Chartered Institute
of Linguists
NEWS & VOICES
Why each language version tells a different story, and the power dynamics behind the platform. By Guilherme Fians
Few would disagree that the airplane is one of the great marvels of modern engineering – and we could confidently call that a consensus. But consult Wikipedia about who invented it and the answer depends on the language you read. On the English-...
GCHQ National Language Competition November 2025
Calling all UK secondary schools!
CIOL is pleased to help GCHQ spread the word about their online National Language Competition in November this year for Year 9 (England and Wales) / S2 (Scotland) / Year 10 (N Ireland) pupils across the country. (Teachers in Scotland: please note the change from S3...
We continue to receive reports from members who have been contacted by various email addresses with spam and scam content. Thank you to those members for bringing these incidents to our attention. We wanted to share them in case of help or use to other members.
Recent Spam and Scam emails for Info Examples of emails received by MembersFrom: Patrick Rose...
by Dr Eyhab Abdulrazak Bader Eddin
A trilingual realm unfolds
Imagine walking into a 13th-century English courtroom. The judge addresses the court in French, the clerk scribbles notes in Latin, and the plaintiffs mutter to each other in English.
This vivid scene captures the reality of post-Norman Conquest England, where three tongues coexisted in a...
This is the final post in a series of three follow-up posts to the CIOL roundtable Freelance linguists: navigating careers in a changing profession featuring Ilenia Goffredo, Karine Chevalier-Watts and Ibrahim Kadouni. It explores and expands on the panellists’ ideas and contributions. Watch the full roundtable video here.
Building windmills
‘There are two...
This is post two in a series of three follow-up posts to the CIOL roundtable Freelance linguists: navigating careers in a changing profession featuring Ilenia Goffredo, Karine Chevalier-Watts and Ibrahim Kadouni. It explores and expands on the panellists’ ideas and contributions. Watch the full roundtable video here.
What is happening?
‘We feel a little bit...
An academic and personal reflection on ‘language attrition’
by Dr Pier Pischedda, MCIL Chartered Linguist
Losing touch with your mother tongue
As much as we can learn a language, we can also lose it. This is a familiar topic in linguistics, and as linguists, we often discuss how maintaining a second language requires constant study and active use,...
By Professor Monika S Schmid
A recent YouGov poll suggested that over 70% of adults in the UK support languages as an obligatory subject in schools, and many regret not having studied them more themselves.
A longstanding argument
The argument goes back a long time. In the aftermath of World War I, it was suggested that language...
‘I started getting fewer enquiries in all languages, so not just in my own language pair of English–French, but also in the other languages that I was representing through my agency’ Karine Chevalier-Watts
It’s no secret that many freelance translators and translation agencies started seeing a drop in translation workload in 2024. However, some...