In a discussion about the House of Commons on FLEFO (CompuServe), Mike Ellis mentioned this general brochure (G7), Some Traditions and Customs of the House. It’s an excellent collection of trivia:

bq. In general, the description used is “the Honourable Member for . . .”. However, Privy Councillors (senior Ministers, past or present, and other senior Members) are “the Right Honourable Member for … “. Less frequently heard these days are “the Noble Lord, the Member for … “, which is used for a Member with a courtesy title (e.g. the son of a duke, marquess or earl) who sits in the House of Commons, or an Irish peer, “the Honourable Baronet for … “. Following recommendations made by the Modernisation Committee the House agreed that some of the embellishments which are added to the standard form of address, such as “gallant” (used for Members who have been commissioned officers in the forces) and “learned” (used for Members who are senior barristers) should be abandoned. Often the constituency is omitted, and a Member will be described as “the Honourable Member who spoke last”, “the Right Honourable Lady opposite”, “the Honourable Member below the gangway”, etc. In most cases Hansard will expand these phrases into the form “the Honourable Member for Ockendon (Mr Bloggs)” in order to avoid ambiguity in the printed record of debates. …

bq. Members may speak only if called by the Chair. They are called by name, and must sit down if the Speaker rises to his or her feet (e.g. to call for order, or to interrupt the debate). To catch the Speaker’s eye, Members commonly rise or half-rise from their seats, but if they are not called, they have no redress.

This is some general knowledge that would have helped a German law student whose dissertation I was reading recently. The topic was the change of style in judicial decisions in England, France and Germany. She refers to the form of address in the House of Lords: ‘my noble and learned friend Lord …’, and concludes that this is not a mere convention but shows genuine respect for a fellow-judge – proved by the generally respectful tone:

bq. Dass es sich dabei nicht allein um eine zu bloßer Konvention erstarrte Höflichkeitsfloskel handelt, sondern um einen Ausdruck der tatsächlichen Wertschätzung des Fachkollegen, bezeugt der ganz generell festzustellende respektvolle Umgangston.

(Jutta Lashöfer, Zum Stilwandel in richterlichen Entscheidungen, 1992 ISBN 3-89325-124-3 or 0932-4763 – quite an interesting book).

Of course, noble = a Lord, and learned = a lawyer, so the phrase is absolutely conventional.

The Guardian (which used to be the Manchester Guardian, at least when I was at school) has its 1928 style guide online as a PDF file. The yellowing pages have been scanned.

Sections include Parliamentary (how to punctuate ‘Hear, hear!’ – I associate this more with The Times than The Guardian; Irish Free State parliament; word division; cricket; football; household servants (Cook general, housemaid, kitchen-maid, housemaid waitress, between-maid, house parlour-maid, nursery maid, children’s maid); and foreign and Welsh publications.

At www.canoo.net there are a number of sources for learners of German, or for those who want to check their German spelling quickly.

The site is in either English or German.
Es gibt englische und deutsche Seiten.

If you click on Dictionaries, you get a search field and a field with a pull-down menu. There you can search on all dictionaries, or select one, including spelling, word formation, and DE>EN LEO, the IT department dictionary at Munich University. For instance, enter ‘Groß’ in the inflection dictionary and you are shown every inflection on the screen.

Klicken Sie auf “Wörterbücher” und suchen Sie entweder in allen Wörterbüchern gleichzeitig (LEO DE>EN von www.leo.org ist auch dabei, es ist gelinkt) oder in nur einem.

CELEX kostenlos für alle EU-Bürger ab 1. Juli 2004.

I had a CELEX subscription for researching EU documents online as I’d been doing some translation for the European Court of Justice. It’s now been cancelled. I received a letter from Luxembourg by registered post:

bq. Please be informed that the Publications Office has decided to cancel your CELEX acces [sic] contract effective 20 June 2004. This decision follows the European Parliament Resolution of 19 December 2002, asking for free access to CELEX to all European citizens.
From 1 July 2004, CELEX will be available free of charge at the following Internet address:
http://europa.eu.int/celex

I can’t help feeling it will be available free to non-EU citizens as well.

Do we have a word for this in English? The mayor and a couple of other people come along and dig a symbolic first spadeful of earth on a building site – no matter, as I realize now, if work has been going on for a couple of months and huge holes have been dug and filled in again. It symbolizes the beginning of work on a building (this is a multi-storey car park).

Collins says ‘to turn the first sod’. I’m not quite convinced.

Anyway, this is distracting me from my work:

Unfortunately I missed the actual digging (see picture in Fürther Nachrichten).

Richard Schneider, in his Nachrichtenportal at Alexander von Obert’s Übersetzerportal, reports that the course for translators and interpreters at the Fachhochschule in Munich is being closed.

The report is long and quotes both Dr. Anne Hueglin, the American who is the professor in charge of the program (she is a professor of English in the economics department), and a former student, Tanja Burger. Here’s the department’s website.

A Fachhochschule is rather like a polytechnic in Britain, before they were converted into universities. It doesn’t have quite the cachet of a university, but it is not far off. It tends to be more oriented towards the working world. FHs call themselves ‘University of Applied Sciences’, which is misleading, because they don’t just do sciences, nor can what they do automatically be defined as ‘applied’.

This FH has the peculiarity, though, that for its diploma, instead of offering a four-year course, it offers a two-year course, the first two years of study being done at one of the five Fachakademien in Bavaria. At A Fachakademie a student can, in two or three years, study for the Staatsprüfung für Übersetzer und Dolmetscher. This qualification in most Länder (states) of Germany qualifies a student to be a certified translator and/or interpreter for the courts. In Bavaria it functions as a final exam for these colleges too.

FAKs (at the SDI in Munich they pronounce it F – A – K, but in Erlangen we pronounced it you-know-how) in Erlangen, Munich – SDI and FIM, Würzburg and Kempten. (I won’t say which website is best).

So the FH had to persuade people it was worth studying for two more years to get the diploma.

I taught at a Fachakademie for twenty years, so I often heard about the Fachhochschule. One of the things I liked best about the FAK was the amount of useful special-subject and background studies courses given. For instance, someone who did English and law would do a German course in law and some two-language law courses, legal translation classes EN>DE and DE>EN, liaison interpreting with a legal basis (and voluntarily also consecutive interpreting), and at-sight legal translation. (The FH only does technology or economics).

One of the things I liked least was the recurring feedback from many students that what they were doing wasn’t worth doing, and I see that Tanja Burger’s account says that she didn’t have much self-confidence after finishing at the FAK (the SDI in Munich), whereas after the FH she had the confidence to start her own translation business. And qualifications are very important in Germany.

Then again, it depends on the individual and the market situation. I don’t know how many students of translation at the more traditional university courses get in-house translation jobs nowadays – there are certainly some of those around that only take students from Mainz-Germersheim or Saarbrücken or Heidelberg, but the number of in-house positions has much decreased.