There’s a meme going around weblogs at the moment that says ‘When you see this, post a bit of poetry in your blog’.

(Via Desbladet, dust from a distant sun)

I nearly posted part of Huchel’s ‘Wei Dun und die alten Meister’ but have decided this is too gloomy and so I offer, hoping not to be got for copyright violation, Robert Gernhardt’s Lied (from Wörtersee). I offer a prose translation, but this, as with all poetry translation, is almost worse than no translation at all:

Lied

In dem Grase war ein Tier,
es saß dort, ich stand hier.
Ich ging langsam darauf zu,
fragte es: Wer bist dann du?
Bist du bräunlich
oder rot?
Bist lebendig
oder tot?
Bist ein Teufel
oder Gott?
Oder bist du ein Hase?

Song

In the grass there was a creature.
It sat there, I stood here.
I slowly approached it,
asked it: And who are you?
Are you brownish
or red?
Are you living
or dead?
Are you a devil
or God?
Or are you a hare?

Kann es gesetzlich verboten sein, “englische Muttersprachler” (“native English speakers”) als Übersetzer oder Dolmetscher zu suchen? Im früheren Beitrag zitierte ich eine englischsprachige Werbung aus der Süddeutschen Zeitung für Übersetzer, die in beide Richtungen übersetzen sollen und “mother tongue standard” (auf dem Sprachniveau von Muttersprachlern) aufweisen sollten. Im Kommentar schreibt Robin Bonthrone, die Guardian habe eine solche Anzeige abgelehnt.

Ich habe aber den Eindruck, es könnte in der EU als diskriminierend angesehen werden, als *nicht*-Übersetzer englische Muttersprachler zu suchen, und die Guardian hat etwas durcheinandergebracht (sie erwähnte auch Rassendiskriminierung). Denn native speaker kann jeder Rasse oder Nationalität angehören, muss bloß in einer englischsprachigen Umgebung aufgewachsen sein.

In an earlier entry, I quoted an English ad for translators of ‘mother tongue standard’ in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. in one of the comments, Robin Bonthrone says that the Guardian refused to place an ad for a translator into English and he had to put it in the Economist:

bq. I wonder if this has a legal background? Earlier this year, we were going to advertise a position for a senior native-English translator with the Guardian in the UK. They refused to accept the job requirement for a “native English speaker”, claiming this breached equal opportunities and/or racial discrimination law. So we pulled the Guardian ad and it went into the Economist instead.

I would be quite annoyed if I discovered that native speakers could not be sought. The word ‘native’ in ‘native’ speaker does not, of course, mean someone who has lived in England since birth. It means, I would say, someone who has grown up in an English-speaking environment. Probably that definition could be polished, but a person born to English-speaking missionaries in some distant land would still be a native English speaker.

A Google search revealed some Esperantist anger at the EU seeking native speakers of English for *non*-translation jobs. That I can see.

bq. Die Beschwerde richtete sich gegen Fälle sprachlicher Diskriminierung sowohl seitens europäischer Organisationen, die teilweise oder gänzlich durch die Europäische Kommission finanziert werden, als auch seitens privater Unternehmen, die mit der Europäischen Kommission zusammenarbeiten. Diese Organisationen veröffentlichten wiederholt Stellenanzeigen, die Sprecher mit “English mother tongue” oder “English native speakers” verlangten. Dies hat zur Folge, dass europäische Bürgerinnen und Bürger, die gute oder ausgezeichnete Englischkenntnisse besitzen, diskriminiert werden und nicht eingestellt werden können. Die Europäische Esperanto-Union hat über 700 solcher Anzeigen gesammelt (siehe Liste unter http://www.lingvo.org/eo/2/15). Die Liste beinhaltet keine sprachenspezifische Stellen als Übersetzer oder Dolmetscher, sondern lediglich Arbeitsplätze, für die alle europäischen Bürger theoretisch gleiche Chancen haben sollten – auch wenn sie nicht englischer Muttersprache sind.

Other comments on EU practice also seem to radiate from this Esperantist initiative.

The definition of a native speaker, and even of ‘native speaker competence’, was a recent topic on languagehat, incidentally.

The Guardian today had an article suggesting the blasphemy law may be about to be repealed in England. This was based on a remark of David Blunkett’s in 2001, so it didn’t look like news, and when I looked again, it had left the front page and the religious slot had been taken by something on gay clergy.

