On the elegance of sleepers
Yesterday I spent a pleasant afternoon trawling Barcelona’s bookshops for Viscount Lascano Tegui’s De la elegancia mientras se duerme. The Viscount was not actually a viscount, but an Argentinian...
View ArticleTranslation Journal Digest
There is a wide selection of magazines and journals related to translating, interpreting and linguistics on the outstanding Directory of Open Access Journals. I wanted to share some of the articles I...
View ArticleMiriady Gwiazd
Yesterday, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Fiesta del Chivo, I came across a word I didn’t know. It was: miríada. For my sins, I am accustomed to skipping over words that I don’t recognise, particularly in...
View ArticleMisleading food names
We have a lot of trouble with food. A tortilla de patatas, for example, could be translated as Spanish omelette. But should we assume that English speakers know that what a tortilla is? Should you...
View ArticleBorges and Thurber on the (in)fidelity of translations
“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” I came across this characteristically gnomic utterance in an essay by Borges on French writer William Beckford’s Vathek (1782). For Borges, translation...
View ArticleHummingbirds and butterflies
I came across the word picaflor in Javier Marias’ novel Corazón tan blanco. A rather lovely word which is apparently on the brink of extinction, un picaflor can refer to one of two things. The...
View ArticleWords for today
The Latin hodie, today, was an amalgamation of hoc (this) and die (day). The Italian oggi, the Spanish hoy, the Catalan avui and the Portuguese hoje are all direct descendants of hodie, via Vulgar...
View ArticleMusic and tone languages
Most people are probably familiar with the basics of tone languages, and Mandarin Chinese is the usual example. Briefly, such languages use pitch to contrast vowels (including diphthongs and...
View ArticleA Midsummer Night’s Bad Dream
Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” takes place on Midsummer Night, the magical night of the summer solstice when anything can happen, including “A Dream”. The indefinite article refers to...
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