Luxembourg: An introduction Nestled between Germany, France and Belgium, Luxembourg is inherently multicultural and, consequently, multilingual. With a population just shy of 650,000 inhabitants, the linguistic landscape is even more impressive: most Luxembourgers speak four languages and both official and unofficial communication often takes place in Luxembourgish, German, or French. English and Portuguese are popular
It’s not often that I get goose bumps during a presentation at a language industry event. But as I sat and listened to Mandy Hewett’s talk entitled ‘Collaborative translation for the future of New Zealand’ about a group of volunteer translators who set out to translate one of New Zealand’s most important documents into 30
For over a decade now, there has been an exponential increase in the public interest in how language and communication shape (or break down) prejudices and other forms of discrimination. After being taught for centuries that language is a neutral, abstract concept (“It’s just words, they don’t do any harm!”), we are now starting to
It was back to school for us recently when we dropped in at Newquay Tretherras School (NTS) to chat with a group of students about using languages at work. We’d been invited in by NTS’s careers coordinator, Sara Jeffery – herself a super-keen language teacher – to talk about how useful it can be to
What are collocations and why are they important? If you ask the average citizen what collocations are, they may not know what you’re talking about, although they will surely use them. Well everybody uses them, but most of us are not really aware of them. Even linguists struggle at first if they have to think
Working as a translator is obviously mostly done with your brain and not with your body. Translating can be quite exhausting sometimes, but here at AJT we never throw in the towel. We all love different sports whether it’s going to the gym, playing badminton or kicking a football and we try to keep our
Here at AJT, we know that language is more than just words randomly put together to form a sentence. Language is a complex and diverse organism that manifests itself not only acoustically but also visually. In one of our recent voice over projects it became obvious that a proper translation, foremost a written task, sometimes
It is commonly known that different cultures perceive and treat animals in entirely different ways: whereas dogs are seen as food in some parts of China, they are the most beloved pets in Western Europe. Cows are considered holy in India, but are the core ingredient of almost every hamburger in Great Britain. But apart
As translators, we like to keep up to date with new developments around all things language. After all, we have a responsibility to know the tools of our trade. It’s no surprise then that here at AJT, we were excited to hear that the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung (Council for German Orthography) recently published a
Although I am a native Dutch speaker and have lived in the UK for many years, I still have the occasional embarrassing steenkolenengels (literally coal English) moment. Also called Dunglish: the popular term to describe the mistakes made by some native Dutch speakers when speaking English. The Dutch term steenkolenengels goes back to the early
