

14th January 2020
I’ve been in sunny Portugal for the last week; a great antidote for the winter blues (and greys). As always, the food was fresh and delicious but sometimes the menu translations left something to be desired. (Not that I would be any better if I had to translate a British menu into Portuguese.) Have […]
2nd January 2020
Love – it’s the same all over the world isn’t it? Not according to research by Joshua Conrad Jackson and his colleagues from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. They examined nearly 2500 languages to ‘determine the degree of similarity in linguistic networks of 24 emotion terms across cultures’. Or, in plain English, they […]
20th November 2019
Someone kindly sent me this fabulous ‘translation’ this week. This is what you are offered if you ask Google Translate to deal with the simple concept of a paper jam. Anyone in business knows what a paper jam means. The dreaded red light appears on the printer. Inevitably, it’s when you’re in the […]
12th November 2019
We’re all familiar with spelling and grammar checkers. Predictive phone text, initially clunky, has come on in leaps and bounds. Gmail’s Smart Compose suggests responses for your emails. Now it’s tone checking. The best known of these is Grammarly’s Tone Detector, which sits in the background of your browser and activates when you write an email. A Range […]
22nd October 2019
Is Neural Machine Translation (NMT) a game changer? I last wrote about the unreliability of computer-based translation a couple of years ago. You might be forgiven for thinking things are very different now. The arrival of NMT means that software can now translate text as well as human translators, it is said. But is this really true? […]
29th September 2019
Who was St Jerome? St. Jerome was a Catholic priest, theologian and historian, He is best known for his translation of most of the Bible into Latin. He learnt Latin in school and from his studies and travels was fluent in Greek and Hebrew. His astonishing body of work means he is considered the patron […]