LATER NOTE: the original Spanish and English versions are both online, and Geoff Pullum has established that the translation deviates only slightly from the Google translation, which suggests a native speaker revised the MT.

Geoffrey K. Pullum of Language Log has been given a brochure in Spanglish and wonders how it was created.

bq. When one has finished giggling, and one has noted that The development business is reserved the right to make any change that be necessary, one finds oneself wondering: who on earth could approve English this bafflingly dreadful for publication in a full-color brochure that must have cost thousands of euros, while knowing so little English that they could not see they were signing off on impenetrable gibberish? Why was no one who knew English from long acquaintance brought in to cast an eye over it?

Is it machine translation? It lacks the untranslated words that aren’t in the dictionary, a feature usually associated with this kind of thing.

bq. Could it be pride, an unwillingness to admit to not being adequately fluent in the nascent global language of commerce and the most frequently encountered language spoken by visitors to Spain? (“I speak English,” as the waiter Manuel from Barcelona in the John Cleese “Fawlty Towers” series, proudly and dramatically; “I learn it from a book!”) The frequent uses of “its” for “is” suggest the material above really was typed by someone who thought they knew what they were hearing, and did know various common English words. Or could it be that someone called up a web-accessible translator, typed in the Spanish text, and actually trusted the output to be fit to print, not realizing that the machine translation problem has yet to be solved?

Here’s an example of the use of its for is:

bq. In the south of the Valencian Community, opening step to the Costa Blanca, its found Pilar de la Horadada. Its coastal seaboard of more than 4Km.,its spring climate during all the year an the behavior of its peoples do of this municipality a privileged place to pass some unforgettable holidays.

All I can speculate is that it was probably done by a human being, or else a machine translation was done and a secretary asked to type it up. If I knew more Spanish, I might make a better guess.

NOTE: This book is purely in German and deals with German terminology.

SPÄTERE ANMERKUNG: Das Buch behandelt nur deutsche Terminologie, außer in der deutsch-spanisch-Ausgabe)
Bis vor kurzem war ein Teil der Staatlichen Prüfung für Übersetzer in Bayern eine 30-Minuten-Aufgabe zu Gerichts- und Behördenterminologie. Denn jede/r, mit welchem Fachgebiet auch immer, der/die die Staatsprüfung besteht, darf für die Gerichte übersetzen. Ich glaube, das Fach ist jetzt leider nur Teil der Kurse an den Fachakademien in Bayern. Beeidigung von Übersetzern und Dolmetschern ist Sache der Länder, die anderen Landesprüfungen enthalten so ein Teil auch nicht.

Als ich die Prüfung in München ablegte, um meine eigenen Studenten und Kollegen in Erlangen zu vermeiden, sah ich, dass viele vor der Prüfung in einem Skriptum (eine “Handreichung”!) von Dr. Ulrich Daum blätterten, das ich nachher selber bestellte und das ab dann auch von unseren Studenten bestellt wurde.

Jetzt ist es neu aufgelegt und überarbeitet und kann, anscheinend auch von Nicht-BDÜ-Mitgliedern, über die BDÜ-Website bestellt werden (auf ‘Publikationen’ klicken). Dort findet man auch andere Bücher. Das Buch existierte und existiert wahrscheinlich noch auch mit einem spanischen Teil, da müsste man sich beim SDI in München erkundigen.

bq. Gerichts- und Behördenterminologie
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Daum
Der Vorläufer der von Prof. Dr. Daum hier vorgelegten, überarbeiteten Handreichung zur Sprache von Gericht und Verwaltung war gut und gerne zwanzig Jahre lang schon das Vademecum angehender Gerichtsdolmetscher.

bq. Bedenkt man, dass die in diesem Buch behandelte Sprache in der akademischen Ausbildung von Übersetzern und Dolmetschern wenig vorkommt, die Tätigkeit der Berufskollegen für Justiz und Behörden hingegen breiten Raum einnimmt, wird deutlich, wie wichtig diese Einführung ist.

bq. Kandidaten der Staatsprüfung für Übersetzer und Bewerber um Beeidigung als Dolmetscher finden hier die wichtigsten einschlägigen Informationen und sprachlichen Besonderheiten zusammengetragen.
ISBN 3980824292
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
Preis 15.00 €

Hier ist noch eine Seite, wo man vielleicht die spanische Version direkt von Dr. Daum bestellen kann. Ich fürchte allerdings, dass Fingerzeige für die Gesetzes- und Amtssprache, 11. Auflage 1998, Quelle & Meyer Verlag, längst vergriffen ist.

