Last Monday the literary world mourned the death of two famous writers. In the southern hemisphere, at the age of 74, Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano passed away after a long battle with lung cancer. Thirteen years older and an ocean away, German writer and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass also parted due to a lung infection. The […]
For those of us who aren’t too familiar with Hebrew and Yiddish, one language may be associated easily with the other when discussing either. However, the languages are very dissimilar, and it’s a more-common-that-not mistake to confuse them or believe that if a person speaks one of the languages then they must also speak the […]
A funny screenshot of a television series is passing around several websites, whose title reads “Woman Crying in Spanish” as an explanation of what is happening on screen. Of course, it’s not possible to cry in a specific language…or is it? Those who have had babies learn, over time, to identify different types of crying […]
Sometimes resulting from the decision of record producers, and at other times being part of the artistic expansion of singers and composers, as of the middle of the past century translation has entered the musical realm. In fact, through translation, songs were created that, at times, gained greater popularity than their originals. “My Way,” written […]
In working as translators, we always come across words that are difficult to translate. We’ve spoken on other occasions about how certain languages use words that are curiously specific and even impossibly specific to describe actions or situations that in another language would require a longer explanation. Today we present a few more to satisfy […]
On this blog we have often insisted about the importance of hiring a professional translator when in need of a translation. And we have also spoken on more than one occasion about the importance of localization. In this post we’ll offer a few examples from the world of advertising in which evidently there has been […]
In this post from last year, we presented some words with oddly specific meanings. Frequently, this specificity makes it difficult to translate these words (or makes them almost untranslatable, as oftentimes the translator ends up explaining them instead of translating them since they have no close equivalent). It is exactly this which makes them particularly […]
Switzerland is a country that provokes curiosity or fantasies in many people, whether because of its banks, its eternal neutrality, direct democracy, precise watches, beautiful scenery, Swiss Army knives, and finally, for having four official languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh). Not all Swiss people speak the four languages, of course, but the majority of […]
In a recent post we wrote about the longest words in world, and commented on the particular power of synthesis and specificity that the German language has which allows it to construct compound words of undetermined length. Now, not only does German have a very particular power of specificity, but rather practically all languages have […]
In a post at the beginning of this year, we were introduced to the marvelous world of compound words and the German language. As explained in the post, the German language has a characteristic that allows one to construct compound words. On one hand, this allows for an incomparable power synthesis, as we find in […]