Latest stories

Translation Is Not Localization

Both inside and outside the translation industry, confusion often abounds about the difference between the terms translation and localization. Some clarity is therefore in order: the two words are indeed different, though far from being so distinct in all situations that they could occupy different...

Filial Realizations

What are these repeated machinations of a world gone mad and doused in a thousand oils? It is the mechanical clinking of the behavioral timepiece that sooner or later falls into silence—which is always, of course, only for a while. From time to time, whenever I have the opportunity on a Sunday...

Are Philosophy and Misanthropy Synonyms?

I was recently poring over some of the excellent books by the late British educator and popularizer in the world of philosophy and critical self-reflection Bryan Magee. Throughout this lovely spree of reading and serpentine contemplation, I was enjoying myself and hop-skipping from page to page...

Refuting Paranormal Phenomena

It is quite simple, actually: that there are phenomena that we cannot explain —such as moments or events that run the gamut of the fortuitous, accidental, absurd, miraculous, paranormal, or otherwise inexplicable—does not in itself justify our attributing a cause or explanation of any kind to these...

Registers and Variety in Peninsular Spanish

The registers of a language are a fascinating thing. Even the mere fact that registers exist is fascinating. And while everyone can recognize that the kind of language that we use as human beings varies with the circumstance—people don’t use the same vocabulary and phraseology in a courtroom...

Television’s Time Out of Mind

It is evident as a kind of motive intrinsic to the vast majority of media and entertainment that it believes it matters, and this entertainment continues to exist for a single correlative reason: as viewers in the audience, we believe that it matters. But neither of those assertions actually...

Parallel Texts: An Object Lesson

For the translator in the twenty-first century, one of the most fervently repeated collocations of the times has to be machine and translation, those two suggestive siblings that have gone on to establish their reputations as the acrobats in a traveling circus of technology. As members of the...

The Savvy Translator?

In the world of professional translation, it goes without saying that the technological advances of the past few decades and, in particular, those of the rampant additions to the translation market such as ChatGPT and other kinds of artificial intelligence have meant the continuous upheaval of the...

My Checklist for Proficiency Levels in a Foreign Language

Known the world over as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages–I assume that all the diligent, methodical precision used to create these levels in the first place has to be applied to the title itself, which is very precise but a pain in the **s to remember–the CEFR is...

Laberinto de pasiones (1982)

En cualquier película que tenga la cantidad de energía que se derrocha a raudales en las obras del director manchego Pedro Almodóvar, que dio con Laberinto de pasiones (1982) uno de sus magníficos saltos iniciales a lo que sería una trayectoria artística más que fructífera, como mínimo cabría darse...