Isabella Massardo at Taccuino di traduzione has as much trouble with the word spookrijder as I do with the word Geisterfahrer. Apparently she was fined for cycling in the wrong direction on a cycling path. The German word (and possibly the Dutch too) applies only to motorways. Anyway, in Erlangen you can see cyclists at night cycling in the wrong direction without lights, or when it’s raining, with an umbrella in one hand and the other on the handlebars.

bq. Ora, come tutti sanno da queste parti, il termine spookrijder (formato da spook, fantasma, e rijder, conducente) indica un automobilista che va contromano (il Van Dale oldandese aggiunge: in una strada a senso unico, in particolare in autostrada). Il Van Dale olandese-inglese dà come traduzione ghost-driver (da prendere cum grano salis), mentre il Van Dale francese-olandese si limita a fornire una descrizione: voiture / conducteur roulant à contresens.

Apparently the term ‘ghost driver’ does exist in English, but it’s not as universally used as the German term. I suspect there are a high proportion of them in Germany. On the radio, they say, ‘Es kommt Ihnen ein Fahrzeug entgegen’ (A vehicle is coming towards you), which always sounds mysterious to me.

Here’s a mysterious site with some vocabulary.

Nützliche Links für deutschsprachige Ausländer in England befindet sich auf der eXil Site.

The site eXil has a lot of useful-looking links for Germans, Austrians and German-speaking Swiss living in Britain.

bq. Exil versteht sich als Treffpunkt für deutschsprachige Londoner. Ob Schweizer, Deutsche, Österreicher, Namibierin oder einfach nur Londoner, es geht hier nicht um Heimatkunde oder gefühltes ‘Anderssein’, sondern ganz einfach darum sich in der gemeinsamen Sprache über die alltäglichen und nicht-alltäglichen Dinge im Leben hier in London auszutauschen. Dass dabei gelegentlich die Vorzüge langer Sätze, der Mangel an gutem Brot, und die Erleichterung bei Rot über die Ampel gehen zu dürfen angesprochen werden sei selbstverständlich.

Deutscher Text beim Institut für Urheber- und Medienrecht.

The Independent says some say that Naomi Campbell’s win at the House of Lords creates privacy law in Britain. She agreed that the Daily Mirror had the right to publish the fact that she was a drug user, but it revealed she had been attending Narcotics Anonymous. This tended to discourage her and others from going there. The Lords weighed up the right to privacy against freedom of expression.

bq. The judgment was held up by lawyers and senior media figures as creating a de-facto privacy law by allowing celebrities to claim that the publication of information which the media knows to be private or confidential – such as medical treatment or employment records – would infringe their human right to a private life.

The case went to both the Court of Appeal (where the decision was three to zero against Campbell) and the House of Lords (where it was three to two in her favour), meaning that of the highest judges in the country, five were against her and three in favour – or something like that (the Mirror says five in favour and four against, but I think they got their arithmetic wrong).

The editor of the Daily Mirror said:

bq. This is a very good day for lying, drug-abusing prima donnas who want to have their cake with the media and the right to then shamelessly guzzle it with their Cristal champagne.

The court awarded Campbell £3,500 damages, which is not exorbitant. But of course, these cases are very expensive and so the costs of the Daily Mirror will be between £500,000 and £1 m.

bq. But The House of Lords judgment, which left the Daily Mirror facing a legal bill estimated at between £500,000 and £1m, was the latest twist in a legal saga with all the swagger and barely-concealed petulance of a Milan fashion show.

There’s a German article at Institut für Urheber- und Medienrecht. It looks good, but I find their reference to ‘Schadensersatz’ confusing. The damages hardly fall into the balance.

bq. Mit drei zu zwei Stimmen bestätigten die Richter das erstinstanzliche Urteil, wonach Naomi Campbell 5.200 Euro Schadensersatz zugesprochen worden waren. Die Entscheidung des Berufungsgerichts, nach der die Klägerin zur Zahlung der Gerichtskosten in Höhe von 520.000 Euro verpflichtet wurde, wurde zurückgenommen. Insgesamt muss das Boulevardblatt nun 1,5 Millionen Euro an Schadensersatz und Gerichtskosten zahlen.

