Everlasting Ego /Eagle

The German TV midday magazine program has been showing a clip of Kathleen Hepburn, at a fairly advanced age, saying she goes out every day intending the be the victor in the day-to-day struggles. It was dubbed in German. At the end she says ‘That’s me – everlasting ego’. At least, that’s what I understood. The German version was ‘immerwährender (?) Adler’, i.e. ‘eagle’.

I understand that dubbing can go wrong, but then I wonder why they show the clip at all if the punch line is so weird.

It reminds me of the Gary Larson cartoon the Nürnberger Nachrichten showed just before Christmas one year, where a witch is disappointed that her Brussels sprouts house is not luring any children. Brussels sprouts was translated as ‘Brussels lace’. The picture was coloured, but the lace remained white. Of course, the translation was not the NN’s work but syndicated, but why did they take the cartoon at all? I suppose because gingerbread houses and witches are Christmassy. At all events, it would be hard to convey in Germany that kids in the USA and Britain don’t like Brussels sprouts.

Everlasting Ego /Eagle

The German TV midday magazine program has been showing a clip of Kathleen Hepburn, at a fairly advanced age, saying she goes out every day intending the be the victor in the day-to-day struggles. It was dubbed in German. At the end she says ‘That’s me – everlasting ego’. At least, that’s what I understood. The German version was ‘immerwährender (?) Adler’, i.e. ‘eagle’.

I understand that dubbing can go wrong, but then I wonder why they show the clip at all if the punch line is so weird.

It reminds me of the Gary Larson cartoon the Nürnberger Nachrichten showed just before Christmas one year, where a witch is disappointed that her Brussels sprouts house is not luring any children. Brussels sprouts was translated as ‘Brussels lace’. The picture was coloured, but the lace remained white. Of course, the translation was not the NN’s work but syndicated, but why did they take the cartoon at all? I suppose because gingerbread houses and witches are Christmassy. At all events, it would be hard to convey in Germany that kids in the USA and Britain don’t like Brussels sprouts.

CompuServe FLEFO

Under my entry yesterday on General Right of Personality, Derek Thornton asks me if this is the kind of post I would normally have made in FLEFO.
FLEFO is the Foreign Languages Educational Forum, some sections of which are used by translators (section 10 for queries, section 11 for general, section 12 for technology). FLEFO used to be much more populated, in the days when the WWW had not really taken off and before CSi was bought by AOL. It should be accessible even for non-members now, but I am still a member and when I enter via the Web I am recognized. Derek says this link should work. Continue reading

CompuServe FLEFO

Under my entry yesterday on General Right of Personality, Derek Thornton asks me if this is the kind of post I would normally have made in FLEFO.
FLEFO is the Foreign Languages Educational Forum, some sections of which are used by translators (section 10 for queries, section 11 for general, section 12 for technology). FLEFO used to be much more populated, in the days when the WWW had not really taken off and before CSi was bought by AOL. It should be accessible even for non-members now, but I am still a member and when I enter via the Web I am recognized. Derek says this link should work. Continue reading

IPKAT Intellectual Property Weblog

(Via Trademark Blog):
A new British IP blog called IPKAT, not just trade marks.

bq. This blog is run by Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon. We are IP enthusiasts from London. If you’re interested in trade marks (that’s the European/UK spelling for trademarks), patents, copyright, designs and/or any other IP topics, do keep in touch. We’d love to hear from you. We colour-code our blogs: red for copyright, teal for patents, purple for trade marks, green for confidentiality, dark blue for competition and black for everything else.

IPKAT Intellectual Property Weblog

(Via Trademark Blog):
A new British IP blog called IPKAT, not just trade marks.

bq. This blog is run by Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon. We are IP enthusiasts from London. If you’re interested in trade marks (that’s the European/UK spelling for trademarks), patents, copyright, designs and/or any other IP topics, do keep in touch. We’d love to hear from you. We colour-code our blogs: red for copyright, teal for patents, purple for trade marks, green for confidentiality, dark blue for competition and black for everything else.

Fo’ Shizzle my Nizzle 2

The Trademark Blog, via IPKAT (see next entry), links to the case report.

