For many years, English has been considered by many to be the primary language of the World Wide Web.  In an

The post English – still the language of the Internet? appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

International expansion of a company is an excellent way to expand turnover and secure new and larger customer bases. However, successfully

The post appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

Translation is one of those fields which is becoming increasingly important in an ever more global world.  It is surprising then

The post appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

You are probably aware that the annual celebration of Chinese New Year is on the horizon.  However, how much do you

The post appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

  It is broadly acknowledged that legal translation is one of the most difficult specialist areas within the whole of the

The post Legal Translation challenges – Part 1 appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

As the festive season approaches, here are some words, phrases and traditions from around the world, that give an instant insight

The post The Festive Season appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

You may never have heard of it, but International Translation Day is celebrated every year on 30th September on the feast

The post Happy International Translation day! appeared first on Kwintessential UK.

Interested in working as a freelancer for a translations agency?

You’ve come to the right place. The competition can be tough – there’s no doubt about that. Translation companies receive a high volume of applications from freelancers every week. The standard is high, the competition is fierce, and the need to make your application stand out is greater than ever.
So, we thought we’d provide you with some guidelines. Here are our 5 key tips on how to make your application to a translation agency shine.

1. Research, research, research

When it comes to getting noticed by the agency’s resourcing team, sacrificing a small amount of time to investigate the company’s background will be worth the while.
Augment your chances of success by tailoring your applications for each individual agency, based on the research you’ve conducted. A covering letter which is specific, personalised, and denotes exactly why you want to work for the company will aid progression to the next stage. Demonstrating awareness of the company’s mission, culture and ethos will also stand you in good stead for impressing our recruitment team. Exemplary cover letters clearly state which of the selection criteria is met by the candidate, and offer transferable skills and experiences to make up for any shortfalls. The best candidates also tailor their CV to the positions, highlighting key strengths and skills which are applicable to the role.

2. Getting the application process correct

The power of getting to grips with the agency’s processes is not to be underestimated. By way of example, a high volume of applicants fail to realise most translation agencies have a designated recruitment area on their website, which details our minimum specifications, and provides a link to contact our recruitment team. Instead, many hopefuls submit their applications to our enquiries email address – an inbox designed for job enquiries from our clients – entirely missing the candidate specifications listed on the recruitment page. Others contact our team members on LinkedIn, often messaging an individual who doesn’t deal with the recruitment process at all.

Familiarising yourself with the company’s recruitment process in order to contact the right team not only saves both parties unnecessary email traffic, but also goes some way to demonstrate astuteness. What’s more, it ensures your application is seen by the intended recipient – a win-win situation for both parties.

3. Check the requirements

Many translation agencies have stringent requirements for recruiting freelancers. Most companies will require a degree and a solid few years of translating or interpreting experience. Companies which usually translate for clients in certain industries will also often look for their freelancers to specialise. Ensuring you meet these requirements before beginning work on your application is strongly advisable, as it avoids both employer and applicant time being wasted. It makes sense to focus your efforts on companies which have selection criteria matching your experiences, work history, and specialisms. If you have a vast and rich experience of completing financial translations, focusing your efforts on agencies which specialise in financial translation is highly advisable, as is making the most of your past accomplishments in this area.

4. Subject lines which err on the side of caution

Sometimes, the subject lines of application emails we receive raise a few eyebrows. Claims that the sender is “gifted”, “born with a second tongue”, or possesses “unnaturally exceptional ability” crop up occasionally in our inbox.
Although you might think that entitling your application email ‘Translator application: English to French’ fails to excite, the vast majority of translation agencies are the sort of people who prefer forthrightness, precision, and accuracy. In a word, precision and accuracy are what translation companies do. Subject lines which get straight to the point, and skip the exaggeration or embellishment, will invoke genuine excitement in a recruiter.

5. Impeccable English

This should probably go without saying, but the body of your application email should be written and formatted well. At translation agencies, writing, formatting and great presentation are of paramount importance. Your CV should follow in the same vein: potential employers will view your CV as a means to scan for excellent English skills, flawless grammar and good presentation.

Personalised cover letters, either making up the email body or included as an attachment, will add to your application, so don’t skip over this vital step. Putting the effort in at this stage means you’re much more likely to impress your chosen company.

You can download this article in the form of a infographic for your own reference.

Is the internationalisation of sport helping or hindering language preservation? This is the question Kwintessential intern, Aiden Froud, investigates in his first blog for the Culture Vulture.

Louis Van Gaal was appointed the new manager of Manchester United in July 2014. This was met with a positive response from both fans and players alike after his success with the Dutch national team.

It was barely a month in to his reign when midfielder Juan Mata revealed that the players had been instructed to speak English to each other whenever they were together – even if their native language wasn’t English.

Many people saw this as an attempt to eliminate cultural identity from sports despite Van Gaal informing Sky Sports that he was only attempting to remove linguistic obstacles between players and officials.

However this shows how foreign sports stars are trying to embrace the culture of the country that they are playing in. Alan Pardew also asked 5 French signings to learn and speak English or face hefty fines ranging from an intense press up routine to monetary fines. However, is this taking away the right to speak you own language? Given the multi-cultural society that we live in it is key that we keep all languages alive.

This cultural embrace isn’t shared in all sports though. One example is Andy Murray. Whenever he gives an interview after playing in a country where English isn’t the primary language, he doesn’t use the local language, whereas Novak Djokovic, the current world number 1, speaks Serbian, English, German, French and Italian and uses them when he has to. Murray, who lived in Spain for two years, admitted to the Daily Record “It’s something I regret not doing when I was actually over in Spain. I wish I had learned the language. I can understand a fair amount, I’m just not comfortable speaking it.”

