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Why surprisingly? :confused: Jo Nesbø, The Devil's Star, (La stella del diavolo, translated by Giorgio Puleo). ⭐⭐⭐+ Pretty good on the whole, but a bit slow for my taste, especially at the beginning. At times it was also difficult, at least for me, to imagine where the action was taking place...

Mark Haddon– Lo strano caso del cane ucciso a mezzanotte (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), translated by Paola Novarese.⭐⭐⭐⭐++ A great book, with the only fault of being too short. I'm generally attracted to books with a metanarrative touch to them and in which the main...

Georges Simenon, Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr il lettone, translated by Marco Amante). ⭐⭐⭐- It may be because I had great expectations about this book and this character in general, but I didn't enjoy it much, it did let me down. I guess the other stories (at least some of them) are better than...

Mike Bartlett (b. 1980) is an English playwright. At university we've read Contractions, a play about the extreme contraction of privacy among people who work for a company. It's quite a simple play, but nonetheless well-written and thought-provoking. I don't know any other of his works, so I...

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh author, remembered mostly for his horror short stories. His name doesn't seem to be quoted very often nowadays (nor in this forum), although it is among the readers and authors of horror fiction (in its widest sense): he has been appreciated by Lovecraft and...

I've recently found out this website, called Biblit, which was founded to help translators who are moving their first steps into this job, or for whoever would like to become a translator (here I am!). Unfortunately for those of you who would like to have a look at it the website is in Italian...

Here's an interesting article about comedy and translation, and about being a stand-up comedian in a foreign country. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/14/translating-joke-english-comedian Of course, at the beginning of the article, the correct spelling of the Italian word is perché...

A man, while on holiday in Sweden with his wife, child and friends, has been arrested and has spent three days in prison. This is because he has slapped, apparently, his child outside a restaurant. Everyone wanted to try a local restaurant, but he preferred pizza, and so he "ran away". His...

I've found on Google News an article about a 21-year-old Russian cannibal, arrested after stabbing to death a homosexual and then eating it. The article I read in Italian (http://www.dottorsalute.info/?p=8632) specifies that he ate his victim in a week, which is even more terrifying. As this...

Can animals communicate as we do? Can they use language as human beings do? A lot has been written to answer these questions, and a lot of experiments have been made, especially on chimpanzees, as they are similar to humans. After seeing that they can't speak, as their phonatory system is...

The introduction of the euro has created problems not only to "ordinary" people (as we were all used to the old currency), but also to linguists. There were, and are still, many doubts concerning the new word, and especially about its plural and its spelling. In English, officially the plural of...

I've discovered some days ago how to count with fingers in Mandarin Chinese. Their way is actually pretty different from ours, and the advangtage is that they don't need two hands to count from six to ten (I've got yet to discover how they count from eleven upwards). Here's a demonstration of...

I was wondering what instruments you play or like. I can't play any instrument to be honest, except the flute: I learned in middle school but I then dropped it; I was quite good though (I prided myself in being able to play this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWd95VbDf8)! I once tried to...

Tonight there will be a rare lunar eclipse, according to the experts. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jun/15/lunar-eclipse-moon-red I will try and see it if I have a chance. Anyone interested?

The expression "it's all Greek to me" came to my mind this morning, and I remembered that some years ago I discussed with some friends of mine that other idioms consider "incomprehensible" different languages: for instance, in Italian we generally use Arabic, Aramaic, Ostrogoth and also Turkish...

Tonight I was watching the beginning of the football match Italy vs Estonia, and as usual they played the national anthems before the match. And it made me think, becuase as far as Italy goes a lot of people are not aware of the meaning of our anthem, and they do not care at all, it seems. It is...

For a lot of Italians is a bit of a surprise to find out that there are some so-called "language islands" in Italy: these are basically areas where the people's mothertongue language is different from the national one. The areas in question are small, and the speakers have necessarily to learn...

Studying pragmatics and being interested in translation (although I have no experience of) have led me to think about the difficulties that one may experience when translating a text in which cross-cultural differences occur. Just to make a simple example, in Russian they use the imperative...

Nowadays the world of advertising is quite a complex one: advertisements on TV are like mini-films, and I don't know how much money they spend, psychologists are involved in the production... We are now to the point where it's more important the advert itself than the product advertised, where...

I know, lack of inventiveness for the choice of the title!LOL! LOL (laughing out loud) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12893416 I honestly don't share the worries of the so-called language purists, as I can't see any threat whatsoever to the...