Around the web – February 2023

Here’s your February 2023 round-up of news, articles, and blog posts about language, translation and interpreting.

• What are the most lucrative ways to specialise as a freelancer?

Standing out from the crowd

• This Guardian article looks at the vicarious trauma involved in several professions, including interpreting.
• Levels of violent extremist Incel language have steadily increased in the main online spaces over the past 6 years
• In The Economist: Genuine etymology is enough to keep life well-seasoned without the need for “folk etymologies” and People still hope to remake the world through language

Lots of genuine etymologies are fascinating and entertaining

• ChatGPT will gladly spit out defamation, as long as you ask for it in a foreign language
• What do multilingual dreams reveal about our night-time brain?

Sleep has a more powerful role in language-learning than was previously thought.

• What happens when your name becomes shorthand for unattractive – or even racist – behaviour?
• Did you know that spoken Latin is making a comeback?

Instead of transitioning between Latin and English, spoken Latin keeps the cognition all in one language.

• A look at UK vs US differences between the words “veteran”, “veterinarian” and “vet”
• Welsh place names are being erased – and so are the stories they tell

The Welsh name Yr Wyddfa is now used for the mountain instead of Snowdon by the national park authority

• Justine Miles went viral for her energetic sign language interpretation of Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show
• Why do so many of us feel that we now need subtitles to understand dialogue in the things we watch?

On a final note, if you haven’t already done so, do take a few minutes to answer both these surveys:

• The 2nd edition of the freelance translator survey organised by Inbox Translation and the ITI is open to freelance translators worldwide, and the closing date is 13 March
• Emma Goldsmith’s survey on ergonomics and health among translators and editors is also open to freelancers worldwide, and the closing date is 5 April

Further reading on the blog:

• Around the web – January 2023
• Around the web – December 2022

Around the web – January 2023

Here’s your first round-up of 2023 with news, articles, and blog posts about translation and language during January.

• How do you keep the balance when you’re working at reduced capacity? Colleague Simon Berrill shares ten things he’s learned

10 tips for anyone working while travelling or wanting to enjoy other elements of life

• “Yes, translators have bodies, too”
• Did you know “translation” originally meant moving a body?
• Some good news: the translator CV scam doesn’t seem to work anymore

The CV scam is becoming less and less profitable to scammers

• There’s been a lot of coverage recently about ChatGPT. In this article the OpenAI chatbot talks about what could go wrong with GPT3 translations
• Why do we all need subtitles now? Apparently it’s not us — the dialogue in TV and movies has become harder to hear

Why we all need subtitles now

• How a premature Spanish-language release shaped media coverage of Prince Harry’s memoir
• Deciphering ancient texts with modern tools, an unorthodox scholar challenges what we know about the Dead Sea Scrolls

A copy of a Greek inscription, made by laying wet paper or plaster over carved stone to create a mirror-image impression

• The National Library of Sweden is preserving 500 years of history to support research in linguistics, history, media studies, etc.

The library’s archives include audio, text and video

• The language used by Saudi camel whisperers to soothe & train camels, Alheda’a, was recently made a part of UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage

The cries of camel herders mean nothing to the untrained ear, but animals respond instantly, gathering to walk together across the Saudi desert

• With coastal communities forced to migrate, climate crisis could be the ‘nail in the coffin’ for half of all languages by the end of the century
• On a similar subject: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality project is assembling a new lexicon for people’s experience of climate change & environmental upheaval
• January 26th was Australia Day, and Ozzies can be pretty creative when it comes to talking about what they eat …

Have you ever called a chicken parmigiana a ‘chicken in pyjamas’?

Further reading on the blog:

• Most popular tweets of 2022
• Around the web – December 2022
• Around the web – November 2022

Most popular tweets of 2022

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.

Related:

• Most popular tweets of 2020
• Most popular tweets of 2018
• Most popular tweets of 2017
• Most popular tweets of 2016
• Most Popular Tweets of 2015
• Most Popular Tweets of 2014
• Most Popular Tweets of 2013

Around the web – December 2022

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

Further reading on the blog:

• Around the web – November 2022
• Around the web – September and October 2022

Around the web – November 2022

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

• ITI’s Autumn 2022 Pulse survey revealed that business confidence has dipped sharply
• Monkeypox has been given a new name by health experts and the World Health Organisation

The virus formerly known as monkeypox

• A guide to decolonising the language of conservation is a basic resource for anyone who writes or talks about conservation, climate change, and nature protection (also available
  in Spanish, French, & Italian)
• Ukrainians and Latvians are repudiating the Russian language, says The Economist 

The war in Ukraine, supposedly in defence of Russian culture, has been a disaster on its own terms

• There’s a divergence in generational opinions about the exclamation mark …  but it’s probably just a result of technology
• Word of the Year season kicked off on November 1st when Collins Dictionary announced their choice. They have since been followed by Cambridge Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. Meanwhile, Oxford Dictionaries used a public vote for the first time in its history to decide between three terms.

