Tag: English
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Europe Celebrates Its Languages. Shouldn’t India Too?
A week after speaking at Alliance Française Bangalore about the European Day of Languages, I find myself reflecting on my own journey with languages—from German conversations in my childhood home, to French at AF, to a career as a bridge between India and Europe. But the bigger question is: why…
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Pet Peeves: The use of “Passive Aggression”
Every few years, there is a new favourite word/expression that floats around, widely overused and abused, but most importantly terribly misused. The current expression seems to be passive aggressive. The expression is bandied around in all kinds of situations, and more often than not, the expression has no place in…
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Pet Peeves #3 Abbreviations
I excelled at acronyms in school. During a creative writing workshop, organised by my school in 4th grade, one of the activities was imagining the full form of acronyms. I was the unbeaten champion in the exercise, coming up with ingenious versions. My penchant for the long and winding has,…
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Pet Peeves #2 Badly Composed Tweets
As a language teacher, I’m used to dealing with all kinds of badly framed sentences: incorrect tenses, missing articles, wrong prepositions and invisible (I really mean absent) punctuation marks. I know it infuriates my colleagues, but not me. I understand that my students ‘ work is just that – students’…
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Pet Peeves #1: The Usage of “Would” In Indian English
Once a student of English Literature, I tend to be a bit of a stickler for correct usage of grammar. As a language teacher, I have learnt to turn a blind eye to some common mistakes my students make. But there are some things that bother me too much to…
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Handy Tips for Translating a Corporate Web Site
I recently translated (French → English) the entire website, ticket booking platform and marketing material for Mystifly. It was the first time that I was handling such a big project. But more importantly, it was also my first translation assignment since 2011. I was quite obviously nervous when I started,…
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