The trouble with the blasphemy law is that it is outdated and the courts have refused to extend it to protect religions other than Christianity. Since they try not to use the law at all, this would be OK were it not for the fact that private prosecutions are permitted in Britain. Mary Whitehouse, who must have gone around with binoculars, was famous for prosecuting in cases of blasphemy and obscenity. And in blasphemy, the law supported her.

bq. The case to scrap the blasphemy laws received a boost in 1997 when the report from the Runnymede Trust’s commission on British Muslims which first studied the extent of Islamophobia recommended a new offence of incitement to religious hatred should be created rather than extending the blasphemy law to all religons.

More on blasphemy on the Wikipedia.

I blogged this after all because Delia Venables links to a new (October 1) site on religious law that looks promising, by (Liverpool) barrister Neil Addison. There’s a bit about the history of blasphemy laws in the USA – no prosecutions there since 1971. Neil also has a website on harassment law.

Einwandfreie englische Computer-Übersetzung.

Professor Lenz comments on my OneLook entry:

bq. Okay, this is off topic, but it might be of interest to note for you that the problem of computer translations has finally been solved completely and anyone can now get perfect English translations here. (Found at discourse.net).

It looks surprisingly good, although I must admit it’s not my direction. It does other languages too, including Greek.

Meanwhile, another comment under ‘Mother tongue standard’ establishes that the way to tell if you’re a native speaker is if you know it yourself:

bq. It is very hard to define native competence. In fact, it’s a quality that only the person in question knows for sure whether he or she has it or not.

Two huge translation problems solved, with the help of comments! I’ve had so much comment spam this week, but it’s been worth keeping comments open.

Anfang September 2004 startete der Law Society of England and Wales, die Anwaltskammer für Solicitor, eine Werbekampagne mit dem Spruch “My hero, my solicitor“. Das kann nur schiefgehen!

Die drei Plakate kann man als PDF-Dateien sehen, wenn man auf die PDF-Icons unter dem Link oben klickt.

At the beginning of September 2004, the Law Society of England and Wales, the solicitors’ professional body, started a pilot advertising campaign with the slogan ‘My hero, my solicitor‘. The Law Society wrote:

bq. The ads will appear at London Bridge and Euston underground stations, and York, Leamington Spa and Newcastle-upon-Tyne mainline stations for four weeks from 6 September or 13 September.
In market research, 73% of those questioned found the ads believable and seven out of ten said they were helpful in telling people how to find a solicitor. A wider campaign may follow the pilot.

There are three posters, one for business law, one for employment law, and one for family law (see PDF files at above link). They’re a bit multicultural – is it harder to imagine a black or Chinese solicitor not caring?

The campaign was used by the Observer as the introduction to a story on complaints against solicitors yesterday, and no doubt it will provide many more happy associations of this kind.

Someone on Compuserve recommended the One Look Reverse Dictionary.

There are two kinds of reverse dictionary. In this kind, you enter some general phrases to remind you of a specific word.

The díctionary allows you to:

find words from their definition
explore related concepts
create a list of words in a category
answer basic questions (e.g. what is the capital of Vietnam?
solve crossword clues using wildcards

It apparently indexes hundreds of other online reference sites.

I have such a dictionary in print form, dated early 1990s.
Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary, 1989, ISBN 0 276 49541 1
Bizarrely, this was ‘translated’ into German:
Der schnelle Weg zum richtigen Wort, ADAD-Verlag, 1992, ISBN 3 87003 473 4

There are also reverse dictionaries that classify words by their endings, so that a group of words ending in ‘erely’ will be together.

Is there one of those online? There must be. All I have is a GDR one, Martin Lehnert’s Rückläufiges Wörterbuch der englischen Gegenwartssprache, VEB Leipzig 1971. The first three words are a, baa, sahaa, and the last buzz, abuzz, fuzz.

LATER NOTE: For those who found this information exciting, I must say I discovered I have already blogged it: my mind must be going.

STILL LATER NOTE: As Abnu points out in the comments (in a discussion as to which of us has not had enough coffee today), the OneLook dictionary can be used to find patterns and thus does the work of a rückläufiges Wörterbuch. Here are the results of a search for *nch.