Definition

From the agency’s very beginning, the one question, hands down, that has been asked most often is:

Saint-who? Sin-tag-me, what does that mean?

Well, very simply put, a syntagm is, like a paradigm, a linguistic concept. The letters in a word have syntagmatic relationship with one another, as do the words in a sentence. An example: the house is blue. A paradigmatic relationship is one where an individual sign may be replaced by another. An example: the house is white. Syntagmatic relationships are about positioning, whereas paradigmatic relationships are about substitution. Are you lost yet? Hang on. Just remember that, in a syntagm, the group of words cannot be split into smaller units or the meaning is lost; the unique group of words operate together to create a unique meaning. Now, we’ll not get into the whole subject of positions… We’ll leave that to your imagination. 😊

Here, at Syntagme, we have a unique group of people who operate together to create a unique product. As a translation agency, we’re so unique that we’re often being cast as the proverbial square peg in the round hole…

Long story short, why, oh why, didn’t we call our agency Translations R Us?