expatica.com reports that the publisher of the translation into Galician of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime has cancelled the contract with the translator:

María Reimóndez, who translated the story about a 15-year-old with autism for Rinoceronte Editora, says that her employer cancelled her contract because she refused to hand in a sexist translation favouring the use of the masculine gender over the feminine in words where English uses a neutral form.

The publisher, Moisés Barcia, accuses her in turn of systematically changing neutral words for feminine ones, thus introducing a bias into the novel.

The publisher has now translated the book himself and the parties have instructed lawyers. There isn’t enough evidence in the articles I’ve seen to form an opinion.

By the time the Daily Telegraph got the story, the translator had been ‘sacked’ and the case taken to court.

“As we corrected her text, we realised that she was systematically translating neutral words into feminine ones, and masculine words into feminine or neutral forms,” said Moisés Barcia, the editor at Rinoceronte. “She chose to make the narrator’s pet rat a female, even though its name was Toby,” he said. In another instance she changed “men” to “xente”, meaning people.

I’d like to know more about the contract. How many of these divergences really went too far? How much did the author know about the problem when he agreed with the publisher that the translation was unacceptable? Did the publisher really say it had been a breach of contract for the translator to want the translation to appear without her name on it? It sounds as if she might have said, ‘Change these things, but don’t put my name on the translation’.

expatica again:

Reimóndez denies having made such changes and says that cancelling her contract was illegal. Barcia argues that she requested not to have her name appear on the modified translation, and that this constitutes a breach of contract.

Kauderwelsch (a great series of small books that give a summary of the grammar, terminology and cultural background of a huge number of language) Galicisch (Galizische) Wort für Wort

It was reported in the Guardian this week that the French regret the decline of the semicolon and blame it on the increasing use of English. See Céline’s translation weblog and Baroque in Hackney.

The French term is point-virgule, the German Semikolon or Strichpunkt.

Why is it not Punktstrich, you ask? Well, I have seen a German writing a semicolon, and they really did do the comma before the full stop.

Confirmations and even denials welcome.

I wish Deutsche Telekom would sue c2c railways in the UK and not waste its time on Engadget Mobile.

This picture of Upminster Station shows, both in the mirror reflection and outside it, attempts to introduce magenta and grey. On the c2c site you can see one of their originally turquoise and yellow trains with some splashes of uncertain magenta on it. One almost wishes for graffiti.

Via Handakte WebLAWg

A few days ago, near Oldenburg, a 33-year-old woman died when the car she was a passenger in was hit by a 6-kilo lump of wood dropped from a motorway bridge .

A drawing of a group of young people who were near the bridge at the time has been widely circulated today and huge numbers of police are searching for the perpetrator or perpetrators.

I suppose whoever did it did not expect the consequences.

It reminds me of the English case of Hancock and Shankland. They were striking miners and during the strike they dropped a larger concrete block – 21 kg apparently – from a motorway bridge, apparently to stop a taxi taking strike breakers to work. The taxi driver was killed.

They were convicted of murder, but on appeal the sentence was reduced to manslaughter (I think this was involuntary manslaughter, that is, fahrlässige Tötung, not voluntary manslaughter or Totschlag). This was because the English definition of murder includes the possibility of carrying out an act the natural consequence of which is death, and the court – the Court of Appeal and later the House of Lords too – did not think that death was a natural consequence.

Wikipedia has the story.

Here is the new Aturn Markt opening in Fürth at the end of April.

RA-Blog quotes this short piece of news from Der Tagesspiegel – obviously an April fool report, like the news of an albino wild boar cub in the ‘Fürther Nachrichten‘:

Finanzsenator Thilo Sarrazin (SPD) hat einen Mitarbeiter angewiesen, die Bestände der Berliner Tierparks auf ihren finanziellen Nutzen für den Landeshaushalt zu prüfen. (…) „Aus fiskalischem Blickwinkel gibt es keine Rechtfertigung für den hohen Bestand an Krokodilen“, heißt es dort beispielsweise, „zumal die Unterschiede zwischen den Tieren sich den unkundigen Besuchern kaum erschließen.“ Je ein Kaiman- und ein Krokodilpaar reichten aus; es sei zu prüfen, ob die überzähligen Tiere zu Premium-Souvenirs wie Taschen, Geldbörsen oder Schlüsselanhängern mit Berlin-Bezug verarbeitet werden können.