Translating into English has a lot of advantages due to English’s status as an international lingua franca. Resources are abundant. You can find texts written originally in English on nearly any subject, which I assume is less true for those translating into, say, Icelandic. For academic texts, the author likely did much reading in English […]
Choosing a translator wisely to avoid embarrassment Translation clients are often buying blind. They seldom know what they are paying for, especially when buying a translation into a language other than their own. Translations are definitely not all born equal, evident to anyone who has experienced the pain, amusement or confusion of reading a bad […]
Ideas for common, hard-to-translate words and phrases – Italian to English A substantial portion of most translation is fairly clear-cut. “Zimbabwe” is pretty much always “Zimbabwe” and “cinque” is usually “five.” Then, there’s the rest of the text that takes extra thought, creativity and research. If I write “gastronomy,” will English-speaking readers imagine “gastrointestinal disorders” […]
A Feather Green: Comparing the habits of Italian and English Growing up in a small Oregon town in the United States, everyone I knew spoke only English all the time. It was pretty late in the game that I realized that there were other languages at all. Finding it already mind-bogglingly silly that other people […]