Reiner Schleicher

“I never said that English was an easy language” – these words by Mr Webster, a lecturer at the Institute for Translation and Interpreting at Heidelberg University, are etched in my memory for eternity and beyond. He would go on to recite typical pitfalls like “clocks and watches, scholars and scientists”, etc. But Mr Webster […]

The swedes know it too. In Swedish, tår is a cup of coffee. If you are on your second cup of coffee, you say påtår. And because Swedish people love coffee so much, there is also the tretår – meaning the third cup of coffee, for when your 5-minute coffee break is not so short

Let’s be honest: how many times have your short-distance flights been on time? And if you’ve ever flown from Frankfurt, you probably know what it’s like at the check-in booths and how the lines are there, and have maybe even missed a flight because of them. Being late is always bothersome. It’s even worse if

Translating is unfortunately not as easy as painting by numbers. The reason being, in a language pair, the one language may only have one expression for something, while the other could have two or more. One example for such a case is the English word “wall”, which in German can be either Mauer or Wand

Interpreting and translating is often more complicated than you would think. Especially so when one language has a single expression for a certain circumstance or object while another has two or more. Everyone who has been to Germany and gone castle-hopping will know – because in German, castle can be either “Burg” or “Schloss”, whereas

It was a known fact already to Mark Twain; he wrote about it in his poignant essay The Awful German Language. And as if that were not already enough, we now have another problem: gender-inclusive language – called gendern in German. To make women more visible, numerous media outlets and newspapers have stopped using the

We keep getting asked the same question: Is it possible to work with an interpreter’s booth during arbitration hearings in order to save time? After all, consecutive interpreting of a witness takes more than double the amount of time. And time, as we all know, is money. However, experience has taught us that speeding up

In January, we started the third round of our forest conservation project and once again donated 10% of our revenue to Wohlleben’s Forest Academy. Just as in the last couple of years, we have leased a plot of forest land for the next 50 years. In return, the owner pledges to let the forest grow

Maybe you still remember – in the past two years, Schleicher Sprachservice’s January donations have gone to a forest conservation project protecting beech forests. Due to a very lively interest in donating for the project, the entire forest area available for it is now completely protected. However, there are still the “young savages”. These are

Interpreter, translator, language mediator, integration mediator, language and culture mediator… All of these terms are used when it comes to language transmission. But what is exactly the difference between these things? The answer is quite easy: While translators convey written texts from one language to another, interpreters communicate the spoken word. However, not all languages