The New Yorker has a review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (see earlier entry) by Louis Menand. This is a much more careful demolition job than mine. Menand points out inconsistencies in punctuation and that the book was not adapted for the American market. So many books are adapted, far too many, and yet here, where the punctuation rules are different, no changes were introduced.

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’’s writing is its inconsistency.

How true this rings. Oh, the times I used to tell my students, ‘You can’t do that. You know, the Americans are even more pedantic than we British are.’ Did they believe me? No – because pedantry is bad and Americans are good. Or if I said, ‘The Americans divide words differently from the British’, it was ‘You don’t like the Americans, do you, because you keep mentioning them.’ (We accepted both BE and AmE from German students, as far as we could, and we had both British and American staff, with the odd Australian or Irish person).

via Language Log.

Desbladet appropriately links to a Monty Python sketch on a team of German philosophers, playing the ancient Greeks.

If you click on the next page, skip over the Bomber Harris interlude quickly, in view of the fact that the dome was put on the Frauenkirche in Dresden today and the Duke of Kent said some words in German.

bq. Obviously the manager Martin Luther has decided on all-out attack, as indeed he must with only two minutes of the match to go. And the big question is, who is he going to replace, who’s going to come off. It could be Jaspers, Hegel or Schopenhauer, but it’s Wittgenstein! Wittgenstein, who saw his aunty only last week, and here’s Marx.
(Marx begins some energetic knees-up running about)

There is an article in the Financial Times on weblogs, but it will not be available free much longer. It’s by Patti Waldmeir, an American correspondent, and is entitled A stretch in the virtual stocks for the global village gossip. Thanks to Robin Bonthrone for the reference.

The main interest in the article is the danger of publishing personal or confidential information online, and at the same time it suggests to employers that they should not be too quick to sack an employee who goes too far. It starts from the well-known example of Heather Hamilton (dooce – but look at earlier entries than today’s for the real flavour). It also mentions the danger of webloggers being dishonest in order to avoid problems.

bq. But the issue is not just whether we are wasting time or bandwidth: the bigger question is about freedom. Politicians are far less free than normal people, says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, because their every utterance is searched and scrutinised for infelicities. To satisfy that scrutiny, they must always be their public selves, without the luxury of lapsing into private bad behaviour.

bq. Bloggers risk the same peculiar loss of privacy, he says: when every idiocy uttered is permanent – and searchable – individuals may have no choice but to present a sanitised public self in place of the real one. The result is much less freedom; only the man without a blog can be free to think as he pleases.

As a self-employed person, I don’t risk being sacked. But as someone offering my services, I don’t want to make a bad impression. This is not a private and personal weblog. Of course I don’t mention clients and jobs, but it would be in my interest not to offend other translators either (and that includes on mailing lists, UseNet groups and elsewhere).

One thing, for instance, that I promised myself when I started here was not to make fun of bad translations. It seems to me that if I show up a bad translation done by someone else, it reflects badly on me too, and it also makes non-translator and customer readers associate the very process of translation with errors. And every time I mention a mistake, someone is going to be offended, probably for quite mistaken reasons. But this doesn’t stop me from doing it. In fact, it’s inevitable I’m going to comment on language peculiarities from time to time. I suppose the problem may be not criticizing enough rather than criticizing too much.

Since the Enigmatic Mermaid has swum off, temporarily I hope, I’m pleased to announce a Portuguese translation weblog that has been around since November 2003. It is by Rosário Durão and is called tradiloisas. Lots of links for technology and medicine. Nothing about football, as far as I can tell.
It links to another Portuguese translation weblog, tradutória. This is more mysterious. The poster is Jim Oliver, but used to be F.C.S.
Thanks to Steve Dyson for the link.

I ZR 136/01
LG München I – 7 O 15999/99 ./. OLG München – 6 U 3739/00

Robin Stocks at Carob reports very early on yesterday’s Federal Court of Justice judgment in favour of Karin Krieger.

He gives a translation of the Yahoo news report (in German). Krieger translated novels by Alessandro Baricco, a sort of watered-down mental pornography (I base this on one reading of Silk) that sells rather well and I believe is actually read (something one doubts about Lawrence Norfolk, whose Lemprière’s Dictionary appeared in a much-discussed German translation):

bq. After differences with Krieger, Piper Verlag announced in 1999 that it was withdrawing all works she had translated and having them retranslated prior to their reissue. This applied to three books published in German in the late 1990s – Silk, Castelli di Rabbia (Land aus Glas or Country of Glass in the German) and Novecento – plus two that had not yet been published: Ocean Sea and L’anima di Hegel e le Mucche des Wisconsin. Most of these were indeed subsequently republished in new translations.

I remember that one of these books appeared in a new translation but was advertised with the same quotes praising the German translation that had actually been made with reference to Krieger’s translation. Continue reading →

The German American Law Journal Blog has begun to describe German law blogs. It starts with Handakte WebLAWg and law blog, on June 14th, and continues on June 15th and June 16th (and thanks for the very complimentary description of Transblawg!)