Welcome to this week’s Creative Hour here at AJT – we’re so glad you’re joining us. What’s the idea? The aim of this transcreation exercise is to brainstorm creative ideas under time pressure. Set yourself a time limit between 30 to 60 minutes for this exercise. What are we doing exactly? Our objective is to come up with
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It is the month of July which means that Camp NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is upon us. Camp NaNoWriMo unites writers across the globe as they try to hit their personal word count goals. Participating in this creative endeavour are two of our in-house translators who are busy devising intriguing plot twists and working hard
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A few weeks ago at the ITI Conference in Sheffield, Adam Fuss, a Russian to English freelance translator and strategic communications consultant, gave a presentation entitled “Translators as communicators – diversifying your career’. During his talk, Adam argued that there is plenty of scope for translators to diversify their service offering. Rather than confining himself to
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When it comes to communicating with each other, grammar plays a role of the utmost importance; without grammar, we would be unable to construct intelligible sentences. However, as an active part of any language, grammar is bound to evolve with time, and not everyone experiences this change in the same way. Find out if you
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With summer only one month away and the sun making a comeback in Cornwall, it’s difficult not to feel the call of the sea. This is why Anja is taking Team AJT on an exciting surf lesson today. So let’s celebrate the beauty of the Newquay seaside with idioms from across the sea. It will
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Tone of voice is a big part of our translation work. In order to accurately convey our client’s message in another language, we need to understand who they are themselves, who their potential customers are and how they want to come across to those potential customers. When working with bigger brands, we often receive a very well-defined style guide
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Last week we looked at writing to a brief – how we can write in a particular way to influence how the reader thinks or feels. The way we do this is by adapting our tone of voice. In this week’s creative hour we will adapt the tone of voice of an existing piece of text. You could do
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We’ve received some wonderful feedback from our translator colleagues about our blog on creative writing for translators, so we thought we would publish this week’s task so you can join us and try it out for yourself! This week, we will focus on writing to a brief. What to do Find a hotel somewhere close-by and go in for
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Inspired by the concept of Feeding – a brilliant idea from the copywriting power house that is Stranger Collective – we recently introduced a ‘creative final hour’ in our office. Every Friday, we like to use the last hour in the office (or out of the office!) to actively broaden our horizons, research language-related topics, share our linguistic knowledge and get
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The main rule of French cuisine is that everything tastes better when smothered in butter, absolutely everything! Do you know why the French (and myself included of course), actually eat escargots? This chewy piece of rubber merely serves as an excuse to fancily sip on tiny cups full of buttery extravagance. So, if butter can actually
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