Politico: The Schuman Trophy has been a fixture on the Commission’s calendar for 20 years, with teams from each department playing each other and raising money for children’s charities. But this year’s event — held on May 21 and sponsored by the likes of Volvo and Belgian financial services firm Easyvest — ended in chaos…
I fear a British employment tribunal is about to give undue weight to an exceptionally everyday Portuguese curse. But José “translator” Mourinho should be able to wriggle his way out of that, and if he can’t then he can probably afford it.
In Spanish etc., campsite > camping, carpark > parking, etc., but then in German happy ending > happy End. Who cares? End is a genital euphemism in English, so a happy ending in a London massage parlour loses nothing in translation. The Happy End of Georg Anton Benda’s version of Romeo and Juliet is more…
The local branch of the Canute Society is campaigning against the (incorrect and correct) use of English in advertising: The RAE “no es una startup.” Confirmation in this video. ¡Numancia romana! Buenos días. pic.twitter.com/gIJ3hr1TqN — Maestro Ciruela (@Master_Plum) May 19, 2016 Tralala.
To the extent that she is not merely chucking us clickbait, Elena Horrillo’s piece on supposedly untranslatable Spanish expressions suggests she hasn’t read the English Wikipedia article, some of which has been translated into Spanish. Translating difficult expressions, sayings and proverbs like those cited was already a minor industry in the late Middle Ages (anyone…
Man who can’t write English got a piece of paper from Harvard Business School. No problem: been there, seen that, finishing school for the N American ruling caste. But same man has got 307K followers on Twitter – even more than the Singing Organ Grinder – many of whom attach symbolic, patriotic importance to his…
Wading through a Francophone African legal swamp, where jurisprudence grows out of the barrel of a gun, one is reminded of early translators’ struggles with Montaigne: John Florio (beware of noisome loons who think he’s Shakespeare), 1603: In summe, if any thinke he could do better, let him trie; then will he better thinke of…
Why pleb-speakers (I’d have thought of Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks(!) before Italians, not to mention the Cataloonies, who a few years ago thought the world was tilting their way…) from outside the EU core will never get a job there. What an immense mess, and how immensely profitable for some.
Tim Parks slags some prominent Italian-English literary translators and praises some lesser-known ones in the New York Review of Books: The problem is that it is hard for the wider public or even the critics really to know whether they have been given a good translation, and not easy even for the editors who have…
Someone sent me the item about the drunken Galician whoremonger who got trapped in a lavoir (Spanish narrative), and I put it on in the background. Galician normally sounds like dodgy rural Spanish with a bit of Portuguese thrown in, but the first interviewee threw me completely. A completely new dialect? Nope: check his front…