If you missed out on holy effigies on your toast, technology can help.

(Via gizmodo – at least, that was the finger drums)

In his entry Kein Dienstvertrag mit Microsoft, Ingmar recently commented on the translation into German of a Microsoft licence agreement.

Microsoft original English
Microsoft German translation

bq. CONTRACT FOR SERVICE.
This is a contract between you and Microsoft for use of the Microsoft .NET Messenger Service. We are Microsoft Corporation (located at One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399) or, based on where you live, a Microsoft affiliate. We will refer to ourselves in this contract as either “Microsoft”, “we” or “our.” You are an individual person.

bq. DIENSTVERTRAG
Dies ist ein Vertrag zwischen Ihnen und Microsoft hinsichtlich der Nutzung des Microsoft .NET Messenger Services. Wir sind die Microsoft Corporation (Adresse: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399, USA) oder, je nachdem, wo Sie wohnen, ein verbundenes Unternehmen von Microsoft. Wir bezeichnen uns in diesem Vertrag entweder als “Microsoft”, “wir” oder “uns“. Sie sind eine Einzelperson.

Now obviously Ingmar was aware he didn’t have an employment contract with Microsoft. For one thing, he wasn’t getting any salary, and on top of that they seemed to be excluding so many things that they didn’t sound like an ideal employer.

However, their translator isn’t alone in his difficulties. Here’s a brief and not very academic summary of the problems:

In English law there is a distinction between a contract of service and a contract for services. This is pretty confusing in itself, and there’s an argument for just not using the terms at all. But since they exist, here’s the lowdown:

Contract of service: a contract of employment. The employee may be employed, say, for 40 hours a week, and the employer can to a large extent decide where the employee works and at what times. Employment law used to be called master and servant law. You could call this an Arbeitsvertrag

Contract for services: a contract with an independent contractor, for example with a translator.

In more recent times, the term Service agreement or Service contract has begun to be used to mean something like Wartungsvertrag. The meaning would be expected by a non-lawyer, but it doesn’t exactly help having a third entity here. Whenever you have to translate something headed Contract for Services, work out what it is before you start.

Now in German law, this distinction between employee and independent contractor is perfectly familiar, but the contract titles don’t follow it. We have:

Dienstvertrag: contract to perform an activity, for instance to work for 40 (or fewer) hours per week. Arbeitsvertrag (contract of employment) is a subcategory.

Werkvertrag: contract to produce a result, for example to make a photograph.

This is a bit peculiar to my mind, as you could have a Dienstvertrag to bake pizzas for three hours, or a Werkvertrag to produce a certain number of pizzas, and the two would be different legal arrangements. And for instance, if you pay a gardener to mow the lawn for two hours, it is a Dienstvertrag, because it’s measured in hours.

It isn’t always easy to draw the line between the two contracts, and there are mixed contracts, but that’s going too far for my purposes here.

So we have two dichotomies, one in English and one in German, and they are not the same. You cannot go around translating Dienstvertrag as contract of service and Werkvertrag as contract for services. Nor can you say, if a gardener I pay for two hours’ work a week has a Dienstvertrag in German, that because he has a contract for services in English, you will translate it that way. We have two different legal systems with two different distinctions.

And for years I used to find that students found this all too much and when they were confronted with the German terms they just applied the English terms because they wanted them to be right. Not that I imagine that Microsoft translator was one of mine.

By the way, under German law translators usually have a Werkvertrag and interpreters a Dienstvertrag – that is if they’re freelances. In England, they would both have a contract for services.

Lamm mit Minzsauce ja.
Lamm mit Pfefferminzsauce nein.
Lamm mit Pfefferminzsauce einschließlich Pfefferminzlikör kotz spei würg.

The German housewives’ programme ARD-Buffet has a daily lunch recipe, devoted today – so they say – to England, as one of the World Cup contestants. So today’s recipe is lamb with mint sauce. They did also admit that it was a Middle Eastern recipe, but I feel very bad about the way they did not distinguish between mint and peppermint – both were waved around and referred to. And the 10 ml of luminous green peppermint liqueuer made me feel very bad.
What’s more, the Turks understand which is the right mint, and you can get it fresh or dried at Turkish greengrocers’. So do they really use peppermint with lamb in the Middle East?

Of course, it may be a ploy to attack the England team yet again.

bq. 1 Bund Minze
300 ml Lammfond
1 Zwiebel
4 EL Butterschmalz
10 ml Minzlikör
1 EL kalte Butter
1 TL Speisestärke
300 g grüne Bohnen
1 Schalotte
60 ml Gemüsebrühe
300 g Lammrücken
Salz, Pfeffer

Two reviews of Language Log‘s book ‘Far from the Madding Gerund’ (it has a prominent place on the blog’s home page). I didn’t do a linguistics course, but Old High German instead, and who’s to say I was wrong (mumbling Phol ende Uuôdan uuorun zi holza) – not that I had a choice – but of course linguists know all that stuff anyway. This is linguists meaning scholars of linguistics. I first met some of them when I was doing Siegfried Tornow‘s Russian course in Berlin in 1967 and these people were there who were also doing a one-year course on Hausa and all sorts of other things.

What do linguists do? Hint: They’re not language cops or polyglots by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe:

bq. In their capsule biographies, the authors reveal their youthful career detours: Liberman was kicked out of Harvard and sent to Vietnam, while Pullum, a high school dropout in England [this sounds like an incredibly American thing to be], worked as a rock musician. Linguistics saved them, they say, and “linguistics can save you, too.” Not, perhaps, from being sent to war or forced to live by your guitar pick; but linguistics, in this user-friendly form, really might help save you from boredom, complacency, and a multitude of misapprehensions about languages and linguists.

Analyzing Eggcorns and Snowclones, and Challenging Strunk and White by Michael Erard in the New York Times:

bq. Blogging has put him [Mark Liberman] in touch with an audience he never imagined existed, including a walking-tour guide, a horse farm owner, a high-energy physicist and a rock musician, all regular e-mail correspondents. “There is a group of very smart and very well-read people out there who like to read about language and who can put together arguments based on evidence from sources and background knowledge which is not made up or nuts,” he said. “It’s a big world out there.”

No, I didn’t know the walking-tour guide existed, either, and he can certainly put those arguments together. Hey, Language Log, not just smart and well-read, educated too!
(Via the Forensic Linguistics mailing list)

Uni Magazin online hat einen sehr gründlich recherchierten und informativen Artikel zum Dolmetscherberuf.

Der Artikel basiert auch noch auf die Arbeit der Dolmetscherin-Bloggerin Tanja Barbian (Plain English), von der wir auch noch Bilder sehen. Nichts wie hin!

Trevor’s scholarly translation (with footnotes disguised as sidenotes) of a chapter in Pío Baroja’s novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) introduces an English conman called Mr Macbeth:

bq. Still not satisfied, Macbeth, drunk and impassive as ever, explained to the public an apparatus of his invention, the optical and acoustic translatoscope. The translatoscope was a simple apparatus—how simple!—based on the learned and little-known principle of Dr Philf, by which words, spoken or written, expand as they advance to the tropics and contract as they recede. Hence, the construction of a translatoscope requires nothing more than the combination of a system of convergent mechanisms that pass gradually to flat menisci and then to divergent menisci and place them in a tube. The menisci may be optical or acoustic, as is wished.
If one talks through one end of the tube in English, the words will issue from the tube’s other extremity in Spanish. The same occurs when one looks through the tube, since the translatoscope translates everything. The secret lies in nothing more than the calibration of the screws.

They are still trying to make this kind of thing work today.