Did you hear about the man who collects “old-timers”? 👴🏽Or that Frank Sinatra has many “evergreens”? 🌲Or the woman who was a rowing “recorder”? ▶Or how the best player on the field was the “goal man”? 🎯And how one unfortunate person was a victim of “mobbing” in the workplace? 👥 These are all actual examples […]
🟰 Words that look the same or similar in two languages but have two, at times radically, different meanings are called “false friends”. There are plenty of them in most languages, and particularly between Slovenian and the other Southern Slavic languages, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. 💁🏻 A particular false friend I love […]
Ask what’s most unique about Australian English 🪃, the answers usually are our accent and slang✔️. However, there are also a number of uniquely Australian English words in regular use, even in formal situations, that Australians are surprised to find are not used everywhere else in the English-speaking world (OK, sometimes also in New Zealand🥝, […]
Are you a fan of the cult TV comedy show The Office?🕺And which version: the UK one 🇬🇧? The US one 🇺🇸? The French one 🇫🇷? The Indian one 🇮🇳 or any of the other 13 variants made? 📣 News in is that an Australian 🇦🇺 version of The Office will be hitting our screens […]
👍The best thing about being a freelance translator is being able to work at any place at any time.👎The worst thing about being a freelancer translator is being able to work at any place at any time. This is something I say all the time 😏 🌏 In this globalised and accessible world, it’s never […]
How do you say in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin or Serbian this: “Up there, the mountains burn worse”? 👉 Gore gore gore gore. I’m not making this up 👌! This is a genuine sentence made up of four separate homonyms. And don’t bother checking it up on any machine translation tool or AI🖱 as it won’t […]
The biggest news to hit Australia 🇦🇺 this week has nothing to do with any natural disaster🔥or a major political scandal 🗯. It’s something far, far, far more groundbreaking… One of Australia’s most iconic lollies 🍬 (psst… “lolly” is the Australian term for “candy” or “sweets”) will be, to use the food wholesale term, deleted. […]
🎉 50 years ago today, the Adelaide Festival Centre, the premier performing and visual arts venue and precinct in Adelaide, Australia, opened. The centre to this day remains one of the symbols of Adelaide. 🇦🇺 🎭 I know what some of you are thinking… it looks like a boxy version of that more famous Australian […]
Translation can often be a very sedentary existence, plugging away in front of a laptop, with little or no face-to-face contact with clients👨🏻💻 But for many of my direct clients, the personal touch is very important. Like earlier this month, when I went to Oxford to meet up with a university professor friend of mine👨🎓, […]
Today (Monday), 29 May 2023 is a “bank holiday” in the United Kingdom, our third this month! 📆Now this term “bank holiday” often confuses many people not from the UK or Ireland. Does this mean that it’s a holiday for banks only? 🧐 Absolutely not! “Bank holidays” in the UK and Ireland are what are […]
