Cringe-Inducing Translation Errors (Spanish/English)

As seen in Las Vegas. Photo by Judy Jenner.  It's time to laugh, dear colleagues! Well, or cry, or cringe, or be mortified. Have a look at these hilarious Spanish-English translation errors, mainly found on signs in public spaces, courtesy of the Huffington Post. We've been taking pictures of bad translations ourselves for years, sometimes risking our personal safety to do so  (turns out that some business...

Bad Habits

It's time to confess that, not surprisingly, we have plenty of bad habits. Some of them are translation-related while others have to do with business practices. We would love to hear yours, but we figured Judy would start out with a list of her bad habits: Eating at my desk. I know it's good for you to sit at an actual table, enjoy a meal and not multi-task while eating. However, for one reason or another, I frequently...

English-Spanish Contrastive Analysis Workshop

On April 6, well-known Spanish translator and trainer Xosé Castro will come to this side of the pond to give a full-day workshop on contrastive grammar analysis. The event will take place in southern California, at Cal Poly Pomona, to be specific. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of hearing Xosé speak at an annual American Translators Association (ATA) conference or elsewhere, you are in for a treat:...

Entrepreneurial Linguist Workshops in Europe

In Utrecht, the Netherlands. It's official: Judy and her Entrepreneurial Linguist workshops will come to Europe again this summer -- in August and September, to be precise. While we are still working on finalizing dates, we are already talking to some associations in several countries about coming to their neck of the woods to share what we know with their linguists. There are several workshops to choose from, including...

You Don't Need an Interpreter!

Those who interpret in community and court settings will probably be quite familiar with this interesting species: the person who does not really need an interpreter, but who requests one (and is certainly mostly entitled to one) anyway. We've never personally seen this happen in conference interpreting settings (or at least we don't find out, but we have heard of conference attendees who get a headset to listen to...