on slang (as recommended by MisterSlang)
- this was actually more or less equalled by a a whole series of tweets on the 5 best books on language, swearing, US vs UK English, the history & diversity of language, grammar & punctuation, and language & the mind, but for the sake of variety I’ll consider them all in 2nd place
And the winner is … 14 words that get to the heart of today’s work culture: an article from Dictionarycom

Words about work and work culture

It’s interesting to note that with the exception of the winning tweet (which was about 5 times more popular than the second-placed tweet), most of these tweets were either humorous, covered UK and US English and the differences between them, or talked about slang and swearing.

* ‘most popular’ = top tweets (most engagement & impressions) according to Twitter Analytics.

For more about words and language in 2022 you might be interested in Google’s Year in Search: the top trending searches of the year, and “Extremely hardcore discourse: the words of the year that slipped under the radar” by The Guardian.

Here’s your monthly round-up of news, articles, and blog posts about translation and language for December 2022.

Two articles on the ATA website: Disclosing what we personally charge as translators is extremely important in terms of raising general rates within the profession, and Are bilingual review files a productivity aid or a waste of time?

We need to talk about… money!

Historically, Jewish life in Ukraine has always taken place in Russian, but now a race to translate Jewish texts into Ukrainian is underway
The decline of the Cyrillic alphabet: free from Russian dictates over language usage and education, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan prepare to embrace Latin lettering

Plaque to Orbeliani Baths of Tbilisi in Georgia with a quote from Pushkin in Georgian and in Russian

Trooper, trucker, sailor, fishwife: What we swear like when we swear like a something
How Hong Kong’s weird and wonderful place names came to be
Imagine how much our discourse could be expanded with terms like ‘adullamite’, ‘roorback’ or ‘flapdoodler’: why forgotten words need rescuing from obscurity

“To get the bull down,” is to complete a last-minute rush of work ahead of the Christmas break. Fail to do that and you might end up a yuleshard, someone who leaves errands unfinished on Christmas Eve.’

Can your accent hold you back? How accents shape lives in the UK
Do you ‘go west’ or ‘go south’? Depends on whether you’re a Brit or an American
The unexpectedly delightful origins of 15 common words

The etymological origins of the word ‘daisy’ are truly delightful.

Duolingo has launched a ‘Museum of Wonky English’ (MOWE) in Japan, the first institution to shed light on the art of mistranslations

The Museum of Wonky English (MOWE) is the first institution in Japan dedicated to the art of mistranslations

A Smart Translator's Reunion

Another language & translation blog (but probably the only one from Reunion Island)

Monthly Archives: December 2022

Most popular tweets of 2022

Around the web – December 2022

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