This week is Samoan Language Week so I had a look in Google to find out about themed weeks. I learned that the correct term is not “themed week” but “awareness week” and that, in addition to several language awareness weeks, New Zealand also enjoys “Teach a Kid to Sew...
Once upon a time French was the main sources for culinary jargon. Words like terroir, crouton, bouquet garni, entrée and so on clearly entered English from across the Channel. The sonorous Gallic tongue is often used to describe certain foods, cooking dishes and techni...
Hace poco tuve la oportunidad de viajar a Chile de vacaciones. Consideraba importante pasar una temporada en nuestro país de origen, principalmente para que mis hijos no olvidaran sus raíces y pudieran practicar su idioma n...
An accurate translation is a many-splendoured thing; offense arising through a failure to make one’s meaning clear is, well, whatever the opposite of ‘many-splendoured’ would be. Let’s say you’re at a formal event of some kind, the conversation flows freely and then, m...
We’d like to share some good news: we held a successful medical interpreting workshop in our Wellington office on 24 March this year, with approximate 20 interpreters attending. It was very encouraging to see so many interpreters willing to turn up for such an event on...
While many companies trust NZTC International with translation of very important information, some of the most critical translations are for our clients in the medical equipment manufacturing sector. This is because their documents contain instructions that if carried...
When I was a kid, I never heard anything about Chinese New Year – I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Now that I’m an adult, I still hear nothing about Mongolian New Year, Ethiopian New Year or Mayan New Year; but Chinese New Year is big news.
Before I moved to Brazil, when I thought of Carnaval I imagined that the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro, with its incredible costumes, semi-nude samba dancers and competitive nature was what Carnaval is all about. Turns out there is a great deal more to it, and the Samba...
Throwback blog!! Here we have the the full transcript of a talk that Dr John Jamieson, senior translator at NZTC, gave to the Goethe Society of Wellington at Victoria University in Kelburn in 2014
In this talk I will try to express some thoughts about language and trans...
How different New Zealand is today from just a few decades ago. Once our population was almost entirely made up of Europeans and Māori. Now Statistics New Zealand tells us, according to projections, that by the year 2026 our population will comprise 3.3 million people...
