Chartered Institute
of Linguists
NEWS & VOICES
The results, along with some detailed and very thoughtful comments, provide a candid snapshot of our community's relationship with digital...
By John Worne CIOL CEO
I attended a really upbeat event with Duolingo last week focusing on what we can do to promote language learning in the UK.
By Mark Robinson
On a recent visit to Volterra in Tuscany, I took time to explore the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, one of Italy’s oldest museums and a treasure house of Etruscan artefacts. Among the urns, sculptures, and delicate jewellery, one fact stood out: the Etruscan alphabet - adapted from the Greeks - was the very script that later formed the basis...
By Pham Hoa Hiep
The full version of this article was published in MultiLingual magazine's September 2025 issue.
Recently, my sister called from Australia, worried about my job as a freelance translator now that AI is everywhere. “If work has become scarce, maybe it’s time to go back to teaching,” she suggested.
She’s not...
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...