Those tired Latin phrases everyone uses all the time.

I.e. ad nauseum
(which means: to the point of disgust)

Guide to Latin Phrases Used in English Ad Nauseum

Although I never heard et alii before. It means 'and others' in case you want to annoy someone

Worst Slogan Translations Ever of All Time Ever In History

Moronland (nice name) has this roundup which is a warning to all branding agencies - don't do this carelessly!

Example:
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Kekoukela", meaning "Bite the Wax Tadpole" or "Female Horse Stuffed with Wax", depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent "kokoukole", translating into "Happiness in the Mouth."

Worst Slogan Translations Ever of All Time Ever In History

50 great translations of literature

A roundup of 50 great examples of translated works. Times online

Top 10:

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958) Buy the book

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959) Buy the book

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961) Buy the book

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962) Buy the book

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962) Buy the book

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963) Buy the book

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965) Buy the book

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

Star Wars: Translated to Chinese and then back to English

Back-translation is a good way of finding out if the original translation was truly accurate. In this case I think it probably wasn't!

Bill Maher Translates Rap Lyrics for White People

This YouTube video shows Bill Maher helping white people figure out what's going on in rap songs.
The art of translation

Via Digg: 22 of the World's Most Creative Alphabets

Someone on Digg picked up this blog post of some really creative alphabet designs. Sometimes I don't like 'wacky' alphabets but these are certainly better than some of the poor free fonts around.

My favourite is above.

ReubenMiller: 22 of the World's Most Creative Alphabets

myGengo

myGengo believe there's a middle ground between machine translation and expensive, expert translation. I think there's something in this - at the moment if you want a page of text translated you might pay $200 for it - putting it out of the reach of a lot of businesses and certainly of individuals. They call it Simple Human Translation

They're also looking for bilingual people to be translators: http://www.mygengo.com/translator

Let's see what happens when they launch. http://www.mygengo.com