When it comes to native speakers, English actually fares pretty poorly; there are more native speakers of Spanish and Mandarin than there are of English. But in terms of the total number of speakers, both native and as a secondary language, there’s really no comparison - there are believed to…
There’s a bit of argument over who translated the Bible into English. Officially, the translation was completed by John Wycliffe, and that’s the name you’ll stumble across if you search for information about Bible translations into English. However, there is evidence that sections of the Bible were translated long before…
When we talk about the English language, we’re usually referring to one of two forms of English. Quite often, this is British English. After all, the English language evolved in England! However, at other times we may be referring to American English, quite simply because the United States has the…
When entering a new market, it’s a good idea to know what type of translation you need to use. Do you need a standardized translation, or does your work need to be translated more deeply, to take into account local dialect? Making this distinction is essential for ensuring the audience…
German fairy tales have had a profound impact on children around the world for multiple centuries. Tales like Rapunzel, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood continue to be popular in a plethora of non-German speaking countries. Of course, such popularity is only possible because fairy tale collections like Grimm's…
It’s safe to say that William Shakespeare is one of the most headache-inducing playwrights of all time. His plays – and his language – are the source of much discontent for many school and college students around the world, and yet it’s this seemingly incoherent jumble of Middle English, foreign…
While we may well have a few colloquialisms of our own, we can’t deny that no one does slang quite like the British. In fact, it’s been taking over for a while. A few years ago, the BBC reported that ‘slanglish’ had become ‘the ordinary way of speaking for many…
What are the characteristics of a good freelance translator? Do they need to have native fluency in the source and destination languages? We all know of people who grew up bilingual but if you ask them, they’ll admit that they speak one language better than the other. Still, it’s always…
Language is a complicated phenomenon. It exists all around the world but in various different forms. However, an interesting thing is that many languages are related to each other because they come from the same root. For example, there are many similarities between English and French. There are also many…
In the United States, children and adults alike are pretty accustomed to their fairy tales ending with the phrase "and they all lived happily ever after," or at least a phrase very similar to that, but the Brothers Grimm fairy tales did not originally end on such happy notes. In…