Vor genau einem Jahr habe ich hier angefangen. Eigentlich nicht hier, sondern dort.

I started this weblog with another provider exactly one year ago. Time flies.

Ein Artikel von Carolina Villegas bei TransDirectory listet auf, wie freiberufliche Übersetzer ihr Büro nach Feng-Shui Prinzipien einrichten können.

On the TranslationDirectory site (see entry here yesterday) there is an article by Carolina Villegas on Feng Shui for the Freelance Translator, with a number of links to other sites. I will go through the points raised here as a kind of meme. How far is my office from the principles of feng shui?

1. Yes, my office is near the front of the flat, fairly close to the door. But I try to avoid receiving clients in my home office.
2. My desk is half-facing the entrance. I don’t think too many surprises will come through that door without the doorbell being rung first, though. Two kittens did once come through the window, but that’s on the other side.
3. I have still got the keyboard and mouse that came with this computer. Bad of me. Still, I’ve often had different ones in the past. But there is no glare from the monitor.
4. ‘Keep your workspace clean and clutter-free.’ Hmm. ‘Keep the cords to your office equipment well hidden.’ Double hmm.
5. Lighting isn’t too bad.
6. Directions. I suppose my office does face south. The windows are on the north though. The desk is NW. That seems wrong. I don’t allow fresh flowers in. Nor plants on the desk – they wouldn’t like it. I have no crystals either. Have I got to have crystals? The art in the room has no mountains on it at all. No wild animals either. I have three dogs, two naked women, an ink blot, and Sigmund Freud with a white rabbit on the couch.
7. No crystals either.
8. ‘Don’t sleep in the same room where your computer is’. Well, this isn’t my bedroom, but sometimes the work is conducive to microsleeps at the very least.
9. Plants in the office – yes, I have got a cactus. The others had to go. Have I got ‘views of harmful elements’ from my window? I suspect a building site is a harmful element. Not sure that I will hang wind chimes though. Another sharp-leafed plant or two would be conceivable though. But I’m always worried about this (see bottom two pictures).

Netbib weblog hat anscheinend nicht viel für Juristen übrig.

Spiegel Online has an article (in German) on strange plaintiffs – litigious people (Querulanten), at least some of them.
Netbib weblog gives the link, via Handakte WebLAWg, rather grudgingly:

bq. Der SPIEGEL macht sich wohlfeil über allerlei verwaltungsgerichtlich notorische Querulanten lustig (via Handakte) – dabei ist die Jurisprudenz doch das Problem, für dessen Lösung sie sich hält.

(smiley omitted)

bq. The SPIEGEL gets some cheap amusement out of all kinds of notorious litigious persons at administrative courts … but the law (I suppose they mean) is the problem as whose solution it regards itself.

Pardon? It’s not clear what this opinion is based on. A search in the archives reveals a few other snotty remarks about the law and also about things being anglozentrisch.

More snotty remarks about German law webloggers today. Digs at legal weblogs in Germany on 13th April and 6th April.

Perhaps this is just a private feud, but it doesn’t read like that.

LATER NOTE / SPÄTER HINZUGEFÜGT:
Ich muss mich korrigieren (siehe Kommentar): netbib weblog hat 8 Autoren und nur einer, kg, hat die Nachrichten geschrieben, die ich verlinke. Er/sie hat auch zu meinem Fürther Weblog mal gemeint “Fürth? Was ist das?”

I apologize to netbib weblog – a comment (in German) points out that there are 8 authors, and all the entries I found dismissive of lawyers (and of Fürth!) are by one of them, called kg. Apologies to the other seven – I didn’t find a description of the co-authorship anywhere on the site, but there are a lot of links so I probably overlooked it.

Schröder erwirkt einstweilige Verfügung gegen Kriminalroman
Landgericht Hamburg untersagt Verbreitung aufgrund Cover-Foto

According to Medienrecht News, Gerhard Schröder has obtained an order from the Hamburg Landgericht to prevent the cover and contents of a crime novel from being circulated. It shows Schröder in the sights of a gun, and refers to a Chancellor called Winzling (something like ‘Midget’). The publisher Betzel Verlag had this on the cover of ‘Das Ende des Kanzlers – Der finale Rettungsschuss” (The end of the Chancellor – the fatal shot). The author is a journalist using the pseudonym Reinhard Liebermann.

The site now shows a different head on the cover – the original cover has almost disappeared from the Internet too.

Isabella Massardo in Taccuino di traduzione refers to the articles on the translation business and linguistics written by translators for translators at TranslationDirectory.com. To quote that site:

bq. TranslationDirectory.com wishes to help freelance translators to get answers to questions they face in their work: how to market their services in the global marketplace; how to collect payments; where to find terminology sources in different subject matter areas; how to more effectively use computer tools; how to handle certain complicated translation issues, etc.
They invite contributions.

