Brave New Words

It’s time for me to have a summer break. Enjoy the warmer weather and see you back here before too long.

I like Michael Rosen’s work for children (I use The Sad Book in my children’s literature course at the university) and I’m always intereste...

Ah, translators! Invisible, overworked, underpaid, and…underloved? Check out the Love Your Translator campaign and Facebook page . Get som...

This online translation agency is large, seems to pay fairly, and has received quite a bit of recognition. I have never worked with them, b...

This comedy sketch may be old news to some of you, but I only recently was introduced to it and it made me laugh. It’s about how difficult ...

Alex Rawlings is a polyglot who blogs about it here and also teaches workshops on it.

A couple of months ago, Swedish TV4 caused a bit of a scandal when they said their subtitles were done by machine. They then backtracked on ...

This episode of the Shelf Life program from the American Museum of Natural History is all about languages and it looks really interesting. ...

Should you date or marry a translator? What would it be like? Well, this humorous link struck home. I think it’s pretty accurate!

Children’s lit is one of my big passions. I think more of it needs to be translated, and we need greater diversity in the field generally. ...

Since becoming a parent, I’ve gotten even more interested in children, their language acquisition, and their development, so I recently rea...

Brave New Reads is a great summer reading program run by Writers’ Centre Norwich. It encourages people to take a chance on books that they ...

I discovered Bilingual By Music recently and love the idea. It’s a CD set with two CDs. Each CD has children’s songs on it, but sung in two...

We all know that 5000 words in, say, German does not equal 5000 words in Russian. That can make it hard to work out fees. This word count ra...

As I’ve mentioned before, many people seem confused about the difference between translation and interpretation. So any articles that can he...

Many translators work with translation agencies, but it can be difficult to know how to first make contact with them. Someone sent me this g...

Here are some fascinating new translation stats . “How many translations are published in English and how accurate is the often quoted fig...

In the last post, I discussed Michael Erard’s book Babel No More. In the book, he offers some resources for learning more about hyperpolygl...

What is a hyperpolyglot? Someone who knows many languages. But how many? Six? Eight or more? Eleven? Or even 30? And what does “know” mean?...

If you know Swedish, you might find these educational videos useful, especially the ones on literature and language.

The sign language interpreter for Melodifestivalen (the Swedish run-up to Eurovision), Tommy Krångh, has rightfully made the news recently. ...

This blog is all about reading in translation and it has lots of great reading suggestions.

I’m loving this website, The World Atlas of Language Structures . I’m a linguaphile nerd, and it really speaks to me, plus it’s useful!

A few weeks ago, I referred to one language app, and now I’ve been told about another , the “Vocabulary Trainer”. It’s a “a mobile app to le...

These pictures of the Indo-European and Uralic language family trees are lovely, and also quite helpful.

I read a couple of interesting articles recently on bilingualism. It’s such a shame that in English-speaking countries, we generally don’t s...

I really like this visual guide to translations that will be published in English in 2015, but one thing I noticed is that very few of the ...

I recently learned about the Historical Thesaurus of English . What a wonderful reference tool!

As a translator, I’m often suspicious of computer programmes or apps that purport to do what we do, and to do it as well as we do. But there...

I was pleased to see that Translation Journal seems to have relaunched. It contains a number of interesting articles about translation (I’v...

This list offers advice for translators, and it includes a mention of me. Tip 1 is to “Make your skills known to family and acquaintances...

Check out this journal . It accepts work translated to English, as long as it hasn’t previously been published in English, and is on Jewish...

I receive a lot of emails from people looking to get into translation and many of the questions I’m asked are common. So occasionally I try...

Check out this blog . It has a lot of fascinating posts about “editing, usage, prescriptivism and descriptivism, and other language issues.”

I was recently told about the Little Red Schoolhouse writing method and form of writing instruction, which was started at the University o...

Many people have told me that children are essentially conservative readers and that they don’t want to read about people from other countri...

Crowdfunding and sponsoring are major trends these days. They seem to be ways of avoiding big companies, or minimizing stress, or trying ou...

SELTA is the Swedish-English Literary Translators’ Association, of which I’m a member. SELTA has recently updated its website, adding more m...

Time for a break from blogging. Have a lovely holiday season and happy new year! See you back here in 2015!

Here’s a load of reading/viewing for the holiday season. It’ll keep you busy if you get tired of all the eating and shopping and spending ti...