David Barnish represented himself in the county court and won damages from the travel company Thomson, but his case was snapped up by the newspapers and ridiculed nonetheless.

He booked a holiday in a hotel where so many of the services were in German and for Germans that he couldn’t use them. There was only one non-German TV channel, and there was a children’s club his daughter couldn’t use because it was German.

The Telegraph report is fairly subdued. But then there’s the second Telegraph report, with obligatory photograph of a lounger with a towel on it.

There are plenty of British holidaymaker who can’t bear the thought of a certain nationality always being first to the sun loungers – but one got so angry about being surrounded by Germans on holiday he sued his tour company, and won.

The Sun goes to town, of course (Brit’s holiday from Helmut). Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine is silly – an unrelated photo captioned:

Urlauber lieben die griechische Ferieninsel Kos – wenn dort bloß nicht soviel Deutsch gesprochen würde.

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)

Aus für Windows Vista. Zumindest auf dem Papier. Das in Fürth ansässige Medienunternehmen Computec Media AG nimmt die Computerzeitschrift nach der Juli-Ausgabe, die am 18. Juni erscheint, vom Markt. Objektleiter Thilo Bayer begründet den Schritt auch damit, “dass Windows Vista als Betriebssystem die hohen Erwartungen bis heute nicht erfüllt hat.”

Fürth leading the way.

From textintern, via Volker Weber.

Musings from an overworked translator is by German-English translator Jill Sommer in Ohio, who is active in the ATA and spent six years in Bonn.

(Via Thoughts on Translation)

Fränkische Dasdatur (and others)

(Via downwärts)

Recently, in the FAZ, Oliver Jungen opined that Germany has more prizes than authors. Let’s expand that to include the rest of the German-speaking world and in particular the bizarre Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis that is held in Klagenfurt every June (of course, several other prizes are presented at the same time). Andrew Hammel picked up on this in German Joys.

Let Wikipedia speak:

The prize winner is determined during a three-day reading marathon in which 18 previously-selected candidates vie to impress both the audience and the nine member professional jury. An award of €22,500 accompanies the prize.

It’s an amazing TV marathon. Slaughter by jury is more civilized than it was a few years ago. For some years now it’s also been possible to read the texts online and watch the entries later. There are pompous little films showing the writers in their supposed home environment, beautifully parodied by the video clip for the 2006 winner Kathrin Passig.

But now the Bachmann Prize is going to present several language versions of the texts online. For details, in German, see here.

Official Bachmannpreis page. There’s also a literature translation prize called Translatio. Some bits are in English, but we must keep an eye out for the translations of the texts themselves.

(Via Markus at textundblog.de – who was greatly impressed by the Portuguese entry to the Eurovision Song Contest (I only liked the Croatians))