Book publication – Translating Crises

Translating Crises, recently published by Bloomsbury, explores the challenges and demands involved in translating crises and the ways in which people, technologies and organisations look for effective, impactful solutions to the communicative problems.

The chapters reflect on and evaluate the role of translation and interpreting in crisis settings.

Covering a diverse range of situations from across the globe, such as health emergencies, severe weather events, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, conflicts, and mass migration, this volume analyses practices and investigates the effectiveness of current approaches and communication strategies. Continue reading

Free online courses on public policy by the United Nations (EN, FR, ES, PT, Arabic)

The UN System Staff College (UNSSC) is committed to innovative learning and training programmes focused on public policy.

It offers a range of courses either online, face-to-face, or a combination of both, and has campuses in Turin and Bonn.

There are programmes on sustainable development, peace and security, as well as leadership and management. The online programmes are offered in several languages – a current selection brings up French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic, as well as English. Continue reading

Monolingual and Parallel Legal Corpora of Arabic and English Countries’ Constitutions

We have news this week from a good friend of this blog (and speaker at the WordstoDeeds Conference 2017 at Gray’s Inn), Dr Hanem El-Farahaty. She informs us of the publication of her latest paper which discusses the building of diachronic corpora including all available constitutions of 22 Arabic countries. Continue reading

Monday smile – Sneezing dragons go head to head

We have all had to read tedious and sterile judgments. So when one comes along illustrated with cuddly green dragons, life immediately becomes more cheerful.

Last week the English legal commentator David Allen Green examined the hot topic of “cute baby dragons” in an intellectual property case heard at the High Court of Justice in London. Are you sitting comfortably?

This should set the tone: Continue reading

The Dictionaries Conference 2023 – Call for papers

The Dictionaries Conference aims to bring together specialists and professionals in the areas of lexicology and lexicography to disseminate and discuss current and relevant themes and lines of research, as well as the presentation of new products and lexicographic resources, focusing on a particular sub-area in each edition.

The Conference will take place on 17 November 2023, at NOVA University Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, on site. Continue reading

Practice Note on interpreters at Federal Court, Australia

A new Federal Court Practice Note has just been issued by the Chief Justice, mainly to implement the recent second edition of the Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Courts and Tribunals published in 2022 by the Judicial Council on Cultural Diversity.

The main purposes of the practice note are: Continue reading

Monday smile – San Serriffe

April Fools’ Day is fast approaching, and on that subject a reader of this blog made me aware of a hoax (stroke of genius) by The Guardian newspaper in the 1970s.

The “small archipelago” “roughly in the shape of a semicolon” with its capital Bodoni lay in the Indian Ocean, occupied by the “irrepressible Flongs” and run with an iron hand by General Pica.

I’ll let you enjoy the rest. Have an excellent week.

Continue reading

Call for papers – EULETA Legal English Conference VIII

The EULETA Legal English Conference VIII will be held from Friday 22nd to Saturday 23rd September 2023 in Warsaw, Poland, co-organised by Kozminski University Language Centre and EULETA, the European Legal English Teachers’ Association.

EULETAʼs membership is made up of many people working in different capacities in legal English, for example: lawyers, linguists, translators, legal English trainers for professionals, and legal English university professors. Continue reading