Dear LPG,

Hears a scenario for you… imagine you are watching the Eurovision Song Contest.  The results are being totted up but you miss the presenter announcing the points in English, and get more and more frustrated as they say the result in French, Spanish, Italian, Greek… and I could go on.

Did you know that today is celebrated as the feast day of St. Jerome?   Sadly, it is the anniversary of the day that he died in the year 420 AD, but he did such a lot in his lifetime. He was born in the 4^th century, and amongst other things, became a monk, established a library and became famous for translating big chunks of the Bible from its original Hebrew into Latin.

All this inspired the United Nations to name today ‘International Translation Day’, although I have no doubt that most of us have never heard of it.  While the internet tells that the bible is now available in 704 languages it also shows that there are between 6500 and 7000 languages in the world. The united nations must depend on translators to get anything sorted and I have to admit that, like the man in the street who, on average, only speaks one or two languages, I do rather take the people who translate them for granted. 

So much translating goes on in our world and while we laugh or get annoyed when we see the actor’s mouths making different shapes from the noises that we can hear them saying when watching a foreign film with subtitles on the television, and take it for granted we will be able to understand news from any part of the world no matter which language is spoken where it happens, it is worth taking a little time to acknowledge all those people who help us to get that information delivered in a language that we can recognise.

This message happened because I found a French website and worked out how the computer can translate it (►►►)

So, to all those professional translators who make official documents available for official purposes, the people who sign television programmes so that deaf people can understand what is going on, and the neighbour or friend who helps to make sure that just one person understands something that is gibberish without that help, I say “Happy International Translation Day”.

 TF, Lee

LPG found some related information….

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