Translator`s blogs

Family [ edit ] Parents [ edit ] Anne Becher and William Makepeace Thackeray, c.1813 Thackeray's father, Richmond Thackeray, was born at   South Mimms   and went to India in 1798 at age sixteen as a writer (civil servant) with the   East India Company . Richmond fathered a daughter, Sarah Redfield, in 1804 with Charlotte Sophia Rudd, his possibly Eurasian mistress, and both mother and daughter were named in his will. Such liaisons were common among gentlemen of the East India Company, and it formed no bar to his later courting and marrying William's mother. [10] Thackeray's mother, Anne Becher (born 1792), was "one of the reigning beauties of the day" and a daughter of John Harmon Becher, Collector of the   South 24 Parganas district   (d. Calcutta, 1800), of an old Bengal civilian family "noted for the tenderness of its women". Anne Becher, her sister Harriet and their widowed mother, also Harriet, had been sent back to India by her autho...

Works [ edit ] Thackeray began as a satirist and parodist, writing works that displayed a sneaking fondness for roguish upstarts such as Becky Sharp in   Vanity Fair , and the title characters of   The Luck of Barry Lyndon   and   Catherine . In his earliest works, written under such pseudonyms as Charles James Yellowplush, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage Fitz-Boodle, he tended towards savagery in his attacks on high society, military prowess, the institution of marriage and hypocrisy. Title-page to   Vanity Fair , drawn by Thackeray, who furnished the illustrations for many of his own books One of his earliest works, "Timbuctoo" (1829), contains a burlesque upon the subject set for the Cambridge Chancellor's Medal for English Verse (the contest was won by   Tennyson   with "Timbuctoo"). Thackeray's writing career really began with a series of satirical sketches now usually known as   The Yellowplush Papers , which appeared ...

Not *this* kind of check. We think. Receipt from Oslo. On June 10 in Los Angeles, our friends at the Association of Independent Judicial Interpreters of California (AIJIC for short), are offering a workshop that sounds so intereresting that Judy booked her slot and her airfare within a few minutes of receiving the announcement. Now, we go to a lot of conferences every year and invariably learn a lot, but it's rare that a topic is so new that we've never really learned anything at all about it. Well, this is one of them. The title of the workshop is: Check Interpreter and Ethical and Practical Dilemmas , and the first half of the workshop will be presented by the great Esther Hermida, while the second half, focusing on ethics, will be led by Genevive Navar Franklin, who is a co-author of the ethics manual for California interpreters and thus a perfect person to teach this. They are both federally certified Spanish court interpreters, and the workshop is la...

As many English<->Spanish interpreters know, especially those of us who work in the US, interpreting Spanglish and anglicized versions of Spanish words can be a signficant challenge. Many non-English speakers do speak enough English to throw English terms into their Spanish-language speech, which makes things interesting, to say the very least.  Even if you live and work in an area where you are surrounded by Spanish and Spanglish (as Judy is in Las Vegas, NV), many of these can can still throw you for a loop. Having grown up in Mexico City, we pretty much know how Spanish speakers can potentially mispronounce English-language terms to come up with all kinds of indecipherable things, but here's one that really was a challenge. And perhaps it wasn't even Spanglish. We don't really know what it was, but here it is for your reading pleasure. Note: the following is in both English and Spanish. At a deposition. The attorney, Ms. Higgins, is the En...

The first post of the month is about a topic that's not very glamorous, but can be quite lucrative: personal document translation. Oftentimes, linguists shy away from it because dealing with non-businesses can be time-consuming and it's happened more than once that you don't get paid. We avoid this by kindly asking for pre-payment for personal document translations. We've translated hundreds of documents for dozen of government agencies around the world, and one of the most frequently asked questions we get from new colleagues is: what do you do if you can't ready something? Allow us to share our thoughts. Ask the client. The beautiful thing about working directly with individuals who most likely are the owners of the documents in question is that you can easily go to the source. This is important for handwritten documents where say, the place of birth is noted but it's a small province in a country you are not familiar with. In these cases,...