QuickSilver Translate is at the forefront of Fire Safety translation and localisation; our President, Colin Whiteley, has had 30 years in international management positions in this industry. As Tyco International’s former Global Director of Marketing and Communications, Colin has unmatched, first-hand experience of the issues and challenges of producing and maintaining multilingual documentation.
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication. Hans Georg Gadamer UNTRANSLATABLE WORDS #19: Kwarandzyey azMamweg (Korandje) – “dates that aren’t quite ripe yet, but that already ooze honey if you bruise them”
In modern English, express is a verb meaning – broadly – to convey information, generally of a more personal nature, as well as an adjective meaning very fast. From the verb, we have formulas such as ‘expression of regret’, ‘self-expression’, ‘expressing milk’, whilst we get ‘express train’ and ‘express delivery’ from the adjective. The word […]
Why do we write Don Quixote with an x when in Spanish it’s written “don Quijote”? And why is it “Don Quichotte” in France and “Don Chisciotte” in Italy? When Cervantes wrote the novel in the early 17th century, he wrote “Don Quixote de la Mancha”, pronounced kish’ote where the -x- was like the first […]
It’s time I mentioned my favourite book on translation: Le Ton beau de Marot – In Praise of the Music of Language, by Douglas Hofstadter, whom many will know as the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Le Ton Beau (a play on words on “tombeau”) takes as its starting point a […]
Proto Indo-European, the hypothetical language from which all IE languages evolved, had three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Most modern descendents have retained 2 or 3 of these genders.