Peschel Blog

This may sound familiar: You need a translation, and since you don’t want to cut any corners, you opt for what appears to be a professional translation service provider. But the final product isn’t at all what you had in mind. The vocabulary doesn’t match what’s usually used in your company, the text sounds wooden and the individual words seem

Nobody likes a false friend. They’re sneaky, they’re treacherous and they can pull the rug right out from under you. False friends are troublesome enough in human form, but here at Peschel Communications we have to be on the lookout for a different incarnation of these dastardly fiends, for there exists a linguistic booby-trap known as a ‘false friend.’

2018 marked an important anniversary for us, and that is why this year, I want to look back on the last 20 years at Peschel Communications ...

The very first Meet Central Europe conference took place on 30 and 31 October this year in Budapest. The national language industry associations of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria established this annual international event as a replacement for individual conferences in each country. It’s an ideal networking platform for both freelance translators and translation companies offering language services

Peschel Communications was founded 20 years ago this year, and we marked the occasion in style. Many of the people who have helped us along the way, including former colleagues and interns, joined us for our anniversary party. Some had even travelled from far-flung locations to be there — Oxford, Southampton, Munich and Berlin, to name just a few. They seized the occasion to visit their former home, relive fond memories of their time in Freiburg and swap stories over tapas and a glass of champagne.

The job description of a translation project manager is very different from what it used to be. Freelance translators have always managed their own projects — and of course, this still holds true. But translation companies now often employ specialists who spend their entire working day organising translation and/or interpreting projects. That being said, the project manager’s role is not

  Spanish, double Dutch or Chinese? Every language has idioms and figures of speech. Their origin lies in a country’s history and culture, and is often gradually forgotten until only the phrase remains. Few Germans stop and think about why it seems “Spanish” to them when something is odd or confusing, just as native English speakers rarely wonder why something

What you need to know to have your personal documents translated Translating certificates and other personal documents (which usually need to be certified) is a particularly challenging part of our job. These translations may appear straightforward at first glance, but there are all kinds of considerations that make them extremely time-consuming. School and university diplomas, for example, require painstaking research

And then we mustn’t forget that famous lack of will power and control. If you don’t have to leave the house at half past seven in the morning to go to work, you have to have a lot of self-discipline to make sure you are sitting at your desk at home by a certain time. Then once you’ve pulled yourself together, it’s difficult to stay motivated and not get distracted by literally everything around you when you don’t have the ‘social control’ and working atmosphere of an office to keep you in line.

Riding a bicycle across the United States with a group of 35 people to raise funds for the American Lung Association gives you a lot of time to think. Where have you been? Where are you going? What are your aspirations? During the seven weeks it took to pedal 3,250 miles from Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C. in the summer