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New to interpreters or interpreting services? Wondering what a simultaneous interpreter does as opposed to a business interpreter? What on-demand phone interpreting is as opposed to whisper interpreting? Kwintessential is here to tell you all about the various existing types of interpreting on the market!

Halloween is often perceived to be a predominantly American affair, along with trick or treating children and theme park horror nights. Thought to have originated in Europe, Halloween falls on 31 October each year and is marked in a variety of different ways across the globe.   Origins   While All Hallows’ Eve has been […]

BOO! It’s the spookiest time of the year in the western world, when it’s customary to dress up as the scariest thing you can imagine and go door to door, wowing strangers with your costumes in exchange for treats.   At Kwintessential, we’re all about real, native-speaker language translation (the kind that won’t scare anyone […]

We tend to think of propaganda as old wartime posters, short monochrome films, crackly radio announcements and racist newspaper clippings from a hundred years ago. We tend to think of Nazis, communism and Apartheid – and link it to words like “regime” or “dictator”. Propaganda uses language overtly, covertly and subconsciously, to form opinion and […]

We’re in the future – instant access to every conceivable piece of information, all delivered on a screen that fits in a pocket. And the biggest area of growth? Video. People consume a billion hours of YouTube per day, and video consumption is tipped to grow even larger, predicted to account 80% of all internet […]

In a world of diverse, beautiful and evolving languages, one seems to be spoken more widely than any other – English. But is this tongue from a tiny island nation really capable of taking over the world? Some would argue that it already has.   Globally Speaking, English is Everywhere   English is recognised as […]

We’ve all got a word or two that we struggle with – just the thought of saying them out loud can make us feel a little anxious, or spur us on to practice them a few times. But don’t feel too self-conscious – there are lots of everyday English words that are hard to say, […]

Dog owners will tell you that they know exactly what their beloved pet is trying to communicate to them. And cat owners will tell you what each little meow and purr means.   But you don’t have to own a pet to experience intercommunication with an animal – in fact, basic interspecies communication is built […]

Gilgamesh is the world’s first action hero, playing up to all the stereotypes of masculinity – even though his story was first written somewhere in the region of 4,000 years ago. Long before it was rediscovered in 1853, and translated to English in 1870, the story had been possibly the most important and influential ever […]