Closer wor(l)ds – a blog for linguists

28 January 2014

Challenges in translating for the advertising industry

Advertising is a world of compelling imagery and deftly wielded wordplay, and writing captivating copy for an advertisement is probably one of the hardest things to […]
13 December 2013

Childhood playground games – a multilingual comparison of etymology

Ah, childhood games! I bet all of you look back at those (more or less distant) times with pleasure and maybe a bit of nostalgia. Those […]
31 October 2013

The potential magnitude of translation errors

In 2004, four people died of massive radiation overdose in a hospital in France. The problem was not one of wrong diagnosis or equipment malfunction: it […]
24 October 2013

Famous cross-cultural blunders in translation

Translation is an art form as much as it is a science. That being the case, it is subject to the quirks of both: from an […]
30 September 2013

The history of translation

The Story of Language Language is one of the most powerful mediums of communication known to man. Before the advent of the spoken word, humans had […]
30 August 2013

Challenges in translating poetry

Some while ago I wrote a post on the challenges in translating films and I thought it would be interesting to turn this into a series, […]
21 August 2013

Guess the idiom (multilingual)

While on Twitter these days, I came across a resource with the strangest/funniest idioms in different languages and remembered a session during my studies where we had […]
19 July 2013

Do we always need ‘translation’?

The answer to the question largely depends on who you are. One may need the services of a professional translator for an official document – which […]
10 July 2013

On translation tests and why we don’t believe in them

If you need to build your house, are you going to ask the builder to build you a free garage first? Shouldn’t you better look at […]