Polish workers (among others) are required by law to play the stock market with at least part of their pension savings. I hardly need to go into what has happened to the stock markets of late. Gazeta Wyborcza had a cheerful lead story on Thursday: The Shares Slump is Devouring Pensioners (a very free translation […]
Here are translated (badly – the Polish language has changed and I don’t have a historical dictionary), edited snippets of a letter from Catherine II to her Polish – ahem – subjects in 1768 after the Bar Confederation. “…Our army in the Commonwealth of Poland, for the keeping of peace … Our friendly, allied nation […]
Witold Gadomski of Gazeta Wyborcza is beginning to sound desperate. Today’s front page story in his newspaper is that the crisis is at hand. Ukraine and Hungary are in serious trouble and for foreign investors there is really no difference between all those East – sorry – Central European statelets. They’ll pull their money out […]
Witold Gadomski is plainly relishing the opportunities the current financial troubles offer for a fight. Here he is in last weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza, telling us all to calm down, calm down. There is no cause for alarm. The system works. He quotes Stiglitz: “The fall of Wall Street has shown the world that a certain […]
Congratulations to Micahel Cronin and all at Routledge, who have put out Mr. Cronin’s book, Translation Goes to the Movies, bearing the date 2009. You can find it in bookshops already, three months before time. Then again, Cronin is so prolific it may have been a good idea to spread things out a little. Translation […]
Here’s an oddity from last Friday’s business supplement to the Irish Times. Despite the – so hard to avoid a cliche here – tumult? turmoil? meltdown? crash? in banking and on the markets the paper found space for a short article on the “Growing importance of protecting company data.” Space was, however, lacking for the […]
“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, […]
Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz writes for the Guardian on Polish matters. She is certainly on top of her brief. Check this out from August 1st: “Are Poles in Britain really starting to go home? Right now, I have no plans to do so, but you never know.” Note the effortless shift from “Poles” to “me.” She continues […]
A good thing about the internet is it allows you to check if that vague feeling you had about the lie of the media land is correct. The vague feeling I had – vague because I don’t monitor newspapers – was that there has been a rash of articles about how this recession is not […]
These are exciting times with banks crashing, insurance companies being nationalised (by GW Bush!) and so forth. Back on page 33 of today’s Guardian there is an article headlined “Merrill Lynch boss to get $11m payoff after nine months’ work.” The same man, John Thain, was given $15 million just for taking the job. He […]
