I have a link on my blogroll to www.gizmodo.com, but sometimes I go there via Google, and I was annoyed today when (eventually) I noticed that I was reading German text, and the contents were different from the original. I really hate this patronizing matching of British ads and American blogs, in this case, to my perceived interests.

At least it wasn’t a machine translation. Micro Persuasion reported on this a couple of weeks ago:

bq. Nick Denton writes in that VNU and Gawker Media have struck a licensing deal that will take Gizmodo into Europe with an eye towards becoming the ultimate European destination for everything gadget, gizmo, and cutting-edge consumer electronics-related. VNU will provide its local presence and its network of bloggers as well as its knowledge of the local consumer electronic players in Europe.
Gizmodo’s content will be translated from English into 6 additional languages, then augmented with local coverage for each market.

You can check it out in French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian.

I wish I’d had this interactive online tour of the church (click at top right) before I translated this.

(More pictures and videos here).

Fürther Innenstadt, 31. Oktober 2005.
Fürth wants to lead the world.

UPDATE 2018: This post is out of date. All links have been removed. Andrew’s weblog German Joys has changed its site.

Andrew Hammel is an American lawyer who teaches legal English at Düsseldorf University. His weblog, German Joys, has been online since December 2004, but when I first saw it it appeared inactive. It seems to have awakened to life since then.

Sascha Kremer reminded me of its existence in his entry ‘Der Lehrstuhl blawgt’. Andrew’s entry on Leitkultur (and followup), or more properly the comments on Claudia Roth’s article in the FAZ linked there, raised my blood pressure usefully.

Btw, there is a Harvard blog written by an American who taught at the Technische Universität München and blogs solely, it appears, in order to blast that seat of learning. Quite bizarre.

swissinfo says:

bq. L’anglais a de bonnes chances de devenir LA langue de compréhension dans ce pays multilingue qu’est la Suisse, selon Urs Dürmüller, linguiste du séminaire d’anglais de l’Université de Berne.

(See also Dürmüller – also in French – via kalebeul).

Here is something in English:

bq. The English language is very widespread in Switzerland. After their mother tongue, the Swiss speak English best, since it is used as a link and the language of communication in this multilingual country of germanophones (65%), francophones (20%), italophones (7.5%) and Romansh (0.5%). The Swiss English-language skills shown in the following table indicate that two out of three German-speaking Swiss and one out of two French-speaking Swiss speak English.

This was also the topic of the arte programme Zwischensprach last week (note the film company’s name Dschoint Ventschr).

Zurich is experimenting with English as the first foreign language. Among those who opined on this was Professor Richard J. Watts, who has edited a book on the topic, and Remigi Winzap (great name), a Swiss diplomat in Brussels whose first language was Romansh.

Official languages in Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Romansh. But the German is really almost two languages, because the spoken and written language diverge.

Some seemed to believe that the English spoken in Swiss companies where English is the company language was not too good. The logical leap from this to discouraging learning English at school was too big for me. Then again, there was disagreement as to whether French is harder to learn than English. It probably is harder for German speakers IMNSHO. Anyway, people had very strong opinions.

Udo Vetter of law blog has started Knastblog (in German). It’s intended to be a team effort:

bq. Sie sind Gefangener, Angehöriger, Anwalt, Sozialarbeiter, Pfarrer, ehrenamtlicher Helfer oder Justizmitarbeiter?
Wenn Sie etwas zum Thema sagen möchten, schicken Sie mir Ihren Beitrag.