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Remember, remember the fifth of November Gunpowder, treason and plot… Tonight is Great Britain’s Bonfire night, known as Guy Fawkes Night – but did you know about other Bonfire Nights around the world? In  South Africa along with many other Commonwealth countries, Bonfire night is also celebrated on the 5th November and is similar to…

What links modern computing capabilities with a piece of document translation carried out in the 1840s? You may have heard in the past couple of weeks, of Lady Ada Lovelace, whose name has been mentioned by several media outlets since the anniversary of her birth on December 10th 1815. While we are just three years…

A reputed newspaper in the U.S. wanted to impress its Spanish-speaking readers and publish Spanish translations of English articles on its website – unfortunately the results weren’t that positive thanks to Google Translate. The population in Hartford (Connecticut) has a high percentage of Spanish speakers. The Hartford Courant had therefore decided to publish its website…

Morse code is currently celebrating its 175th Anniversary; messages were first transmitted using the code in September 1837. Interestingly the now very familiar knock-code was apparently not developed by its namesake, but rather by Alfred Lewis Vail. The code, as Morse had invented it, worked at first like a seismograph: a pen, a piece of…

For a minority community in St. Paul (Minnesota), McDonald’s decided to translate their marketing material into the Hmong language. Unfortunately, it appears no native Hmong speakers read the advertisement prior to publication. After printing it transpired that the translation wasn’t correct. There were no spaces between the different words “Yuavtxhawbpabraukojsawv yuavntxivzograukoj ism”. This issue was…

For the first time in more than 30 years, an Egyptian head of state travelled to Iran to participate in the 16th Summit of  the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran and it immediately turned into a scandal. In his speech, the newly appointed president of Egypt Mohamed Mursi  spoke about the Iran-backed regime in Syria. Mursi…

I have to admit, until I came across a recent article on the BBC News Website introducing some of the people behind Wikipedia (“Wikipedia: Meet the men and women who write the articles”), I was a complete sceptic about Wikipedia. Albeit, a hypocritical sceptic because Wikipedia is usually my first point of reference for finding…