Deutscher Eintrag, Weblog entlarvt Mörder, bei Udo Vetter.

Sek Man Ng started his weblog in October 2002. On May 12 2005, the last entry finished like this:

bq. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon, oh yeah working on the jap report as we speak!

The ‘sister’s former boyfriend’ has now been charged with the murder of Ng and his sister just after this – the weblog confirmed his whereabouts.

English-language report here:

bq. Sam Cheung, a cousin of the Ngs, is still in disbelief.
“It’s unbelievable that it was one single guy!” said Cheung, 24. “He took two lives. How can one person do this?”

The trick is to do them consecutively, I believe.

perlentaucher.de verlinkt internationale Kommentare zu den Neuwahlen.

perlentaucher.de (in German) gives a number of links to international coverage (some of it in English) on the German elections called for by Schröder.

Some papers are trying out epithets for Angela Merkel, and Kate Connolly in the Telegraph chooses iron maiden. I suppose this is meant to be a weaker form of the Iron Lady. Unfortunately there seem to be weaknesses in British educational standards – the iron maiden was a bit tougher than Maggie.

bq. She is known by the German media as the “das eiserne mädchen” (the iron girl) – suggesting that she lacks the Iron Lady’s toughness in pushing through radical reforms. Indeed she herself has promoted the idea that she is “deeply rooted” in Germany’s social-market economy.

That’s true, but still no reason to mistranslate it.

Here is another picture on a book cover (Bram Stoker translated by Steffen Radlmaier).

perlentaucher.de has an English-language site called signandsight.

There, there is a page in English on the call for elections (but some of the sites linked are in German!)

Apparently one type of the iron maiden / Eiserne Jungfrau is associated with Nuremberg, but now in the crime museum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. There have been a couple of women politicians associated with Nuremberg, but they were SPD.

Wikipedia on torture, with photo of iron maiden. The spikes pierced the victim’s eyes, chest and genitals.

I am taking the liberty of posting this announcement which I got from the legaltranslators group at Yahoo:

bq. City University, Centre for Language Studies is offering a one day
Legal Translation Seminar on Monday 27th June from 9am to 5pm, at our
main campus in Northampton Square. The morning session will be a
series of talks about various related topics as well as a comparative
study of the French and English legal systems and the German and
English legal systems. The afternoon session will be a 2 hour
interactive workshop based around the translation of a legal text.
The document will be translated, and the main traps and pitfalls
discussed. We offer 4 language combinations as follows: English into
French, French into English, German into English, English into German.

bq. The cost of the seminar is £110 (£95 concessions). The
deadline for registration is 12 June 2005. Further information
including a detailed programme of the day as well as the application
form can be found on our website
http://www.city.ac.uk/languages/seminar.
Alternatively you can email Erin Faulkner e.faulkner@city.ac.uk or
telephone +44 20 7040 3265

Actually there are seminars on June 3 and 4 too, on commercial and corporate law. I see that a City University centre for legal translation is planned and wonder what form that would take.

Angela Sigee, who is comparing English and German law and talking about EN>DE translation, is excellent. I don’t know the others, but have heard good reports of the seminars.

The Department of Applied Linguistics at Saarland University at Saarbrücken is doing an online survey of translators’ and interpreters’ use of terminology management and terminology extraction tools. It can be done here and is supposed to take about ten minutes. It is all in English.

Some of the questions are accompanied by an explanation. The terminology extraction tools mentioned were these:

TermExtract (Trados)
TermFinder (Xerox)
TermFinder (Acrolinx)
Term Finder (SDL)
Autoterm (IAI)

I felt a bit odd answering in English because I felt it was being asked by non-native speakers. So I wrote ‘studentische Hilfskraft’ once rather than trying to explain it in English.

After I had done the test I got a message saying I would be taken back to the home page:

bq. Sie werden in wenigen Sekunden zur Startseite der Fachrichtung 4.6 weitergeleitet…You will be redirec

But I wasn’t, so I hope they got the answers. 77 people have answered so far. The results will be sent to me by email.

PS Does anyone know why the main page of the applied languages department at Saarbrücken is ‘sticky’? I kept entering the Transblawg URL and returning there, but after a few seconds Saarbrücken reinstituted itself. The trouble with those people is that they know too much about software.
LATER NOTE: I have edited my links and removed the problem.