There’s a Dictionary of the Scots Language online. You can browse headwords on the left.

I looked up but and ben (= without and within), with difficulty: it’s under but, but not as a noun phrase referring to a small house. Nor is deoch and doris. Still, I suppose Harry Lauder is not the absolute source.

bq. The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND). DOST contains information about Scots words in use from the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries (Older Scots); and SND contains information about Scots words in use from the eighteenth century to the present day (modern Scots). These are the most comprehensive dictionaries available for, respectively, Older Scots and modern Scots, and are therefore essential research tools for anyone interested in the history of either Scots or English language, and for historical or literary scholars whose sources are written in Scots or may contain Scots usages.

I’d like to recommend a book. The Scots Thesaurus. This is not just a thesaurus: it contains definitions of the words too. (The one at amazon appears to be a later edition than mine). Here are some words on law (some are marked as archaic):

|habit and repute|held or regarded to be (a thief, a married person etc.) …|
|hail, whole|the whole of, the full number of: ‘the whole Heritors or their agents’.|
|hereanent|concerning this matter; in regard to what has just been said|
|heritable jurisdictions|collective term for various ancient rights formerly enjoyed by feudal proprietors of land or by holders of certain offices, entitling them to administer justice in local courts; abolished by the Heritable Jursidictions (Scotland) Act 1747|
|hing, hang|to attach, append (one’s seal to a document)|
|holograph|of a deed or letter: wholly in the handwriting of one person and, in the case of a will, signed by him …|
|homologate|ratify, confirm, approve, render valid|
|ingiver|one who hands in or lodges a document formally for registration etc. …|

(Thanks to Rainer Langenhan for the web link)

Some other language blogs have been posting interesting language-related entries that I haven’t commented on.

Michael at Translate This! refers to my entries on the Collins German Dictionary. His first job after university was as a compiler for the Collins Dictionary in Glasgow.

Robin Stocks at Carob, after recovering from the financial-statement-translating season, has had a number of useful entries and links for financial translators, starting on May 1st.

Robin had a photo in January that I meant to comment on.

What struck me, of course, was the tidiness of the flexes. I would like to emulate this, but I think that should have started with better-designed electricity fittings.

Gail at Open Brackets took up another entry of mine and wrote about quality or lack of quality and the translation market. There are some interesting comments, too, including some about lack of translation budgeting in the humanities. This topic struck me because I translate guides to churches and castles and sometimes a publisher recommends me to someone at a university. For instance, this week someone with a whole book on cathedral architecture wanted a quote. There was a grant for £5000 for translation, but the length was 140,000 words. If I had taken a German publisher’s line of 60 strokes and publisher’s price of 1 euro per line (OK, some pay half), that would have added up to 17,500 euros. A translator well up in the vocabulary of these cathedrals, and they weren’t cathedrals in Germany, might have made good progress on something like that, at the 1-euro-per-line price. But even then, the translator would not be able to translate for 70 working days without risking losing other clients.

Actually, I should probably have quoted per page, which is the usual method for books (but not for the ones I’ve done myself). Then I’d want to remind myself what the usual page rates paid by publishers are.

Here’s a quote from Gail’s entry:

‘There was a comment to a recent posting here that I found quite telling:

bq. I’m a contract writer for an insurance company and am responsible for “coordinating” the translation of said contracts. I have to confess to feeling rather frustrated when my translator comes back to me asking what we mean when we say “benefits payable on the death of the spouse will be payable to the employee’s estate if the employee is deceased and there’s no beneficiary designation.” He’s trying to understand it, for heaven’s sake. I, on the other hand, don’t want to understand it, as it just gives me a headache.
— cmb

I’m afraid my advice to cmb would be to get a new translator:the current one apparently stumped by very basic terminology.’

Gail also has a wonderful quote in the entry prior to this one. She found a description of her weblog at Force Monkeys:

bq. Its like a bunch of college professors got together and smoked pot for a week. They bring up a bunch of stuff you probably wouldnt think about. I dont recommend this if you dont have a very large vocabulary.

As already mentioned, the Collins large one-volume DE>EN EN>DE dictionary edited by Peter Terrell, originally sold in Germany as Pons Großwörterbuch für Experten und Universitäten Englisch, has two successors.