Gaslighting was WOTY 2022 for which dictionary publisher?

• In the documentary “In Flow of Words”, war-crime interpreters tell their own stories
• Archaeologists discovered the oldest known sentence – “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard” – written in the earliest alphabet (well technically an abjad) on a comb used to untangle hair and remove lice 3700 years ago. And Spanish researchers found a 2100-year-old bronze plate, apparently the earliest document ever written in the Basque language

the Hand of Irulegi, the earliest known text in Basque script

• What if Twitter were named in a language other than English?
• November 15th marked the official start to the cyclone season here in the south-west IndianOcean. But how do cyclones/typhoons/hurricanes get named?

Further reading on the blog:

• Brewing up a (tropical) storm
• November 16th was Icelandic language day: here’s my blog post about the language 
• Around the web – September and October 2022

Around the web – September and October 2022

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

• A translator’s responsibility is ‘as grave and precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs’, says Jhumpa Lahiri, quoted in a Spectator article written by Frank Wynne

Fresco from Pompeii of Echo and Narcissus, with whom Jhumpa Lahiri, as a translator, feels a close affinity

• “Despite their importance, translators rarely receive recognition for their work, likely due to most readers and filmgoers underestimating the challenges of translation”
• Talking about consequences, a damning New York Times report about Hasidic schools has been translated from English into Yiddish and is currently doing the rounds on WhatsApp. However the translator’s identity is a closely guarded secret as they could be at risk

Who translated The New York Times’ widely-read yeshiva report into Yiddish? It may undermine Hasidic leaders.

• In this opinion piece for the New York Times, linguist Michel DeGraff talks about how he was taught to despise his native Haitian Creole
• Another New York Times article looks at whether film titles should be left untranslated, be translated, or changed altogether
• How interpreting errors in police interviews can send innocent people to jail
• Too much trust in machine translation could have deadly consequences

Death by Machine Translation?

• On translating the musical Hamilton into German
• 200 years ago, French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced that he’d decrypted the Rosetta Stone (interesting fact: did you know that Champollion never saw the stone in person?)
• When Elizabeth II died, there was some debate about whether she was a feminist. This made language academic Debbie Cameron wonder if we’re in the process of evacuating the word ‘feminism’ of both its political meaning and its history
• According to a new guide, words and phrases commonly used in conservation, such as ‘wilderness’, ‘voluntary relocation’ & ‘protected area’, are perpetuating “racist and colonial” myths
• A novel has been translated from Uyghur into English for the first time

In order to avoid raising suspicion the novel’s translators met and worked in a Uyghur tea shop

• How Jane Austen’s early Chinese translators were stumped by the oddities of 19th-century British cuisine

On a final note, for International Translation Day I was pleased to help shine a spotlight on my profession by being featured in a local newspaper.

Further reading:

• October 9th was Hangeul Day: you might want to take a look at my blog post with a few facts about the Korean language
• Around the web – July & August 2022
• Around the web – May & June 2022

Around the web – July & August 2022

Been away over the summer? Here’s your round-up of news, articles, and blog posts about language and translation for July and August.

• “Even experienced full-time literary translators can hardly make a living from literary translation” is one of the (depressing) results to emerge from a European Council of Literary Translators‘ Associations’ survey on the working conditions of literary translators in Europe
• A high price to pay: the recent attack on Salman Rushdie served as a reminder of how some of the translators who worked on ‘The Satanic Verses’ have been physically targeted – and even murdered – in the past
• A former rapper is now debunking racist myths about Creole languages, including the myth that Creoles are just simplified languages
• What is linguistic discrimination? When it comes to language, who decides what’s correct?

What is “good” or “right” when it comes to language?

• The EU border agency Frontex has been accused of exploiting staff by using a contractor who it is claimed offers interpreters an effective wage of less than €2.50 an hour
• How do our brains cope with speaking more than one language?

Mixing up the languages we speak can reveal surprising things about how our brains work.

• In this video for Wired, linguists Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer explain why some slang has gone out of style while other terms have persevered
• Staying on the subject of new language: “Coining words is like sex in that it’s necessary to our species” says a writer and editor in this article

Who made that word and why?
No matter how many words in a language, it seems that we always need just one more to explain ourselves.

• How do you tell which language rules are valuable and which are piffling?
• Meta launched a virtual reality game in France & Spain … but failed to translate it properly into Spanish or French

Screenshot from ‘Horizon Worlds’, Meta’s new virtual reality game

• Will naming heatwaves (i.e. the same system used for cyclones) change people’s perception and help save lives?
• Here’s an interesting chat with the team responsible for the sensational, nearly no-holds-barred “Stranger Things 4” descriptive captions

Wet writhing and eldritch gurgling

• On a fun final note, this “literature clock” instantly finds literary quotations based on the time of day (or night) you access the website

Further reading

• Around the web – May & June 2022
• Around the web – April 2022
• 20 things I learnt about 20 languages…

Around the web – May & June 2022

In May I was away attending BP22 (in Lisbon), Wordfast Forward (in Montenegro) and ITI22 (in Brighton) and wasn’t able to do my monthly round-up. So I’m doubling up this month!