One of the most outstanding moments on a tennis tour was in 2013 at the Italian Open when Serena Williams gave her entire victory speech in Italian much to the delight of the locals and the confusion of the TV crews.

Many governing bodies within sport are trying to preserve native languages within their sport and are offering language courses to those who would like it. UEFA- the Union of European Football Associations- have brought out a dictionary which contains key footballing terminology in the official languages of UEFA (English, French and German) and it can be brought by all but is given to all officials who are officiating matches with foreign teams.  The pocket dictionary contains 1,800 phrases in all three languages and is endorsed by the world football body FIFA.

Each country has a specific style of play in all sports, whether it be tika-taka in football, the Spanish national team, or using your wingers as much as possible – the Welsh rugby team – just like each country has its own unique language or languages and by not embracing these languages it will only contribute to the 25 languages that fall silent each year.

Project International deliver an Elite Sports Academy at Epsom College which is attended by teenagers from all over the world. They offer two courses. One is a sports only course and the other is a sports and TEFL course. The TEFL course offers 12 hours of English tuition each week alongside the hours of sport also on offer to them. This course has been both highly praised and criticised because English is being taught and the sports coaches only speak English. The English being taught is praised for spreading a language but, like Louis Van Gaal, criticised for almost forcing the students to speak English.  

If you watch 6 Nations rugby and listen to what the referee says to players in the England-France match, he will speak English to everybody. Many players have pleaded for this to be altered as some see it as an insult that the referee isn’t even attempting to speak in the native language.

Sir Bradley Wiggins also caused some upset amongst French nationals when he won Le Tour de France because the first thing he said in his victory speech was, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll speak English,” suggesting that he can speak French but didn’t want to at the time. On the other hand some people praised him for at least acknowledging the native tongue of the majority of his audience rather than speaking English immediately. The list of incidents like this could go on for an extensive period of time and include such names as Mauricio Pochettino, Fabio Capello, Steve McClaren, Robert Pires and Carlos Tevez.

To help combat the elimination of languages, many feel that Van Gaal, and others, are wrong to make all the players talk in English when, for example, Daley Blind, Robin Van Persie and Van Gaal himself can communicate in Dutch and Angel Di Maria, Juan Mata, David de Gea and Ander Herrera can all converse in Spanish. However as a collective group, such as in training, then all players should at least try to speak in a common language.  And in a recent interview with Geoff Shreeves, Angel Di Maria required some help with translating from Juan Mata. This not only made Manchester United fans grin even more after a 4-0 victory but triggered one of the largest sporting trends on Twitter that originated in the UK.

Sport is helping preserve native languages by teaching languages to the younger sports stars and the top stars learning them as well but it is also hindering it as some franchises are trying to enforce a common language throughout the players and coaching staff at all times.  Everything that can be helped can also be hindered, it’s up to you what happens next.

Linguists have long been interested in the origin of language. How did languages evolve? And what did the very first languages spoken on earth sound like? Linguist Gretchen McCulloch is hoping to give you some answers!

On Slate.com, Gretchen McCulloch dives a little deeper into the origins of spoken language.

McCulloch states that according to a TED Ed video [below], languages belong to language families that have the same ancestor, or proto-language, but as these languages have evolved in different directions, for example because of migration, people today can no longer understand each other.

It is also stated that language families are determined based on grammar, syntax and words such as pronouns and numbers.

The relationships between languages is what interests her most in the video, McCulloch says. The video tells the viewer that by comparing the abovementioned language features, linguists cannot only determine what languages are related, but also how they have evolved and what language preceded them. 

However, she states that similarities aren’t always that easy to spot. She gives the example of English and Ancient Greek: the Ancient Greek words for father, foot, far and five are pater, podos, per and pente. In English, all words start with an F, while all words in Ancient Greek start with a P; linguist are able to construct a proto-language based on if similar parallels in a number of languages.

The proto-language to many European and Indian languages, such as Latin, Gaelic and Hindi, is Proto-Indo-European. A more recent ancestor of English, McCulloch says, is Proto-Germanic, which encompasses Germanic languages such as Norwegian and Dutch.

The main difference between Proto-Germanic and the other Indo-European languages lies in sound. The sound changes that have taken place when language evolved from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic have been discovered by the Brothers Grimm (more commonly known for their fairy tales). An explanation of their discoveries can be found in the video below.

According to McCulloch, linguists have done a fairly good job in devising proto-languages – in fact, they have already recreated 50 different proto-languages! However, she says the further researchers go back in time, the more difficult their work becomes. As all human societies in the world today use language, McCulloch believes the first genetically modern humans probably already had some form of language to communicate in. However, as writing was only invented 50,000 to 300,000 years later, there is no evidence on which research can be based.

The fact that language investigation is based on what McCulloch calls “pretty darn flimsy evidence” has long been known. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris already banned papers on the topic. Of course, people can now write freely about languages, but views on the origin of language or features of the first languages still vary. McCulloch does state that recently, interesting evidence has been brought to the table: new research has shown that new languages, like Nicaraguan Sign Language, are created by children that are given inconsistent linguistic input which they then try to organise. It is impossible to find out how languages were formed centuries ago, but McCulloch suggests that the ways of creating a new language might not have changed since then.