Links

1. There has been a long hiatus here, partly because I was away for three weeks and partly because I seem to have been hit by more than one nasty virus. So here are some links to be getting on with:

In die tageszeitung, Katy Derbyshire (as I spell her name) writes (in German) about the lack of English translations of German literature.

Man muss sich das Leben einer der wenigen des Deutschen mächtigen Lektorinnen bei einem dieser Riesenhäuser dagegen als recht frustrierend vorstellen. Wozu sich jeden Tag schick machen und die quälende U-Bahn-Fahrt auf sich nehmen, wenn man doch keine deutschsprachigen Bücher verlegen kann? Anna Kelly arbeitet bei Hamish Hamilton im Hause Penguin. “In den letzten paar Jahren habe ich einige Sachen gelesen, die mich für das begeistert haben, was im Moment auf Deutsch geschrieben wird, die ich aber trotzdem nicht verlegen konnte.” Zum Glück hat Hamish Hamilton längst die Vorzüge des Internets für sich entdeckt und gibt eine Online-Literaturzeitschrift heraus. Am 3. Dezember kommt Anna Kellys Baby: eine Sonderausgabe von Five Dials mit 13 deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsautoren, von Juli Zeh bis Ulrike Almut Sandig. “Das ist ein Weg für mich, einige dieser starken Stimmen mit der Welt zu teilen. Zahlreiche Autoren schreiben gerade wunderbare Sachen auf Deutsch, aber diese Ausgabe kann nicht mehr als eine Handvoll davon zeigen.” Hoffen wir, dass ihre Begeisterung ansteckend wirkt.

2. The People’s Daily was fooled by an article in The Onion which described Kim Jong-Un as ‘the sexiest man alive’, according to the Economist’s Analects blog:

SOMETIMES China flexes its soft power without really having any idea it has done so. That appears to be what happened on November 27th when the People’s Daily Online, a website of the Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece, republished an article by the Onion, a satirical version of an American newspaper, declaring North Korea’s Kim Jong Un the “Sexiest Man Alive”. The republication, complete with a gallery of 55 photographs of the North Korean dictator at work and play, quickly became an internet sensation.

.

..“He has that rare ability to somehow be completely adorable and completely macho at the same time,” Onion Style and Entertainment editor Marissa Blake-Zweibel said. “And that’s the quality that makes him the sort of man women want, and men want to be. He’s a real hunk with real intensity who also knows how to cut loose and let his hair down.”

3. At Ü wie Übersetzen, (in German) Lisa John explains in detail how to download and use the new set of translation memories from the EU translation corpus (if I can correctly so describe it).

And there too, if you missed it: Lisa has often tried to improve the German Wikipedia entries on CAT tools for translators and there is a German Wikipedia ‘editor’ who keeps removing descriptions of programs. I’ve seen this extreme example cited in a mailing list as an argument why one should not pay money to support Wikipedia. Here is the latest blog post on this topic .

9 thoughts on “Links

  1. I would guess that the republishing of the Onion piece by People’s Daily Online (English edition) was not an example of a culturally tone-deaf mainland Chinese newspaper editor getting fooled by a satirical magazine.

    More likely, it was an expat American journalist on his last day on the job, inserting this plant as a way of getting off a parting shot at his employer.

    The bloom is off the Chinese rose. Here is one story (Bloomberg) but there are many others pointing in the same direction.

      • Hi Eugene,
        It didn’t come through either in the comment or by email. Are you sure you put it in? If you use BBCode you can even give it as a real link, but no one usually bothers. Could you try again?

  2. Oh, okay. Here is the URL in plain text: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-20/china-for-many-expats-its-not-worth-it

    Using ordinary HTML formatting as in the previous comment: one story (Bloomberg)

    And, having just added a BB Code extension to my Firefox, we’ll try it this way, too: [url=http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-20/china-for-many-expats-its-not-worth-it]one story (Bloomberg)[/url]

    Sorry to be so much trouble…

    • Btw, I realize that the expression ‘the bloom is off the rose’ is common, and in particular Americans have been saying ‘The bloom is off the Chinese rose’ for some years now, perhaps in hope, but I find it odd. I would expect ‘the bloom is off the grape’, i.e. it has lost its freshness. But ‘the bloom is off the rose’? Does it mean the rose blossoms have fallen, or they have lost their bloom? but did they ever have one? Still, language doesn’t have to be logical.
      On Googling “the bloom is off the * rose” I got ‘Obama’, ‘electoral’, ‘”low tax jurisdiction”‘. Only three ghits for ‘the bloom is off the American rose’.

    • I don’t know what happened to your ‘ordinary HTML’. I saw it neither by email nor online. There will be some explanation to do with the symbols you used.

  3. Ah yes, I thought it would be referring to those two famous foreigners who decided to leave China recently. It’s been blown up a lot. There was a calmer discussion on the Sinica podcast: [url]http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/time-to-leave-china[/url]

    • Dear Margaret, thank you for the link, will listen to the podcast later. In return, I give you [url=http://compound-eye.org/]the Remote Operator from Urumqi in Xinjiang province[/url]. We were a bit concerned for R.O., not having heard from him in three years, but he’s recently checked back in with another mind-bending broadcast.

      Without a doubt China will always be an interesting place to explore, but for the regular expat gold digger, the pickings have gotten slimmer.

      *Uncharitably called FILTH (Failed in London, try Hong Kong) in days past. I guess Myanmar is the new China now.

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