• You can read college Claire Cox’s account of the ITI conference here, Elisabeth Hippe-Heisler’s blog post here, Alison Hindley’s blog post here, and, on the ITI website, Sue Mason’s article
• Meanwhile, over at the Chartered Institute of Linguists, Baroness Coussins (CIOL Vice President and an Honorary Fellow) talked about why there has never been a better time to be a linguist
• On 23 May Alice Zeniter and her translator Frank Wynne won the Dublin International Literary Award, the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English
• A New York Times reporter reflected on the interpreters who faithfully convey her questions
• In the mainstream news there was much talk about Ryanair’s mandatory Afrikaans test for South Africans travelling with the airline. The test was eventually dropped in mid-June

Critics of Ryanair’s test pointed out that South Africa has 10 other official languages, apart from Afrikaans

• Greenland has a rich vocabulary for ice & snow. But what happens to language when those natural phenomena start to disappear?

As Greenland’s iconic icebergs begin to melt as the planet warms, how will its people, and language, adapt?

• 6 words in English that come from the Romany language

Which English words are borrowed from Romany?

• Is the internet changing how we talk about slang words?

Is the internet changing how we talk about slang words?

• 21st June is now celebrated as ‘Make Music Day’ in many countries around the world. This infographic looks at how 28 famous rock bands got their names
• What are the most mispronounced world cities, consumer brands, and celebrity names?
• Lastly, the 2022 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation is still open for entries until midnight on Friday 15 July

 

Elsewhere on the blog:

• Around the web – April 2022
• Around the web – March 2022

Around the web – April 2022

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

• The six-title 2022 International Booker Prize shortlist was announced on April 7th at the London Book Fair
• Translation has allowed these 9 books to become popular all over again in English
• To avoid angering internet algorithms, people are changing language in real time by creating a new ‘Algospeak’ vocabulary

“Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media

• Prisoners in the UK often have to resort to language support from peers 
• On the (sexist) language of body parts
• Gender bias turns up even in the way we think of the neutral word ‘people’, as a 630-billion-word internet analysis shows it’s generally interpreted to mean ‘men’

Gender bias turns up in the way we think of the most neutral of words

• Why is a man who can converse in 24 languages and ‘get by’ in 13 more cleaning carpets for a living?
• Warm weather species moving north into Scotland have been given Gaelic names

Scotland’s newest animals get Gaelic names

• Do you ‘make’ or ‘take’ a decision? It might depend on whether you’re a speaker of UK or US English
• Fungi appear to “talk” in a language similar to humans

Macrolepiota procera, the parasol mushroom. Fungi have vocabularies of around 50 words.

• Taylor Swift was in the language news twice this month: firstly because an academic recommended translating her songs as a way to help Latin students learn the language, and secondly because she’s been the inspiration for the name of a new millipede species!

Elsewhere on the blog:

• Around the web – March 2022
• Around the web – February 2022

Around the web – March 2022

Unsurprisingly, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine occurring late February, the March 2022 round-up has a number of language and translation-related articles, blog posts, and stories about the war.

• How translators are supporting Ukraine: a list of resources translators, interpreters and professional organisations have created to support Ukrainians. Also see these pages on Proz and the ITI website

• A linguistic power struggle was playing out in Ukraine long before shots were fired. (Also in The Conversation: Ukrainian and Russian: how similar are the two languages?)
• In this article a Ukrainian interpreter based in the UK revealed what her job involves and why her role is so important
• An interview with Russian translator Max Lawton (carried out before the invasion of Ukraine) on reading Russian literature, translating Sorokin, books in need of translation and retranslation, learning languages, and ambitious projects
• Paulo Scott and his translator Daniel Hahn and talk about Blackness and the experience of Blackness
• UK publishers are being called on to pay literary translators royalties on the sales of books they translate
• The US Interior Department is taking steps to strip an offensive term from the names of 660 sites

The US Interior Department is looking to rename 660 federal sites that use an offensive term

• We need more speculative fiction in translation, says Rachel Cordasco

Fantasy awards, among others, rarely ever feature a work of long-form or short-form fiction originally written in another language or translated into English

• If you’re looking for books on translation, language and thought, language and the mind, grammar and punctuation, or US and UK English, the 5 Books website has recommendations from experts in each of these fields.
• 18 words for St  Patrick’s Day

It’s said that if you find a four-leaf clover, it will bring you good luck

In other news, I was honoured to be featured in the “Meet our members” section of ITI’s FrenchNet newsletter: you can see the interview here. At the beginning of March I enjoyed participating in a careers event at a local high school with a class of penultimate year pupils. And I’ve also signed up for the BP22 conference in Lisbon: will I see you there?

Elsewhere on the blog:

• Around the web – February 2022
• Around the web – December 2021 & January 2022