No, this isn’t a puzzle to test your back-to-front reading skills… Looks unprofessional, doesn’t it? And yet, speakers of Arabic and other right-to-left languages (such as Farsi, Urdu, Pashto) have to put up with this all the time! Text that’s back-to-front, or even letters that are back-to-front AND in the wrong order.   Unless you have Arabic installed as a language on your computer, it’s quite likely that Word and other programmes will display Arabic text from left to righ

If you ask me, it’s not a mind-bendingly long compound noun. It’s a deceptively simple-looking false friend.   Konzept.   When I first started school in Germany as a teenager with only basic German skills, I remember the teacher asking us to create a “Konzept”. I didn’t have the foggiest what he meant. How could I create an abstract concept? It turned out we had to make an outline for all different aspects of a new brand.   “Konzept” can be translated as many things in Englis

Some of the errors I had to correct in a recent Arabic-English post-editing project: ⚕️ Wildly incorrect medical terminology ❌ Sentences that sounded convincing but actually meant the complete opposite of what the original said (and not usually just because of a missing “not”) ❌ Very common dialect words transliterated as names when they shouldn’t have been ❌ A complete failure to recognise some other dialect words 🍆 Introduction of medical terms of a sexual nature where it

Given how much complaining I do about the shortcomings of AI, you’d be forgiven for thinking I never use it. That’s not true – I do use it occasionally. But not to translate – for research. Let me explain. I was recently translating a book sample from German to English, which features part of a poem that was originally written in Portuguese (I don’t speak Portuguese).  As a professional translator, I don’t just translate the German translation of the Portuguese poem myself. T

I’m not interested in art created by a machine that can’t feel pain or joy Not interested in outsourcing my creativity to a robot to work faster, but not better Not interested in slowly eroding my ability to think  Or being unable to remember what I “wrote”, because AI did it for me Not interested in creating “content” woven together from the stolen echoes of others’ work   If your text is important enough that you wrote it yourself, it’s important enough to deserve a human t

If you'd like to challenge any preconceived ideas you might have about Yemen and Yemenis, I can highly recommend reading  Comma Press ’s anthology about the Yemeni capital, The Book of Sana’a, edited by  Laura Kasinof  -  https://lnkd.in/esaDB8t3 .  It also happens to feature my translation of  Rim Mugahed ’s compelling short story, “The Ruse of Sana’a”, about a young Yemeni girl forced to become the breadwinner for her family after her father is kidnapped by the Houthis. I a

"Talei Lakeland’s translation maintains a poetic cadence, blending personal and urban trickery to elevate the story into an exploration of trust, identity, and the fragile illusions that tether us to hope." Thanks to Fifi Bat-hef from Arablit for the review! https://lnkd.in/e_rnfBGu

This question will make sense if, like me, you have synaesthesia. For me, the letter “a” is yellow – always has been, always will be. No matter what colour script I’m reading, my mind’s eye always sees “a” as yellow. And every other letter has its very own colour, every other number too. They’re very precise shades, and they never change. I didn’t choose them, either – they were just there in my mind when I learned to read.   Synaesthesia is a mingling of the senses which aff

Yemen has been in the headlines a lot recently. And because there is always more to every country than what the media would have us...