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
Read More...
Korean novel The Vegetarian, a dark tale about a woman who decides to stop eating meat and become a tree, was last week awarded the coveted Man Booker International prize, which is shared equally between its Korean author Han Kang and its English translator, Deborah Smith. With the popularity of translated fiction ever on the
Read More...
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
Read More...
English is such a wonderfully ‘bendy’ language that allows for all sorts of sentence structures, repurposes words for new meanings and turns adjectives into nouns at the drop of a hat (‘I had 3 new likes on Facebook today!’). Unfortunately, German isn’t quite so flexible, owing to its more complex grammatical structure. So when we
Read More...
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
Read More...
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
Read More...
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
Read More...
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
Read More...
Translating marketing texts can be a tricky thing. We need to relay the information from the source text and make sure it sounds beautiful in the target language at the same time. Here are our top 5 tips for good copywriting that also apply to translation. Research your audience Before you start translating, find out
Read More...
“I have bumble bees in my butt”, I once told a friend. He couldn’t stop laughing. Apparently, unlike Germans, the English don’t get bitten by bumble bees when they feel restless – they have ants in their pants. Both seems equally uncomfortable. But knowing these little nuances of languages is the first step to really
Read More...