Category: Blog

A statistical portrait – 2017 Edition (by Eurostat) At home, at work, at school… … there are large differences between the lives of women and men in Europe, but there are also similarities. This digital publication The life of women and men in Europe – a statistical portrait aims at comparing women and men in…

Last week, Google announced “Pixel Buds” — wireless headphones that can translate 40 languages on the fly.  It’s impressive, but most translators don’t worry for their jobs any time soon. Others are more pessimistic: One said it will “[destroy] my profession.”In Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy” series, a Babel Fish is a small…

We recently had the opportunity to provide Chinese interpreting services at a chemical regulatory event focusing on Asia. The location of the conference was Brussels, Belgium. The participants were from the European and Asian chemical industries; most of them were from the regulatory field. Therefore the presentations were quite technical, specific to chemicals. The interpreting…

To help make the European debate decent and civilised, it is now more important than ever to value the skills of the linguist. I began learning German at the age of 13, and I’m still trying to explain to myself why it was love at first sound. The answer must surely be: the excellence of…

We humans are swamped with text. It’s not just news and other timely information: Regular people are drowning in legal documents. The problem is so bad we mostly ignore it. Every time a person uses a store’s loyalty rewards card or connects to an online service, his or her activities are governed by the equivalent…

In these 2+1 videos (the +1 will be a surprise at the end of this post) you can take a deeper look into the process how fictional/fantasy languages can be created. Like almost all studies and articles related to this topic, we must start with the grandfather of all these language inventing methods, J.R.R. Tolkien.…

Some languages, like French, have an official body that decides how words can and cannot be used. English, as a flexible, global language, has no such designated referee. Therefore, there is no definitive answer to whether you’re using a word “correctly.” It’s all a matter of taste and context. But there are opinions. And some…

Interesting article recently posted on www.mic.com Being bilingual already has a long list of benefits. Research suggests that it boosts creativity and memory, strengthens multitasking and slows down the onset of dementia. But in case these benefits don’t already outweigh the monotony of memorizing grammar structures and vocabulary lists, here’s one more: Bilingualism seems to…

There are some differences in Standard German as used in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, mostly in style and syntax, but other than cultural specifics, much of the vocabulary is the same. In translating general topics, there is normally no need to cater individual variants. But marketing, social media or other direct types of content may…