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When you start blogging, you're never quite sure where it will take you. I guess it was as much an impulse as conscious strategy just over six years ago to write about my 'feelings' with the birth of the new CPLS website. As I wrote back then, "let it be a collage of my reflections at this point in time....

When the political scientist Steven Weber compared translation to transportation, he was talking of ideas and knowledge not of people and goods. Instead of a horse-drawn carriage, it's now a process of accelerated multilingual communication, especially with the use of AI tools. Since the adoption of neural networks in 2015, translation algorithms...

When I was an English teacher in China, I was asked by a student why we say 'two million' rather than 'two millions'. His logic was sound: two of something makes it plural and plurals usually end with an 's'. It's never satisfying to then have to tell a student that he'll need to just ignore logic to learn English...

So, there he was in all his crowning glory at the age of 74, finally becoming what his whole life was leading up to: King Charles III. A long wait. Abdication in the UK, unless for breach of protocol, has no tradition. For sons of queens, it seems, a long and testing time awaits before they can fulfill their destiny....

I was first exposed to ChatGPT – the now-famous artificial intelligence chatbot by research lab OpenAI – last December when my father shared an article outlining what it could mean for future AI technology. The twist? The entire first half of the article was written by ChatGPT itself, yet I never suspected a thing. As a copywriter, I felt my...

The furore that has followed on from the decision to 'doctor' Roald Dahl's children's books, whether in the original or in translation, seems to know no bounds, with well-known authors (Salman Rushdie), celebrities (Ricky Gervais) and even political leaders (Rishi Sunak) weighing into the debate. I can't stay out of this ring either.

In 1969, blues sensation Howlin' Wolf was pressured by Chess Records into creating a psychedelic album that they believed would capitalise on a new wave of far-out bands inspired by his music. Howlin' Wolf himself poetically deemed the results "dog shit", leading to the bold advertising strategy of publishing his opinion while (to the Wolf's...

What comes to your mind when you picture 'plain language'? Dumbed down baby speak in an insult to the reader's intelligence? Or straightforward expression using only as many words as are necessary? With the term itself subject to disagreement, it's no surprise that it provokes fierce debate when implemented as a policy requirement.

A recent article (A Clockwork Orange: 60-year-old teen slang that still shocks - BBC Culture) recalls A Clockwork Orange, the dystopian satirical black comedy novel by Anthony Burgess published sixty years ago. Set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence, A Clockwork Orange presents a youth (sub)culture whose...

The World Cup has arrived, a tournament that is so high on hype, it provides a temporary and perhaps convenient smoke screen for all the ills in the world - war, conflict, recession, human rights. But it also allows us, lest we forget, to luxuriate in a gush of commentary and quotes that sometimes makes a comedy caper of language....