A ♥ for Language Blogs

Judy and Dagmar Jenner, the translating twins behind the Translation Times blog, recently suggested that fellow language bloggers post a list of their "ten favorite" language-related blogs and offered their own favorites. I find it hard to pick ten since there are quite a number in the two languages I read well which I enjoy for diverse reasons, but since the motivation behind the suggestion is to give exposure to interesting writing which might otherwise be overlooked, I shall deliberately omit any favorites I have found posted elsewhere under this title to date. Except Mox's Blog, which I described in a recent post. That brilliant little strip about our profession can be considered necessary comic therapy for any serious translator who reads English and deserves all the promotion it gets and more. Here are my recommendations for eleven (well, twelve actually, or a lucky 13 counting Mox) interesting, unique language blogs in German and English, grouped by language:

German

• 300 words by Susanne Schmidt-Wussow (@frenja). I love her concept: as a writer with an overabundance of vocabulary, she disciplines herself to make a relevant point with each post in 300 words or less. God help me should I ever try that.
• Über-Setzer-Logbuch by Gabriele Zöttl. A friend of mine in Munich sent me so many links to brilliant, thoughtful essays here that I became besotted with the blog and its author before I realized it. Not for the weak-of-German but always worthwhile for a mental stretch and linguistic massage.
• Fidus interpres by Fabio Said. A trilingual blog (English & Portuguese too) with a very large following by a Brazilian translator based in Germany. I've enjoyed and benefited from his posts for years and once learned a lot about traffic analysis from its author. My only regret is that I can barely get the gist of the Portuguese content, so I know I'm missing a lot.

English

• A Pragmatic Eye by Charlie Bavington. The author is an irreverent Brit who translates from French to English and has great good sense as well as an unerring nose for bullshit, both of which make him a suspicious character in a ProZian world.
• Language Mystery by Victor Dewsbery. I became aware of Victor about a decade ago, possibly earlier, because of his many helpful contributions on the Yahoogroups dejavu-l list. He has a rare, thoughtful competence and solid professional ethics, and his occasional well-informed commentaries on his Christian faith are interesting and enjoyable even for a Richard Dawkins fan like me.
• Words Matter by Doug McCarthy, a thoughtful linguist based in Paris. The blog is only a few months old, but Doug's points are well considered, well expressed and carry real weight. Words do indeed matter there as do the ideas.
• Financial Translation Blog by Miguel Llorens. Don't let the tile fool you: most of the content hasn't a thing to do with finances. Miguel takes on and exorcises the major demons of today's translating world, including MT, Lionbridge and content farms. He's possibly crazier than I am, but he's right more often and more entertaining.
• Diary of a Mad Patent Translator by Steve Vitek. Steve also has a range well beyond patents and brilliantly deconstructs the bullshit behind MT (which he uses for some of his work), rate issues and many other topics of current interest for translators. Even when he's trying to explain some obscure linguistic point about Japanese I find his contributions interesting, and even if they're not I enjoy the music videos on every post (and occasionally emulate this when the mood strikes me). I disagree with nearly everything he has to say about translation tools but still like to read it.
• The Greener Word by Abigail Dahlberg, a German to English translator from the UK, now based in the US. She writes a lot on waste management and recycling topics (her specialty), and I often learn a lot from her posts.
• Translating Berlin. Since author Sarah Vilece took a day job her posts have been far less frequent than they once were, but I have always enjoyed them for their content, local relevance (I live near Berlin) and their beautiful style.
• Translationista by Susan Bernofsky is a recent discovery from another world - literary translation. The great thing about reading her blog is that I can enjoy the insights regarding the translation of literature without having to engage in the field's usual habit of starvation. And the writing is good. She also has a good culture blog about Berlin.

Addendum: I see that a number of others have joined the effort inspired by Judy and Dagmar. I'll list links to these posts in no particular order as they come to my attention. I'm particularly pleased that there are few redundancies, and a number of blogs I enjoy but omitted from my own list for no good reason are to be found in these others.

• Jill Sommer's picks on Musings from an Overworked Translator
• Michael Wahlster's list on Translate This! 
• A Culture of Language and Thought by Lisa Carter
• The Interpreter Diaries offered a good list for interpreters
• A Spanish and English list by Silvina Jover-Cirillo of Around The Globe Translations
• Translation and linguistics blogs suggested by Alexandra Milcic Radovanovic 
• Eline Van De Wiele at Jade Language solutions offered a few interesting ones
• Here's a list on Bootheando. Looks like Spanish to me. 
• Miguel Llorens' list has an English blog collection that I read frequently and a very substantial list and commentary for Spanish translation blogs 
• A list from The Delaware Valley Translators Association blog
• Katherine Osgood's favorites
• From Outgesourct, mostly German
• And, of course, the original list from Judy and Dagmar at Translation Times
• And last, but not least, Margaret Marks' unique favorites with the unforgettable comment, "I don't read a lot of translation blogs in detail. There are lots out there directed at people who want to make their business grow, whereas I sometimes want my business to go away." There are days when I know very well what this means. 

I've also noticed that various scumbag spamming content scrapers have taken some of the posts above as well as my own, changed some words and tried to use the content to draw traffic. Apparently they haven't heard the latest fatwa that makes the perpetrators of such actions fair game....