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…
David Torres Ortún (cache) re the Spanish dubbing of The Hateful Eight aka Los odiosos ocho: Hay dos problemas principales con la traducción de las películas de Tarantino, que también aparecen en Los Odiosos Ocho: Uno es la desidia, un error bastante común es traducir de forma inadecuada la palabra fuck, y en especial fucking…
An Italian libertarian tells me that she and some friends booked to Burning Man were surprised to land in Solihull. Refugees from London are now rowing up the M6 to Burning Man aka Birmingham, Brighton and then Bath and Bristol having become too expensive, but best British value is still to be found in Boro,…
The emerging narrative seems to be that the mass sexual assaults in Cologne and other places during the New Year celebrations confronted on the one hand white left-wing institutional racism and sexism (brown men can do no ill, for all Rolf Jäger’s (misreported?) fine words) with on the other hand brown right-wing popular racism and…
Moving house, so orders may take longer until mid-February - mail me first if in doubt. Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss
