Fantastic news!

🗳️!

Kent, near Sevenoaks

A bob of seals 🦭 near Beachy Head, Sussex Coast (along the English Channel). We've had amazing weather in the last few days ☀️

New take on a blind date.. @ The Book Elephant - lovely independent bookshop & café, Elephant & Castle, London

From X, but gold. I don't want to imagine something like that happening in the booth! 😂 😬 #1nt 🎧 #langsky

Greenwich Park

One of my favourite corners of the world: Cornwall

Very good advice. Padstow, Cornwall, UK

Westminster underground station, Jubilee line. I've always liked it. Futuristic, industrial, some say it looks like a setting for a dystopian movie.

Happy Valentine's day! Don't you just 💖 it when great CPD events are announced? An Introduction to Speech-to-Text Interpreting (STTI) and Live Subtitling - 19 March 5:00PM GMT Featuring a panel of seven experienced practitioners and academics #1nt #xl8 www.ticketsource.co.uk/iti-interpre...

A colleague argues that a professional interpreter could have helped prevent the diplomatic car crash in the White House back in Feb 2025: interpretersoapbox.com/why-zelensky... #1nt 🗒️ #langsky

#1nt booth in a garden - the Garden of Multilingualism in Luxembourg - near the Court of Justice of the EU

If you're in London, don't miss "Son of a Bitch". It's absolutely brilliant. Darkly funny. Great performance (and writing!) by comedian Anna Morris. About motherhood, relationships, social media... On until 15 March.

Unusual workplace. Interpreting booth in a church in Leiden. #1nt 🎧⛪️ (Spotted by a colleague, Justyna Seweryńska.)

Crocuses = cheer-givers. Spring is coming! (Photos by my daughter)

US Secretary of State: "[W]ith Putin you got to have these translators and it just takes forever back and forth. With Zelenskyy, he speaks fluent English, and they’re able to... communicate more directly and it moves a lot faster." Well, consecutive interpretation... 🤷‍♀️ www.state.gov/secretary-of...

Missed last week's Interpreting Europe Conference 2025: AI x AI Artificial Intelligence for Augmented Interpretation? Catch the recordings here: commission.europa.eu/get-involved...

Ahem... 🤢 No shortage of takers, apparently. 😬 tvpworld.com/84953068/pol...

This is fun: textfx.withgoogle.com play with words; alliteration, collocations, acronyms...

New language/country in the Skilliga🪁 "Buzzword of the Week" series on trending names, words & expressions in different countries. 💃 Our #AIIC Greece & Cyprus colleagues debut with 🇬🇷 "Getting the straits… straight: Iσθμός, πορθμός, διώρυγα": blog.skilliga.com/buzzword-of-... 👏 #xl8 #1nt #langsky

Are linguists paying a lot of attention to LLMs? Because this seems like a fascinating finding with large implications: LLMs share highly abstract grammatical concept representations, even across unrelated languages, so even models trained mostly on English do well in other languages.

Someone "using LLMs to translate in the same language direction [they] did manually for many years" explains their highly iterative & quality-focused process: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4289... "Using an LLM as a sentence-level thesaurus on steroids is particularly wonderful," they say. #xl8 #AI

Here are some free webinars from @britishlibrary.bsky.social that I thought #xl8 #1nt colleagues might find useful: skilliga.com/organiser/br..., including social media, networking (5 Feb!), researching your market, copyright, and intellectual property (7 Feb!). #SkilligaPicks 🪁 #CPD

My new favourite pastime. (Not.) Not a good day to be a train. Delayed or cancelled because of dodgy tracks, breakdowns, or… vandalism!! And other 🚃 line-hogging and slow-rolling (slow coaches... 😂🫣 sorry, couldn't resist puns!). All that in the space of… 60 mins!

Amazing day today ☀️

🇩🇪Buzzword of the Week is "Zustrombegrenzungsgesetz" (@theguardian.com: “influx limitation law”). Plus "Brandmauer" ("firewall"), I suppose. Here's an explainer by a German journalist and linguist (in German): blog.skilliga.com/buzzword-of-...

Delayed by being late. Simples!

Five years on from Brexit, London remains a European city, where European Londoners are valued and cherished. You are our neighbours, colleagues, friends and loved ones. Thank you for making London your home. You are wanted here—and always will be.

When I first started working here, I really struggled finding my booth! The place is impressive, but not super easy to navigate. European Parliament, Strasbourg, building named after 🇫🇷 politician Louise Weiss. Glass = transparent democracy; seemingly unfinished roof = ongoing-ness of the 🇪🇺project.

Odd but cool. A nondescript hotel in Strasbourg, bland and grey. But if you take the stairs instead of the lift, a different world appears, with more colour and character.

Latest in 🤖 #AI in interpreting: Meta’s new #xl8 model, SeamlessM4T, can translate speech directly to speech, without having to go through text first: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... It's claimed to be 23% more accurate than its rivals. 🤔 "Nearly a Babel Fish": spectrum.ieee.org/machine-tran... #1nt

A new resource for interpreters, translators & trainers from @ec.europa.eu: Knowledge Centre on Translation and Interpretation; DG Interpretation & DG Translation's resources merged into "an all-inclusive hub" for #xl8 #1nt professionals. 👉 knowledge-centre-translation-interpretation.ec.europa.eu/en

Heads up ⚠️ Here are some great-looking conferences coming in 2025! 🔖 👉 skilliga.com/conferences -- feel free to add more here +to Skilliga🪁🙂 Feb 🔸 Interpreting Europe 2025: AI x AI Artificial Intelligence for Augmented Interpretation, Brussels🇧🇪+🧑‍💻, @ec.europa.eu's DG Interpretation | free 1/5

From my conversation with Gemini yesterday. Really, I feel Google's AI model is a little too "sweet" sometimes.

This made me laugh hard. 🤣 (If I'm honest, I like FLERBS much better than DUST MOTES.) Spotted in this week’s New Yorker by my husband, who said: “Sound familiar?”. Just need to be careful our daughter's aware that some of the odd / funny words I use sometimes are actually made-up! 🫣😆

Only in France 😁 Sorting through photos from a recent holiday. On our way to the Alps, my family & I stayed in a hotel in Dijon. This was our view at breakfast 👀 Having grown up in (still) strongly Catholic Poland, I can tell you someone would have a word with the management back in my home country!

Do you know Skilliga? skilliga.com is a free directory and calendar (skilliga.com/calendar) of training and CPD events and courses for translators and interpreters. Run by volunteers. Plus blog.skilliga.com with tips from trainers and 🇮🇹 🇬🇧 🇵🇱 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 buzzword reports. (New contributors welcome! 🤗)

Blast from the (communist) past at Warsaw Airport, Poland. Looks like the iconic Jelcz "Cucumber" 🚌. In a bar.

As spotted in a south London park today

Green and coffee. I don't have any intriguing caption. Just that those two cheered me up today

And here's a 🎄postcard from my last work trip of 2024, & one of my favourite places to work. Not an easy year overall, but I'm counting my blessings. Like travel with (relatively) few restrictions, supportive family, friends & colleagues, a nice safe home. & all the little things -like this one...

Beautiful autumnal colours in Strasbourg... on my way to work.