Miscellaneous/Vermischtes

To make up for the lack of posting, here are some miscellaneous links of things I’ve noticed on the Internet.

1. Suppenfuß, from Feetart by Stoecker Fotografie – many more photos on site.

This one recalls Suppengrün (soup vegetables) and also pigs’ trotters, which I think are a similar price per kilo.

2. This has been widely linked – Tracy Goodwin is an American coach who teaches people to speak with what she believes is a British accent (she refers to the ‘British dialect’). One link is on The English Blog. Jeffrey Hill says:

Tracy may be an expert in some things but definitely not in speaking with a British accent. Hers is all over the place—sort of a cross between Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins and the Queen.

On YouTube you can see How to Speak with an American Accent. A Parody of the Tracy Goodwin videoby ELIPTIS (note picture on wall in the two videos). Heavy emphasis on the fact that this is not meant seriously did not get through to all the commenters.

That is so far from ANY American accent I have ever heard in any state. The U.S. spans an entire continent from east to west. There are numerous ways of pronouncing words in the U.S. I am American and often I could not understand what you were saying either when you were speaking with a British accent or ATTEMPTING to sound like an American. Perhaps you would find it good to practice a lot more before you make your next video about American English.

ELIPTIS replies:

Its a Parody you fool. Parody = ” A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.” I was taking off, which means copying Tracy Goodwins video of an English Accent….

3. BBC News reports that Tokyo’s oldest man had been dead in bed for thirty years.

Mr Kato’s relatives told police that he had “confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha,” according to a report by Jiji Press.

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000) in widower’s pension payments via Mr Kato’s bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.

4. Tips for Translators has a short list of free online periodicals for translators.

5. In the latest edition of Translation Journal, among other interesting entries, there is an article by Michael Wilkinson on using the Web as corpus. The main emphasis is on how to use Bill Fletcher’s Web as Corpus website if you (like me) have not got round to creating your own corpus. I found the site promising when I tried it out for legal English.

5 thoughts on “Miscellaneous/Vermischtes

  1. I made a corpus for Legal English which I use in teaching/materials writing in English as a foreign language. One of the results was this list of keywords:
    [url]http://www.scribd.com/doc/57977159/Legal-Keywords[/url]

      • The corpus was chosen to fit the subjects covered in this introductory course:
        [url]http://www.britishcouncil.org/professionals-specialisms-legal-intro.htm[/url]

        Interestingly, “plaintiff” is slightly more common in my corpus than “claimant” (404 to 397) but “plaintiff” is much more common in the reference corpus (British National Corpus) appearing 2401 times…therefore it comes out as less “KEY”.

        KEYNESS is a statistical way of identifying a word as belonging to a particular register.

        • Oh dear, I didn’t look at the list properly. I did have Wordsmith Tools in the distant past but didn’t get so far with them. I will have to read this up.

        • I’ve been looking at BootCaT and AntConc again and I now understand that the keyword list requires a reference corpus. I suppose that large parts of the BNC predate the change of use from ‘plaintiff’ to ‘claimant’ in the UK.

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