French and French Canadian

By Celine Imbaud   Just as Great Britain and the USA are divided by a common language, so are France and their former colony in the Americas, Canada. In fact the dichotomy here is even bigger than between the two versions of English. While it is widely known that Canada is the second largest area [...]

How to write a good source file

By Celine Imbaud When writing, your intended audience is important. This is especially true when you are writing for an international audience. When you are preparing a document that is to be translated, this is exactly what you are doing. It is good to write with your entire audience in mind. The garbage in, garbage [...]

Concordances, dictionaries and thesauri, oh my!

Concordances, dictionaries and thesauri are all related tools, each with the purpose of helping the linguist to select the correct term. They are also unique, each providing valuable assistance to the linguist in its own way.   Concordances do not attempt to define words, but instead show the word as used in a variety of [...]

Screen translation and text Expansion for the Movie and Televison

Recently a friend, who is a graphics editor, made a comment about the translations of a video he was editing being longer than the original dialog, which was causing obvious problems for captioning purposes. “After all why use two words when five will do instead!” he said. Despite his lack of linguistic knowledge, my friend [...]

Fat Tuesday Celebrations Around the World

By Celine Imbaud Fat Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. As Lent is a season of penance and strict self-discipline, Fat Tuesday in many countries has become a day of celebration before it begins. Here are some of the Fat Tuesday traditions from around the world. In England [...]

English and French, a match made in…Hastings?

By Celine Imbaud English is a Germanic language, but its native speakers will find it more difficult to draw parallels between it and its sister languages, German and Dutch, than for example speakers of Spanish and Italian, which are Latin-based languages where the connections are much more apparent. English is a Germanic language, but its [...]