On May 28, I forgot to add my third photo of Fürth. This shows the latest efforts to make the inner city green. Today’s paper shows two people tending their plants. Herr Jahreis of the City planning office says ‘So langsam wird aus der Steinwüste eine Streublumenwiese” (the desert of stone is gradually turning into a flowery meadow).

The trouble is, the really striking thing about these turn-of-the-20th-century streets is their very lack of green.

A house owner whose building is in the subsidized area (there are EU funds) can get 100% subsidy for this. A lady in Theaterstraße is strewing pepper on her creeper to keep dogs off. 10,000 euros per year are available for making houses and inner courtyards greener. I can understand the courtyards – there are 750 of those in the inner city alone, and Fürth has more than 2000 listed buildings (I’m sitting in one now), more than practically any other city. But is it right to destroy the sight of beautiful rows of sandstone houses by putting creepers all over them? Perhaps I am just too negative. I wonder what the city historian (Stadtheimatpflegerin) Barbara Ohm (author, inter alia, of ‘Durch Fürth geführt’) thinks of this?

This is my real worry. These before and after pictures on how to improve your office come from a 1995 German magazine.

Calpundit, on June 4, had an entry on the Paul Wolfowitz quote the Guardian got wrong. The entry is headed Translation Woes. I know that Wolfowitz was saying ‘we had to fight Saddam because there is so much oil in Iraq that he can keep his régime going for ever, whereas in North Korea we expect the economy to break down sooner or later’.

But what is new to me is this story that the German paper Die Welt had a translation of Wolfowitz which misled The Guardian. The entry – and above all the comments – discuss whether there was a translation mistake by Die Welt or by The Guardian. The original, German and Guardian quotes are given. Continue reading →

Calpundit, on June 4, had an entry on the Paul Wolfowitz quote the Guardian got wrong. The entry is headed Translation Woes. I know that Wolfowitz was saying ‘we had to fight Saddam because there is so much oil in Iraq that he can keep his régime going for ever, whereas in North Korea we expect the economy to break down sooner or later’.

But what is new to me is this story that the German paper Die Welt had a translation of Wolfowitz which misled The Guardian. The entry – and above all the comments – discuss whether there was a translation mistake by Die Welt or by The Guardian. The original, German and Guardian quotes are given. Continue reading →

The Enigmatic Mermaid gives a detailed summary of a talk by Anthony Pym (online publications on his website) on Risk Analysis in the Translation Process.

Pym says you always need more information than what is in the translation. He likes parallel texts. Enig gives a link to a Swiss site that is set up to search for parallel texts in Google. It turns out to be the site of Tanya Harvey Ciampi, who has a Yahoo group called wwwsift, all about finding materials for translators on the Web. I found her original ideas and files more helpful than the list, which is more or less silent except when she occasionally posts a URL. She has some links that look good too.

The Enigmatic Mermaid gives a detailed summary of a talk by Anthony Pym (online publications on his website) on Risk Analysis in the Translation Process.

Pym says you always need more information than what is in the translation. He likes parallel texts. Enig gives a link to a Swiss site that is set up to search for parallel texts in Google. It turns out to be the site of Tanya Harvey Ciampi, who has a Yahoo group called wwwsift, all about finding materials for translators on the Web. I found her original ideas and files more helpful than the list, which is more or less silent except when she occasionally posts a URL. She has some links that look good too.

The Lord Chancellor has not quite gone. Lord Falconer has become Lord chancellor but will be the last to hold the post, which is to disappear shortly. Reading various British papers online, it appears that the Cabinet reshuffle was hasty because Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary, suddenly resigned. Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, was intending to resign anyway. So plans in the pipeline were brought forward. According to the Telegraph Online (registration required, costs nothing),

bq. Tory peers accused the Government of announcing a constitutional upheaval “worked out on the back of an envelope”. The Earl of Onslow condemned it as “playing Pooh sticks with 800 years of British history”. Continue reading →