Author Archives: MMarks

flickr/Moo/amazon/twitter

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The joys of the internet. Does one reply to an email like this?

Hey Margaret,
We’re just checking in to see if you received your order (Ideal and Actual in The Story of the Stone) from XYZ Books. If your order hasn’t blessed your mailbox just yet, heads are gonna roll in the * warehouse! Seriously though, if you haven’t received your order or are less than 108.8% satisfied, please reply to this message. Let us know what we can do to flabbergast you with service.
Humbly Yours,
Indaba (our super-cool email robot)

I got this book ages ago, much sooner than one would expect, and I thought I left positive feedback somewhere.

flickr and Moo are also incredibly upbeat. flickr (which I scarcely use) tries to appear multilingual by greeting me with bizarre foreign hellos, and Moo is constantly celebrating something. Maybe I need something of what they’re on.

Meanwhile, I am not getting a great deal out of Twitter. My biggest problem is that I skim or read lots of blogs, including translation blogs, by RSS. On Twitter, translators sometimes make it clear they’re linking to their latest post, but most of the time, they give these shorter links – usually to each other’s posts – which give nothing away, and a vague reference, and if I click on them I find something I read, sometimes weeks earlier, or that I would get to later in the day. I’m also not clear about the value of followfriday, when people just cite everyone who links to them – there’s no space to give value – but that’s OK, because I can ignore it. And at least Twitter showed me where I can vote against Tony Blair becoming EU president, although I suspect that may do little more than make me feel better.

IT in Supreme Court

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In the Times Online, Richard Susskind describes the IT systems used or to be used in future in the new Supreme Court. So the new building has done some good!

Fixed cameras are installed (banned in other courts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland).

Documents discussed to be shown on screens.

The three courts are also equipped with document display systems. Elegant, black, flat, high-resolution monitors sit before all judges. When barristers argue their cases, the precise pages under discussion appear on the screens. The judges do not need to search for paper-based folders and documents. This technology alone can cut hearing times by a quarter.

Justices can use laptops and mark up documents on them.

Unless permission is given, everything must be filed both on paper and electronically.

Information for public online:

What about the public and the lawyers? Any web user can find out the status of cases before the court. Details are fed from the case management system to the website (www.supremecourt.gov.uk), so people can view summary information and lawyers peruse in greater detail.

Hope it all works!

(Tweeted by Nick Holmes)

Refresher/Sonderhonorar für Barrister

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The Oxford English Dictionary has a word-of-the-day service. Today’s word is refresher, and one meaning is the one that sprang to mind immediately:

Dietl-Lorenz:
refresher Sonderhonorar für den Anwalt (Br barrister) (bei längerer Verhandlungsdauer)

Romain
refresher außerordentliche Anwaltsgebühr (bei langandauerndem Prozess bzw. mehrtägiger Verhandlung)

OED:

2. Law.

a. An extra fee paid to counsel when a case lasts longer than originally expected or allowed for.
1796 Attorney & Agent’s New Table of Costs (ed. 5) 222 Refresher to Mr. Bearcroft. 1831 F. REYNOLDS Playwright’s Adventures vi. 108 He also knew that barristers..can only be kept alive by refreshers. 1881 Times 19 Feb. 10/3 It is therefore recommended that daily refreshers should be abolished, as being one of the principal causes of the undue lengthening of trials. 1933 H. ALLEN Anthony Adverse xlix. 740 My retainer is reasonable, my refreshers modest, my reputation unblemished. 1991 Investors Chron. 26 July 68/3 The refreshers or daily fees will never be less than £1,000.

{dag}b. A revised brief. Obs. rare.
1852 T. DE QUINCEY Sketch from Childhood in Hogg’s Instructor 8 2/1 Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should rec

eive a ‘refresher’, as lawyers call it{em}a new and revised brief{em}memorialising my pretensions.

Guido Westerwelle

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It was widely reported and tweeted yesterday that Guido Westerwelle, the FDP (Liberal) party leader who will be Germany’s next foreign minister, refused to speak English when requested to do so (28th September).
Es ist Deutschland hier

The BBC correspondent asks Westerwelle to speak English, and Westerwelle says that as this is a German press conference in Germany, he can take questions in English but he will answer them in German.

This seems perfectly OK to me, but a lot of other Germans have been making fun of him for this. I admit he gets tactless after answering, when he says in German ‘We can meet outside the conference for tea and speak English, but it’s Germany here’. I hope his manners improve as foreign nminister.

Now Cem Özdemir of the Green Party has made a video Cem Özdemir asks BBC to stay with us promising German speakers of English will be back after the next elections in four years’ time.

I really can’t see that this video does the Greens any good either.

LATER NOTE: The Independent has an article by Philip Hensher, Flummoxed by foreign tongues, supporting Westerwelle too, and mentioning the decline of foreign language teaching and university courses in the UK:

Some people, even in Germany, have criticised Westerwelle for his insistence, and suggested that in fact he couldn’t answer in English. Actually, though his English is certainly not as horribly wonderful as many German politicians’, and he does seem to make some trivial mistakes, it is perfectly serviceable. More curiously, what did the BBC think it was doing, sending a reporter to a press conference in Germany on the German elections, knowing that he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak any German?

See also blog entry by Gabi (in German)

International Translator’s Day/Hieronymustag

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(St. Jerome by Rubens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today is St. Jerome’s Day, which has now apparently become International Translator’s Day, and I am celebrating by translating.

Here are a couple of links, though.

1. Ghaddafi About the story of Ghaddafi’s interpreter collapsing: Richard Schneider has a full account, in German, which suggests that the New York Post was inaccurate when it said the interpreter collapsed after 75 minutes and shouted ‘I can’t take it any more’ – it seems he managed 90 minutes, and the UN interpreter only had to take over the last 5 minutes. The speech was intended to be about 15 minutes long. But simultaneous interpreters usually do about 20 minutes, as far as I know. Ghaddafi said he had brought his own interpreter, because he was going to speak an obscure dialect, but in fact he did not speak dialect. The chairmanship/presidency is currently held by Libya, by rotation, and that is why there was no complaint about the procedural irregularity. (How did Ghaddafi’s French interpreter manage?)

Richard Schneider gibes YouTube links to all sections of the speech. Here is the last one, including the takeover of the interpreting by the UN. These videos may not be accessible online for very long.

2. Becoming a medical translator On her blog, Sarah Dillon has an interview with Andrew Bell, who does medical and pharmaceutical translations and also runs the site Watercooler.

3. White House calls for machine translation Thus Global Watchtower reports.

Last week, the Executive Office of the President and National Economic Council issued its “Strategy for American Innovation.” Among the recommendations was a call for “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world — greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.” In other words, machine translation (MT) has captured somebody’s attention in the President’s inner circle.

This tactic would certainly save all the problems associated with human translators – a potential such was recently held for hours, apparently for having Arabic flashcards in his backpack. (TSA defends itself).