What do Sir Alex Ferguson, Gordon Brown, Billy Connolly and Bill Paterson have in common?

That’s right, they’re all Glaswegians.

And, at Today Translations, they love our friends from Glasgow. If you’re an avid reader of The Sun, The Times or The Glasgow Herald, or a listener to BBC Radio or Scottish TV News, you might know why.

Today Translations created a bit of a media storm when they advertised in Gumtree, Craigslist and the Glasgow Herald for Glaswegian interpreters. In fact, they were famous for a day not only on all the media listed above, but also as the most popular search on the BBC News website.

The thing is, the ad was entirely genuine. Today Translations are looking for partners to translate to and from Glaswegian. That’s because there’s a genuine need for this service. Ask the BBC. They once provided Ceefax subtitles to Still Game, Scotland’s best-loved sitcom, which features two Glaswegian pensioners and has won high ratings UK-wide.

And US DVDs of films based on novels by Irvine Welsh, such as Acid House, also use subtitles to help Americans along with the dialect. Not to mention Scottish sitcom Rab C Nesbitt, known as much for its impenetrable dialect as for the number of bellylaughs it provided.

Says Jurga Zilinskiene, owner of Today Translations, “I’ve lived in Britain since I was 19 and I like to think I speak English pretty well. But I still sometimes struggle to understand certain accents, and that tends to be truer in Glasgow than anywhere else. I often hear of foreigners arriving in the city, jumping into a cab and not being able to understand the language. We want to help. We want to be able to meet the needs of our clients who are doing business in Glasgow.”