Robert McCrum
Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. For nearly 20 years he was editor-in-chief of the publishers Faber & Faber. He was the literary editor of the Observer from 1996 to 2008, and has been a regular contributor to the Guardian since 1990. Author of six novels, he has written a book on the Globish phenomenon – Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language (May 2010).
Updated: 2 April 2010
With the worldwide success of Stieg Larsson and Haruki Murakami, translation has not enjoyed such a boom for over a generation. But will it ever attain to that Holy Grail, of perfect fidelity to the original? 
With a vocabulary of only 1500 words, “Globish” or “decaffeinated English” has become the world lingua franca. Author Robert McCrum charts the rise of this new dialect of the 21st century.