One of our studio spotted a howler on the behalf of his alma mater. Cambridge University classics faculty has just opened a shiny extension building. In keeping with their studies, the doors have been decorated with a quotation in ancient Greek.
The quote is Aristotle, meaning “All men by nature desire to know”. Unfortunately whoever was responsible for lettering the door did not know Read More
A poster campaign caught my eye recently – for two very different reasons.
The extent that other languages are permeated by English is in the news again, with an interesting article in yesterday’s Independent: “France tries to halt march of English”.
The French government is keen to replace currently used anglicisms for 21st century phenomena with French-sounding words. This week saw the results of a competition open to schoolchildren and students to do just that.
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Regular readers will notice this blog has a new look. We have tried to keep a very simple look that is easy on the eye and hopefully a stimulating read.
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I came across this picture gallery of classic movie posters, as part of a recent Guardian article called ‘The Story of O’, a diverting little piece about the letter O in type and design.
Designers would probably start thinking how about how the ‘O’ cleverly combines textual and visual representation to deliver a single message, as with this poster for The Simpsons Movie:
We, on the hand, tutted knowingly, Read More
As a Scot – and an Ayrshire Scot at that – Robert Burns and his poetry have always been important to me and I’ll be raising a glass to his ‘immortal memory’ tonight as Scots the world over celebrate Burns night.
The unofficial national bard of Scotland (and voted the greatest ever Scot in a TV poll), Burns was by far the most important poet to write in the Scots dialect. Read More
How do you spell Portuguese? In English, many people forget to put in that second ‘u’, but Portuguese speakers across the world, whether in Portugal, Brazil, Angola or Macau, are likely to spell it correctly: português.
One reason it’s easy to get correct is because Portuguese spelling, unlike English, is largely phonetic. But what happens in the cases when it’s not? And what happens when words have alternate pronunciations? Read More
Our production manager Sanjoy Roy highlights a common confusion about Bengali usage
The Bengali language is the language of Bengal, right? Well, not wrong – but it’s not as simple as that. In the UK there’s quite a lot of confusion about what Bengali is, so I’ll try to clarify that here.
First, let me illustrate the problem. I live in Whitechapel, in East London, which has one of the highest densities of Bengalis in the country. My father, who was born in Dhaka and grew up in Kolkata, is a native Bengali speaker. But when he comes to visit me in Whitechapel, he can’t understand what the local Bengalis are saying. Yet he has no problem reading the shop signs and street names written in Bengali. What’s going on? Read More
Taking Translation to Clerkenwell Design Week
The signs are up, the windows dressed, the installations in place.“Clerkenwell Design Week” started yesterday and is set to finish tomorrow. Now that’s somewhat short of a week, but no less interesting for it as the streets are full of “design” of all sorts.
image: Clerkenwell Design Week
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