I listed them and other translators’ sites in an earlier entry.
Translatorscafe has articles too.

These sites for translators to seek and find work can be irritating, but they have advantages too (for instance the possibility at ProZ.com to search the old Kudos glossary questions – some of the answers suggested are very wide of the mark, but others do a mass of research and are worth looking at).

In a different category, there is also Translation Journal, edited by Gabe Bokor, which has been running for 27 issues now.

Foreignword.com has articles by Roger Chriss on working as a translator. There are links to more articles on other sites too.

Per Döhler’s Artikel zu Umsatzsteuer für Übersetzer und Dolmetscher ist auf den Stand 2004.

Per Döhler’s article (in German) on VAT for translators and interpreters is up to date for 2004. It’s useful because tax offices and tax advisers are often ignorant about how to categorize translation and interpreting work.

Further to the entry on washing instructions: I discovered the company producing them is Tom Bihn. Pedantry was sceptical but is now convinced, via Silt, that it’s legitimate – see this Tom Bihn page, where they have now put the words on a T-shirt too.

It looks as if the big one-volume Collins dictionaries for Spanish, French, Italian and German are online at wordreference.com, as is the Collins English dictionary (my favourite one-volume British English dictionary at the moment).

(thanks to Betina Frisone on FLEFO)

Das zweisprachige Handbuch für Deutschland, das neulich für uns Migranten veröffentlicht wurde, enthält einen Auszug aus Goethes “Osterspaziergang”, allerdings nicht ins Englische übersetzt, was auch sehr schwer wäre.

The other word of the day, or word of yesterday, is Osterspaziergang: Easter walk. The Manual for Germany mentioned in an earlier entry quotes fourteen lines from Goethe’s ‘Osterspaziergang’, which is actually from Faust I. The text of the book online is much shorter and does not include the poem.

The two-language copy I received does not attempt to translate the piece into English, perhaps fortunately (I have had to accept that the English is rocky in parts). It does entitle the passage ‘Easter Stroll’, although a moment later it has ‘Easter-Day Walk’.

The text is available online in English and German (translation into English by Edgar Alfred Bowring). The English is not good. Perhaps the contents sound a bit pedestrian, but the German has a bouncy rhythm (and the text must be seen as part of a play, not a free-standing poem).

The description in the manual of Easter is a bit shaky. ‘Ancient Germanic custom states [sic] that the egg is the origin of life. … Easter Eggs, chocolate bunnies and other sweets are hidden in the garden or in the apartment by parents on Easter Sunday for the children to hunt and find.’ (We don’t actually hunt eggs, do we?) ‘Sometimes Straw puppets are burned to symbolise the end of winter.’ Eggs and Straw with capitals. Is this Jack Straw, following in the tradition of Guy Fawkes? And ‘puppets’ – are they glove puppets, marionettes, or what? – I don’t like to be so negative, but the list of country and capitals is also odd (p. 11). I know that towns are often left in their original spelling, but what is this: Ucrain Ukraine, Slowakia Slowakei, Icland Island. Belarus or Belorussia etc. has been omitted altogether.

However, the attempt to communicate in icons on the cover is still more mystifying:

What does the symbol on the left mean – it suggests ‘Is this the men’s or the women’s lavatory?’ And then there is the empty third square.

Read on for the German Goethe text and the translation: Continue reading →

Das Wort Teilstrich scheint in Österreich statt Spiegelstrich benutzt zu sein, aber vielleicht sind die zwei Wörter Synonyme? Im Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz wird es auch benutzt, laut Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Justiz: § 32 Abs. 1 Nr. 3 erster Teilstrich StUG . Hier § 32 bis zum zweiten Teilstrich:

bq. (1) Für die Forschung zum Zwecke der politischen und historischen Aufarbeitung der Tätigkeit des Staatssicherheitsdienstes sowie für Zwecke der politischen Bildung stellt der Bundesbeauftragte folgende Unterlagen zur Verfügung:
1. Unterlagen, die keine personenbezogenen Informationen enthalten,2. Duplikate von Unterlagen, in denen die personenbezogenen Informationen anonymisiert worden sind, es sei denn, die Informationen sind offenkundig,3. Unterlagen mit personenbezogenen Informationen über – Mitarbeiter des Staatssicherheitsdienstes, soweit es sich nicht um Tätigkeiten für den Staatssicherheitsdienst vor Vollendung des 18. Lebensjahres gehandelt hat, oder – Begünstigte des Staatssicherheitsdienstes,

The word Teilstrich seems to be used in Austria instead of the German Spiegelstrich, but it can’t be, because Google with site:at indicates both are used in Austria too. Are they alternatives? The usual EU English term is indent, rather than bullet point, although when I looked up a German statute (see above), one site had bullet points and the other little dashes.