

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 […]
22nd September 2019
Kim Tran an independent interpreter who worked in the justice system for 16 years was found to be in the pay of a drugs gang in a £1m cannabis cultivation case. She was exposed as she helped detectives after the arrest of a Vietnamese gang last year. The gang ran one of the largest networks […]
12th August 2019
It’s quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages. Yet, sometimes even English doesn’t have quite the right word to express what we’re feeling. Turning to another language can solve the problem. Who isn’t familiar with the idea of the ‘Zeitgeist’? This wonderful, portmanteau (there’s another one from French) German word […]
2nd August 2019
If you were to pick a language of the future then you would probably choose Spanish or Mandarin. But – it just might be French. Today, English is still – just – the ‘lingua franca’ but did you know that this place was once held by French? It was the language of art […]