Note this Internet HTML case report: it has a ‘Neutral Citation Number’ – that is the way the case report on the Internet is referred to when it is cited.

Note also that English courts spell judgment without an E. In ordinary BE, you write judgement and judgment, just like acknowledgement or acknowledgment, but lawyers more often than not leave the E out, which brings them in line with U.S. practice. This is something the new Romain gets wrong. I’m sure it took advice, but not all lawyers know much about spelling.

The case is a good read, because of the slight distance between language and subject-matter:

bq. Ms Joachim said that Mr Thomas’ enthusiasm for the tracks by the Ant’ill Mob made it clear that he saw the inclusion of the Ant’ill Mob as crucial to the success of the album.

Fo’ Shizzle my Nizzle 2

The Trademark Blog, via IPKAT (see next entry), links to the case report.

Note this Internet HTML case report: it has a ‘Neutral Citation Number’ – that is the way the case report on the Internet is referred to when it is cited.

Note also that English courts spell judgment without an E. In ordinary BE, you write judgement and judgment, just like acknowledgement or acknowledgment, but lawyers more often than not leave the E out, which brings them in line with U.S. practice. This is something the new Romain gets wrong. I’m sure it took advice, but not all lawyers know much about spelling.

The case is a good read, because of the slight distance between language and subject-matter:

bq. Ms Joachim said that Mr Thomas’ enthusiasm for the tracks by the Ant’ill Mob made it clear that he saw the inclusion of the Ant’ill Mob as crucial to the success of the album.

General Right of Personality

I’ve been translating some decisions of the Federal Court of Justice, or Federal Supreme Court as I am supposed to call it. The current one is VI ZR 220/01, available at RWS Verlag in German.
The plaintiff was Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, the defendant the newspaper Bild, which had used a photograph of Marlene Dietrich in a TV commercial for a contemporary history supplement.
The court held that if someone was ‘eine absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte’ (rather than a ‘relative Person der Zeitgeschichte’), the newspaper was within its rights: any image of such a person can be freely used by the press.

I don’t always fish around for terminology, but in this case I’d been given a synopsis in English, which had ‘absolute person of current history’, namely a very famous person of recent or present times.

There is an argument for a literal translation together with a definition, I suppose. For another possibility, I found an article online at Jurist by Professor Thomas Lundmark of Munster University (who writes in the journal of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristenvereinigung) on the Princess Caroline case.

Prof. Lundmark (I always thought he was German, but he’s from the U.S.A.!) is Professor of Common Law and Comparative Legal Theory at the University of Münster (!) has ‘public figures for limited purposes (relative Person der Zeitgeschichte)’ and ‘public figures for all purposes (absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte)’. This is very nice. The only query I have is that the element of history is lost. But here I am making the mistake of not going back to the German definition. Perhaps ‘figures of contemporary history for all purposes’. Continue reading

General Right of Personality

I’ve been translating some decisions of the Federal Court of Justice, or Federal Supreme Court as I am supposed to call it. The current one is VI ZR 220/01, available at RWS Verlag in German.
The plaintiff was Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, the defendant the newspaper Bild, which had used a photograph of Marlene Dietrich in a TV commercial for a contemporary history supplement.
The court held that if someone was ‘eine absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte’ (rather than a ‘relative Person der Zeitgeschichte’), the newspaper was within its rights: any image of such a person can be freely used by the press.

I don’t always fish around for terminology, but in this case I’d been given a synopsis in English, which had ‘absolute person of current history’, namely a very famous person of recent or present times.

There is an argument for a literal translation together with a definition, I suppose. For another possibility, I found an article online at Jurist by Professor Thomas Lundmark of Munster University (who writes in the journal of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristenvereinigung) on the Princess Caroline case.

Prof. Lundmark (I always thought he was German, but he’s from the U.S.A.!) is Professor of Common Law and Comparative Legal Theory at the University of Münster (!) has ‘public figures for limited purposes (relative Person der Zeitgeschichte)’ and ‘public figures for all purposes (absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte)’. This is very nice. The only query I have is that the element of history is lost. But here I am making the mistake of not going back to the German definition. Perhaps ‘figures of contemporary history for all purposes’. Continue reading