I used to volunteer at Oxfam, back in the days when I had spare time. And at Oxfam, you meet all sorts of random characters: students, OAPs, antique hunters, book collectors, people on a budget and people trying to save things from the landfill. With all of these different personalities coming together for the Great Bargain Quest, you are bound to hear some rather interesting opinions… Once, while I was ringing up a man’s purchase, he commented: “why is it that Americans and Australians are the only ones who come to the UK, but never try to speak like the British?”

It seemed to me that he thought British English was superior to my American English, and that Americans/Australians should try a bit harder to assimilate. I really didn’t know what to say to that! I think I managed some random explanation about how people who come to the UK from non-English speaking countries use British English as their model, but I was a native English speaker, so why should I try to say tom-ah-to instead of tom-ay-to?

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‘A single 30 minute lesson’ would probably be the answer to that questions from many of my collegiate peers past, but are we really, scientifically, limited by anything other than apathy?

It is true that there is a critical period for learning one’s native language as a child: feral children raised in solitude without any linguistic stimuli (or ‘negative feedback’ as it’s technically called) prove this when they are returned to society in their teens, yet remain unable to string together even a simple sentence. But what about the acquisition of a second, third, fourth or even fifth language?

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Now, the unwritten rules of this company blog (which, post-ironically, have been written down), clearly state that any self, or client slanted, promotion is punishable by death: we have a website for such things. Having said that, and at the risk of corporate punishment, two projects deserve to have at least a little digital ink spent on them…

Most summers are remembered by an effeminate pop song, the social slaughter that is Big Brother and, in this country at least, an ongoing disappointment at the crude and rainy weather. Not so for Jenn, though, Chief Project Manager here at Web-Translations, who was pinned down with the task of coordinating the translation, localisation and launch of over 2000 products and 500, 000 words into German for online camera specialists, Warehouse Express.

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UKTI has earmarked the countries that will be the next big thing in terms of International Trade.

The emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China will continue to be key areas for companies trading internationally, but a report commissioned by UKTI has identified Vietnam, Mexico, Ukraine, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates as the new high-growth markets.

The “Tomorrow’s Markets” report also lists Indonesia, Poland, South Africa and Argentina among the priority markets for expansion - these countries have huge potential for investors and look set to provide companies with a similar level of success and growth that has been experienced in China and India.

So, we could soon start to see an increase in demand for Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and the other languages spoken in these emerging market countries as UK companies turn their attention there. Here’s hoping!

Motorists in Swansea had to do a double take this week when a Welsh road sign told them: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

Unaware of the real meaning, Council officials had the Welsh text printed on the road sign under the original English, which cautions: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.”

The blunder happened when the council emailed its in-house team for a translation, as all road signs in Wales have to be bilingual, only to receive a Welsh reply which they failed to realise was an automated out of office notification. They only became aware of their rather embarrassing mistake when Welsh-speakers pointed it out.

The moral of this tale; always get your translations checked by a native speaker….

This blog post is dedicated to all of the Céciles, Célines, Josés and Frédérics out there…

An easy way to make someone feel appreciated is to get their name right!  (I’m sorry, Petar, for writing “Peter” in my email last week…)  It does get a bit tricky when you are writing to Jesús or Agnès, however, as to really get their name right you need to stick in one of those funny accent marks…

The obvious way is to click the “insert symbol” function in Word or Outlook and look through all of the characters until you find the one you need, but this can sometimes take a while.  When I was at university, typing out too many French essays, I reassigned the functions of all the function keys on my laptop, so that when I hit “F2″, an “à” appeared, and “F3″ an “è”, etc.  (I don’t think it worked for F1 for some reason.)  I re-learnt to type with an extra row of keys and it really did speed up my essay-writing!

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This post doesn’t strictly relate to translation, rather just words themselves in whatever beautiful language they may be - or not, as is in fact the case in this post - either way, do read on…

Reading is a multi cognitive process that has us decoding symbols in order to derive meaning. Once the retina recognises a set of symbols, the primary visual cortex processes them and then Wernicke’s area interprets them.

Convention has us arrange the symbols in a certain way and deviation from that pattern is discouraged. This is in order to maintain understandability across generations and to aid the formation of new words acording to the rules already in place.

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The greatest - and I do mean greatest - quote by any non native in a second language has to be that belonging to US President, J. F. Kennedy. On June 26th 1963 he declared ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. Here comes the shocking part: he did not categorise himself as a jelly filled doughnut in saying those words, as the whole world, it seems, thinks he did.

In fact, according to the nuances of German, his translation of ‘I am a person of Berlin’ was perfect, as should any translation be. And that includes the punctuation, and brings me nicely to the topic of this entry: foreign quotation marks.

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Talking plants are no longer the works of fantasy or science fiction - a far cry from the intimidating Audrey II of The Little Shop of Horrors, and its sinister appetite, a plant in a Japanese cafe has become the world’s first non-human blogger, claim scientists.

Japanese IT company KAYAC Co., Ltd. has developed a sophisticated botanical interface system that allows plants to post their “thoughts” or impulses online.

Satoshi Kuribayashi, who is part of the project at Keio University, says that the aim of the project is to study ways of communicating with plants, and reveal something about their internal world:

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Recently, we had a .ttx file that would not clean up. We tried the usual tricks, including putting the Excel source file in the same folder as the .ttx, and naming the source file exactly the same name as the .ttx file, but nothing seemed to work. The error message we kept getting was:

“Unable to locate original file. Please copy this original file into directory above and try again. File skipped!”

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