tweets of the year | 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, in ascending order, are the ten most popular* tweets about language and translation that I shared during 2020 on my @Smart_Translate Twitter account:

10. Beauty & Violence: Sophie Hughes on translating Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

9. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales have been published in Scots, translated by writers including Val McDermid

8. The meaning of ‘Just Deserts/Just Desserts’

7. Un lexique éclectique de Le Monde diplomatique qui collectionne des problèmes dont la solution n’est pas mentionnée dans les dictionnaires usuels

6. What does ‘Zhuzh’ mean (and why is it so hard to spell)?

5. On pourrait croire qu’il est facile de traduire l’un des incipits les plus connus de la littérature française, « Aujourd’hui, maman est morte »

4. Cameroon’s language barriers: Linguistic divides underpin conflict and poor translation is now hampering the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic

3. Eastern Parlance: delightful Asian words with no straightforward English equivalent

2. Les leçons linguistiques de la crise du coronavirus

And the winning tweet: Cambridge Words Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year for 2020

Interestingly three of the tweets are in French (which is a higher proportion than the number of tweets I send in French), two of them being from Slate France. And of the seven others, two are from the Grammar Girl blog.

Do you have a favourite article published in 2020 that you’d like to share? Don’t hesitate to mention it in the comments below.

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

A Smart Translator's Reunion

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

Category Archives: tweets of the year

Most popular tweets of 2022

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: