As we’ve seen throughout our series of Translation Postcards, you can find translators in historic villages, towns and cities all over the world, but few of us live in a place that boasts over 3,400 years of recorded history. Home to Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, Athens (Αθήνα) is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilisation and the birthplace of democracy, largely because of its cultural and political impact on the European continent, and in particular the Romans.
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Is your email inbox kept as a to-do list? Often, people leave “to-do” emails in their inbox until they are completed. After completion, the email is categorized or deleted, thus removing it from the inbox.
Many are the reasons we change countries in the course of our lives. For the majority of us, those reasons are innocuous enough – we are drawn to different cultures, or climates, or lured by romance. And yet such life choices are sometimes far harder, as we’ll see in the case of translator and interpreter Mahdi Abdulbasit, who fled Ethiopia for Egypt in 2016.
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Persecution: enslavement, forced assimilation, segregation, genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II, and other human rights violations – the history, both ancient and modern, of the Roma of East-Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, is a litany of suffering.
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In this week’s Language Watch, we head for the first time to Canada, and the indigenous peoples known collectively as the First Nations. We zoom in on the northern boreal and Arctic regions and on the Dene people, who speak a group of languages that are described as Northern Athabaskan.
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In the series on 50 Steps to optimising your ProZ Profile being discussed at the Translators and Interpreters (ProZ.com) facebook group, group moderator and author Andrew Morris has turned the group's attention to recommendations.
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Translating means allowing everyone to understand the world and to be understood. A real gift that people working into the localization industry offer every day to everyone who needs to communicate or understand a message in another language.
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It may not be a pretty city, but it’s certainly a historic one, with roots that date back to the pre-Viking, Anglo-Saxon era, and a port that was already a busy international transit hub when William the Conqueror was on the throne in the 11th century. Some of the ancient city walls are still visible – the most famous relic being the iconic Bargate.
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The world’s deaf communities have long suffered from discrimination. Aristotle himself deemed the deaf unteachable, paving the way for centuries of prejudice. It was not until the 16th century that Italian physician Girolamo Cardano proclaimed that the deaf-mute people could “hear by reading and speak by writing”.
So how does a man born in South Africa, brought up in Mozambique and educated in Malawi end up as a medical interpreter in Fortaleza in Brazil?
In fact it turns out the story’s logical enough, especially as Mozambique and Brazil share the same language. Carlos Kwengwe’s mother is a white Brazilian, who met his father, a black Mozambican, when they were studying together in Brazil in the 80s, at a time when Mozambique was still being torn apart by civil war.
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In fact it turns out the story’s logical enough, especially as Mozambique and Brazil share the same language. Carlos Kwengwe’s mother is a white Brazilian, who met his father, a black Mozambican, when they were studying together in Brazil in the 80s, at a time when Mozambique was still being torn apart by civil war.
Take a look at the video below and within seconds you’ll realise where we’re headed in this week’s Language Watch. So far in our series, we’ve travelled to Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Europe, shining a spotlight each time on minority and endangered languages throughout the world. Now for the first time, we’re in Oceania, in Australia’s Northern Territory to be precise, and the world of the Yolŋu Aboriginal people.
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As a language professional, do everything you can to boost your chances of success. Here's a short video from director of training Paul Urwin with some tips for connecting with translation agencies via email.
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Have you heard of project milestones? As a freelancer, you have likely come across this term but may not have yet implemented it into your project management systems.
Long-term projects need milestones. They help the freelancer stay on track and also make sure that you are getting paid along the way.
It’s the city that gave us both Lionel Messi and Che Guevara, and the birthplace of the Argentine national flag. For those reasons alone it’s worth taking a much closer look at Rosario, the third largest city in Argentina, set on the pampas alongside the broad brown waters of the Paraná, which gets its oxide and colour from its origins far to the north in Brazil. Scorching hot in summer, and cold and wet in winter, at least Rosario escapes the snow.
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Some of the communities and languages we focus on in this series may be vaguely familiar to you. Many others are completely unknown in the wider world – and barely even recognised or understood in the countries in which they have lived for centuries. Such is the case of the Mru people of Bangladesh – one of the many tribes that populate the Chittagong Hill Tracts, an underdeveloped and heavily militarised region in the South-East of what is already a country facing momentous struggles of its own.
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