Language Hat seemed interested in a review of the new Collins-Langenscheidt dictionary (see recent entry). I can’t see myself doing a full review because I don’t use a bilingual dictionary like this much. I probably use the CD-ROM every day to jog my memory, but if I encounter a new German expression, I go to a monolingual dictionary or the Internet. And my translation problems usually relate to legal or cultural matters for which this dictionary is too small.

Still, I have a paper copy of the 1999 edition here and have now compared some of the pages of the new editions online with that.

First, the new Collins German Dictionary, known in Germany as Langenscheidt (Collins) Großwörterbuch Englisch (must remember the names). Some pages can be downloaded here. Take the lower link (Musterseiten), for the thumb index version – it gives 5 DE>EN pages and 5 EN>DE.

The 2004 dictionary and the 1999 dictionary are very similar indeed. I looked at the pages from biologisch – bisherig, and from E – echt, that is, only two pages, and only DE>EN. I looked at the layout of the EN>DE for the sidebars.

The layout is a bit nicer: markers like ADJ, PRON etc. are in capitals, white on a black background, so they strike the eye immediately. The sidebars (they exist in both language directions, but the sample pages show them only EN>DE) are now on a grey background, so they stand out nicely. The one I looked at was not new – it was in the 1999 dictionary too.

On one occasion, two entries have been separated, so that ebenerdig and ebenfalls are in separate entries, which makes more sense.

New words are Birnenfassung (light-bulb socket), Birnenwasser (pear brandy), and Eau de Toilette (eau de toilette – isn’t it toilet water?)

Words removed: eine weiche Birne haben (to be soft in the head).

Other alterations are trivial. Birgt replaces birg for those who are looking for the verb bergen and don’t know about the vowel change. Birst is added for bersten.

Under bisherig, the sentence der frühere Außenminister ist jetzt Kanzler has now become der frühere Stellvertreter ist jetzt Vorsitzender!

I did not compare the long entry on bis word for word. From length and layout it looks unchanged.

Two things struck me. One, why is Bisamratte given as muskrat (beaver)? I presume it means that Bisamratte is a muskrat but some people wrongly use the word for beaver. I can confirm the former because there are some in the Fürth Stadtpark. But I find the entry confusing.

Another interesting point is bisherig. Both dictionaries give:

wegen unserer bisherigen Arbeitsweise war das unmöglich: because of our previous way of working / because of the way we worked before that wasn’t possible
wegen unserer bisherige Arbeitsweise ist das unmöglich: because of our present way or working / because of the way we have worked up to now that isn’t possible

It’s interesting that bisherig can mean previous or present depending on context, but I’m sure they’re right. It means: running up to a particular time, and contains a tense problem.

That’s all, folks – not many changes, are there? Those with an earlier copy of the dictionary should have a good look, though, since the sidebars have not always been there and I suspect the 1999 edition had some big changes.

Now for the other one. That is Pons Großwörterbuch Englisch 2001, labelled on the cover Vollständige Neuentwicklung. If you click on praxisorientiert on that page, you will see a little bit of text.

Looking at the DE>EN example of fahren, it looks as if the dictionary is completely new. The meanings of the verb seem to be the same in number, but the examples are different. I missed er fuhr mit der Hand/einem Tuch über den Tisch: he ran his hand/a cloth over the table, but the entry is torn off and maybe that is there – they don’t show whole pages. There are some differences: Fahrensmann, a rather archaic word, is added, and peripatetic is added for fahrend.

Here’s the old entry for Fahrer:

Fahrer Fah|rer [>faùrŒ] m (-s, -), Fahrerin Fah|re|rin [-«rIn] f (-, -nen) [a] driver;
(= Chauffeur) chauffeur/chauffeuse, driver;
[b] (Sport) (inf) (= Radfahrer) cyclist;
(= Motorradfahrer) motorcyclist

The new one has: driver, motorist, motorbike ride, motorcyclist, biker, racing driver, racing cyclist, driver, chauffeur, chauffeuse.

Not all entries are longer, though. To compare this dictionary with the 1999 Collins, you would need to work with both and see if you developed a preference.