News and articles

Would you pay a fortune hiring a world-renowned star performer for your team and then leave him to fend for himself in a new world he doesn’t fully understand? We’ve blogged on exactly this subject before, but evidence continues to emerge that rugby clubs are just as bad as their footy counterparts when it comes …

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“Critically endangered” doesn’t sound like anything much to boast about – but if you’re talking about the Cornish language, then it’s time to break out the bunting and uncork the champers. Up until December 2010, it was listed by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as “extinct”, so this would appear to be …

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In today’s world of intense media scrutiny, it’s almost always bad news when “the medium becomes the message”; e.g. when a public figure wants to talk to you about something, but what actually happens is that you end up talking about the person him/herself, rather than the thing that person was trying to talk about. …

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So the BBC are being their usual snarky selves about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Mandarin exploit – a Chinese New Year speech in, yes, Chinese. Rather than lauding Zuck’s obvious linguistic achievement, Auntie chooses to lead with the insinuation that the whole thing was little more than a publicity stunt to butter up a country in …

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Watching the wall-to-wall news coverage of the backlash to the recent events in Paris, I was particularly taken by the English-speaking media’s adoption of the « Je suis Charlie » slogan. And it got me thinking… Firstly, it’s commendable – indeed mandatory – that we should stand in solidarity with the victims of such an …

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What could the translation software of the future look like? I’ve just read a fascinating article by Jost Zetzsche – who, if you haven’t heard of him, is a working translator who also writes and blogs in guru-like fashion about linguistic issues. I’d usually give you a link to the article itself, but as it’s …

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