Procrastination is one of the most feared omens in the professional world. I mean how can procrastination be good when it may prevent you to deliver your projects on time? Well, I will dare say that sometimes procrastination can help! Take the following situation: you...
Today, I'm going local with this fun, hip Romanian beer brand. This is a tiny, boutique-like, high-quality beer company doing business almost exclusively in their local area (the city of Timișoara). Their name translates into English as ”The Beer Clinic” and, needless to say, everything about...
I stumbled upon this very interesting brand one day and I thought I'd share with you. Surprisingly enough, The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a wine brand based in Denver, Colorado. Why I like the brand: because it has the guts to challenge the entire traditional concept...
Because I've been a brand enthusiast for quite a while now, I decided to write every week about hip, inspirational brands. I will judge them by their statement, visual identity and philosophy, and not by the intrinsic quality of their products or services (except...
Like all professionals, translators use various tools to carry out their tasks. And life is much easier when you actually enjoy working with these tools. You have deadlines to meet, thousands of words to translate so clearly, having a crippled laptop and a sluggish CAT tool...
If you're a translator then you have surely been confronted with the issue of political correctness in your translations. Gender neutrality, addressing disadvantaged categories appropriately, choosing formal/informal tone for your texts, all of these can pose problems while translating. And I bet many of...
Language evolution is sometimes ironic and leads to surprising outcomes. It is the case of the Latin verb 'plicare' which took on opposite meanings in Romanian ('a pleca' - to leave) and Spanish ('llegar' - to arrive). The explanation is quite simple and it is...
Here's a fun fact about Romanian language. There are three semantically distinct equivalents for the English ”tree” in Romanian. Depending on the context, this word can be equated with ”copac”, ”pom” or ”arbore”. So what do they each mean? ”Copac” is a tree which doesn't bear edible...
I decided to begin writing about contemporary Romanian culture in order to provide some (hopefully) useful insights to people interested in learning about the way Romanians act and think. Since it's summer, I will begin this series with a post about spare time activities...
The title to this post should not be interpreted literally; it was rather chilly in Budapest in the past couple of days. However, the inter-linguistic/inter-cultural temperature was extremely high thanks to a very cosy and successful conference for freelance translators from all around the...