Lost in Translations – voices from the intertext

Traduc.ch is a translation agency in Switzerland and this blog is written by its translators in their spare time (they don’t seem to have much of that!). There is not much about translation there.

The appearance is the same in Firefox and IE.

They also have an aggregator for German blogs / Aggregator für deutsche Weblogs:

bq. Über commonsense.traduc.ch:

bq. commonsense.traduc.ch ist ein (weiterer) Aggregator mit dem Ziel, dass sich deutschsprachige Blogger näherkommen und Netwerke bilden können. Andererseits soll versucht werden, die vorhandenen Sprachbarrieren unter Bloggern zu überwinden, da Themen in Weblogs die “nationalsprachliche” Grenzen oft nicht zu überwinden vermögen. Geeignete Wege werden gefunden werden, zur Zeit sind wir noch nagelneu in “Feed-Business” und suchen deshalb in erster Linie nach Interessenten, die Ihren Feed bei uns auf commonsense.traduc.ch sehen möchten. Das hat natürlich auch massig Vorteile:

bq. Man lernt neue Blogger, Leser, Themen, Projekte, etc. kennen
Google und all die anderen freut’s auch und bringt Euch im Gegenzug Besucher und einen besseren PageRank
Ein Blick auf commonsense.traduc.ch verrät zudem, was gerade aktuell ist.

It looks as though this curiosity, mentioned earlier, has actually hit the market. My link is to a German description:

bq. Jeder Fachbegriff ist in der authentischen Aussprache vertont, gesprochen von hochrangigen Richtern aus Australien, Deutschland, England, Österreich, Schottland und den USA.

This could be the only bilingual law dictionary you can listen to in the car. Must get down to podcasting.

Das Museum wird kurz beschrieben im Blogreiter-Weblog aus Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

The museum of criminal justice in Rothenburg ob der Tauber describes itself in German, ‘English’ and Japanese (perhaps Professor Lenz knows what the Japanese is like?). In German, it says it is the most important law museum in the Federal Republic, while in English it says it is the only law museum in Europe.

Kriminalmuseum

You can go round the whole museum and everything is labelled in German, English and Japanese. And you can order the museum’s book on criminal justice through the ages in German, English and presumably Japanese too. Mine is quite old, but I presume it’s unchanged and still richly illustrated – particularly good on instruments of torture.

Baker`s Chair
for bakers who sold too small loaves of bread, which were too small [sic]

I found another law museum – the ABA Museum of Law in Chicago. It doesn’t look much like Rothenburg, where you can have yourself photographed in the stocks outside the building.

(Thanks to Blogreiter (German) for the reminder).

The Guardian reports that a Japanese-style capsule hotel has opened in London. It’s the easyHotel. The figure of £5 per night has been bandied about but is not correct:

bq. The rooms start from £20 a night and are booked on the easyHotel website in a similar way to budget airlines; rates vary with demand and how early or late a booking is made.

Some rooms even have a window.

Im Handelsblatt schreibt Dr. Henning von Boehmer über die Schwierigkeit, deutsche Titel zu übersetzen. Er präsentiert auch ein “Übersetzungs-Tool” zur Übersetzung ins Amerikanische und Englische (sic), Französische, Italienische und Spanische.

Beispiel: Prokurist: American: Authorized Officer / Officer with Procurement
English: ditto
French: Fondé de Pouvoir
Italian: Institore
Spanish: Apoderado General

What is procurement?

The tool is a bit irritating because you have to click on your language for each term. A table would have been much nicer.

Here’s a similar but not identical list set out much more nicely.

(Via Richard Schneider’s news at Übersetzer-Portal)

A translator on the pt mailing list (at Yahoo Groups) needs to translate into German a text in which two people argue about whether the drink egg cream contains eggs or cream. (This reminds me of asking the Turkish butcher ‘what are those?’ recently and being told ‘Lammeier’ – I wondered where the nest was). To quote Tony the Tour Guy:

bq. It isn’t made with eggs, or cream. This famous soda fountain concoction was a favorite for many of us, and is currently enjoying a comeback in many restaurants and diners. A mixture of milk, syrup and seltzer water, just how it got its name is one of those things nobody seems to know for sure.

So what would work in German? I could only think of Leberkäse, which is not a drink. It contains neither liver nor cheese, at least in Bavaria it doesn’t. This is reminiscent of the U.S. head cheese.

Suggestions included Alsterwasser, kalter Kaffee, and then a whole list of bizarre names (Blutgeschwür – Advokaat with a shot of cherry brandy, Tote Tante – North Frisian drink of hot cocoa with rum).

But I suppose most cocktails have names like that.

For microscope photos of cocktails, see here.