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Monthly Archives: August 2009
Do you tweet basic Arabic?
A language school based in Dubai are planning to make use of Twitter to bring basic Arabic language to a worldwide audience.
Followers of the Eton Institute will get a daily lesson, containing an English transliteration of an Arabic phrase.
Posted in Arabic, foreign language Leave a comment
Sign that puts Italian translation off the rails!
Here’s a little something to put a smile on your face for a Monday morning. One of WorldAccent’s studio team recently returned from holiday, having swapped Italian typesetting for the Italian countryside.
As well as bringing back some delicious cake, he took a snap of this amusing sign from the door of his train compartment:
Yes, that [...]
Posted in Italian, funny, holiday, translation Leave a comment
iPhone calls out Arabic translation
At WorldAccent we use a mixture of PCs and Macs for our multilingual typesetting, but many of us firmly belong to the Apple camp in our hearts. So when a new iPhone app does a clever thing in the world of translation, we sit up and take notice.
One of great functions on the new [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
Their face doesn’t say it all!
It’s not just words that sometimes need translating across the globe. A study this month has concluded people from different cultures read facial expressions differently.
Research on these cultural differences, carried out by a team largely from Glasgow University, showed that East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.
“We show that Easterners [...]
Posted in Chinese, translation Leave a comment
Could French economic happiness be infectious?
The champagne corks weren’t quite popping but the French and German finance ministries were no doubt pleased with themselves last week.
The news that both economies have emerged from recession was welcome, leading French economy minister Christine Lagarde to comment “These are obviously very positive numbers, which have surprised us and made us quite happy.”
The [...]
Posted in French, German, business growth, recession, translation Leave a comment
Why FIGS translation matters to business
Look up figs in a dictionary and it will describe a fruit or the tree that produces them. In translation and localisation the word has a quite different meaning. FIGS translation is simply an acronym describing French, Italian, German and Spanish translation.
This combination of languages opens any document or product up to a wide [...]
Posted in FIGS, French, German, Italian, Spanish, localisation, translation Leave a comment
No substitute for professional translation!
Thanks to one of our readers for pointing out this news story about York council coming under fire for relying on online machine translation.
There’s a couple of funny examples but there is also an underlying serious point. If you want to communicate details and nuances of your services in a foreign language, the often [...]
Posted in foreign language, professional, translation Leave a comment
Translator behind Swedish ‘Dragon Tattoo’ revealed
Along with much of the rest of the English speaking world, the WorldAccent office has not been immune to the lure of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. For the uninitiated, crime novel “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was a massive hit last year. The second in the series “The Girl Who Played With [...]
Posted in Stieg Larsson, Swedish, literature, translation Leave a comment
Fertile Desert: Arabic short stories from the UAE