Lost in translation: Eight of our favourite untranslatables!

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a document translation company, a concept we find particularly interesting is that of untranslatability. By this, we mean a single word in one language, for which no equivalent single word exists in another language. Everything is translatable, to a certain extent, but it’s these unique words with no precise one-to-one counterpart, that […]

Translation – Or How To Close A Sale With A Bit Of Effort

An anonymous German businessman is credited with the quote “When I’m selling, I’ll speak your language.  When I’m buying, you’ll speak mine.”.  Whether or not the source of the quote is true, the accuracy of it is hard to dispute.  One of the great ironies of the growth of international trade is that in a […]

Keeping Translations On Target

Back in the 1950s, IBM calculated that translating a short piece of text required more than double the number of computing instructions needed to simulate a guided missile in flight. While computing power has increased literally exponentially since then, improvements in machine translation have not kept pace. That there have certainly been improvements is beyond […]

What The Cold War Can Teach Us About Translation

Back in the days of the cold war, two diplomats, who’d both been athletes in their youth, decided to have a race.  In the U.S. it was reported as follows: yesterday a U.S. diplomat and a Russian diplomat had a race.  The U.S. diplomat won.  In Russia it was reported as follows: yesterday there was […]

Translation And The Rise Of The Machines

Computers have undoubtedly changed the world, although often not in the ways people initially imagined.  IBM for example confidently predicted a world where computers would be better than humans in numerous ways.  Their famous Deep Blue computer finally best chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, although that game was far from without controversy as there […]

Translating – When All Is Said And Done, That’s Exactly What It Is

There’s an old joke about an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German discussing languages. The Frenchman argued that French was the best language in the world as it was the language of romance. The German argued that German was the best language in the world, because it the language of discovery of thought and science. […]

A Home Without Rent?

The idea behind the working holiday visa is to allow people to explore and experience Australia, paying their way as they go.  Many travellers go about this task the conventional way of finding a job and a place to live within travelling distance of the job, but there are other approaches.  House-sitting is a popular […]