You can become a ‘zertifizierter Übersetzer’ (certified translator, literally – although in BE that sounds as if you were ready to go to a lunatic asylum) – see the item on E-Bay.

The firm appears to have been on ebay for a while. It claims to certify knowledge you already have. It says you train and do a final exam and then you get a certificate. The title can legally be used in Germany. The company was founded in the UK, but of course EU law permits that, no matter whether the object was to save money. But maybe the company does have a lot of English-language operations and I just haven’t found them.

On a cursory search I failed to find an English version.

More activities here (German).

Thanks to Robin Stocks, translator, who is in Bonn and also does a home page for the Bonner Übersetzer- und Dolmetscherforum (German, database of translators and interpreters), and Christiane Sprinz, food technologist and translator.

On the firm’s personal page at E-Bay (registration probably necessary), it says you don’t need to do any training if you confirm by email that you have the necessary experience.

bq. Frage: Ich habe ausreichend Fachwissen muß ich trotzdem an der Schulung teilnehmen?

bq. Antwort: Nein, sofern Sie uns Ihr Fachwissen per Email bestätigen (z.B. “Ich …. bestätige hiermit das ich über genügend Fachwissen in dem zu zertifizierenden Bereich verfüge”).

Via Isabella Massardo, an article from the Sydney Morning Herald about the way Australian English resists U.S. influence, No fries with that, mate.

There’s a link to ABC Online’s Australian Word Map, which shows regional Australian expressions and indicates their spread on a map, with ten words of the month.

bq. A recent inclusion is “blue-tongue”, for small children (because toddlers are close to the ground, like blue-tongue lizards). That one comes from Tasmania. The Brisbane region contributes “desert chicken”, meaning corned beef. From the central coast of Queensland comes “muckadilla”, meaning a disorganised person. From the Sydney region comes the expression “YMCA dinner”, or leftovers (“Yesterday’s Muck Cooked Again”). And, when someone agrees to take part in an activity, they say they’re “thumbs in”.

Old Bush Vernacular will be used in The Aussie Bible, to be published in August (there is already a Cockney Bible).

Via beSpacific, Harvard Law School Library runs the Nuremberg Trials Project,

bq. The Harvard Law School Library has approximately one million pages of documents relating to the trial of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and to the twelve trials of other accused war criminals before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT). …

bq. In this project only the English language trial documents and trial transcripts will be presented, but the evidence file documents are usually in both English and German.

German documents are online at the Oberlandesgericht Nürnberg.

Virtual tour of the Nazi party rally grounds in English or in German. A museum, the Dokumentationszentrum opened there in 2002.

I just discovered Messagease, a superior system for entering text on a Palm device (freeware). It’s intuitive, that’s to say, it works although I haven’t read the instructions yet.

The system is a grid as for noughts and crosses, containing these letters:
A N I
H O R
T E S
123 space

These are the most frequently used letters and you tap the square to enter them. For other letters, you stroke the square outwards: for instance, around the O are smaller letters:
q u p
c O b
g d j

On the 123 square you can switch to a numbers keypad.

You have to copy the text into memory and paste into another application.

I discovered this in the comments on Philip Greenspun’s weblog, where he reports his Handspring Treo has died and wonders whether to get a Pocket PC. The comments are worth reading. I suspect the best advice comes from those who advise ‘neither’. I don’t use a PDA much, but it’s very useful if I am away for a while.

The program was recommended by Ted Marcus. Continue reading →