Tea in the Sahara, and elsewhere. Or why I hate German "Frühstücksbretter"...

I have enjoyed several types of breakfast while travelling around the world over the years and learnt to adapt to the foods I was offered – for the most part :-). Tea always seems to be the common denominator of my travels - outside of Southern Europe! I tried about every type of tea for breakfast while travelling in Asia, where coffee is just simply not an option...

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What is it that you do?

Our industry may need a new name... Some of the gurus in our industry and some of my coworkers might object but localization remains a fairly unknown industry. The reason I say this is because most people, let me rephrase, 95% of the people out there just have no clue about what we do...

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Securing the BeatBabel website

As a translation company, we get to see confidential material all the time. And we need to make sure it stays confidential. Exchanging files via email attachments or FTP does not fulfill these requirements for us. You can call us paranoid or overcautious but we don't want to see a client's international marketing campaign materials made public because of a leak in our process.

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Dog cage and Execute

The Chinese B2B giant Alibaba goes global financially, not so much linguistically 

In the famous folk tale Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, two words, Open Sesame, open the doors to a secret cave hollowed by the hand of man and full of rich bales of merchandise, including silk, gold and silver. Last week, the homonymous B2B giant opened its doors through one of the most anticipated IPOs of the year; however, to the surprise of its international users, the cave of wonders was full of trinkets.

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To Vote or not to Vote

The growing responsibility of language professionals as revealed by the Spanish translation of the European elections campaign, which protects abstainers

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