Author Archives: MMarks

Pretzels at the Last Supper

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I didn’t realize how long pretzels have been around. See Victoria Emily Jones, Praying with Pretzels.

The salty, twisted treats that we call pretzels have their origin, it is thought, in a seventh-century European monastery—according to lore, either in southern France, northern Italy, or Germany. Allegedly a monk invented them by shaping scraps of leftover bread dough to resemble arms crossed in prayer over the chest.

The pretzel’s Lenten link, not to mention its popularity as a year-round snack both inside and outside monastic communities, led artists to sometimes paint pretzels into Last Supper images.

Illustrations there, one of which I have pinched:

St. Bartholomew, from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, in Latin, Utrecht, The Netherlands, ca. 1440. Morgan Library, New York: PML M.917, fol. 228. http://www.themorgan.org/collection/hours-of-catherine-of-cleves/87#

Leytonstone

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Café de Montmartre, Leytonstone

I should have known that Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone.

However, I went there to see the Singing Organgrinder at the new market.

He can be heard again at 13.00 next Saturday, but I am not sure if the market will still be in the Church Lane car park.

Lidl, Hornchurch

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Today would be Hitler’s birthday, as my father always used to say – he would have been 116 tomorrow, April 21, which is also the Queen’s birthday. So I found myself having to pass time in Hornchurch and visited the new Lidl. It was so large that it reminded me of a big Edeka (Aldi in Upminster is smaller).

Unfortunately it could only be built after the elegant Towers Cinema, later bingo hall, was demolished: here are pictures.

There seemed to be more German foods there than I have seen in Aldi, but I haven’t been often enough to give a reliable account. Leberkäse, the German delicacy containing neither Leber nor Käse, was sold as Bavarian Meat Loaf.

There was also Austrian sliced salami, some of which recalled Käsekrainer (though commenters may correct me).

Here, however, is an older picture of Speculatius at Aldi:

And here some more pictures of Lidl:

Elektro Götz closes 31.3.2018

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Here’s a photo of my downstairs neighbours for many years, Dieter and Jutta Mund, who ran Elektro Götz in Fürth (they don’t actually live there) but have to close on March 31st, which means this Saturday will be their last trading day. I took the photo in October 2016 and I’m sorry I will not be able to visit them in their shop again.

The kind of shop where if you want a vacuum cleaner bag replacement you will be given full details of the function and price of several manufacturers.

No doubt buying online has meant that a shop of that kind can’t make ends meet nowadays. I am surprised they managed so long!

Many thanks to Ralph Stenzel for keeping me informed.

Elektro Götz in FürthWiki

Fürther Freiheit

German-English legal contracts workshop

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The ITI is offering a workshop on contract translation: Dual German/English Contracts Workshop in Milton Keynes in May. Event Details:

This workshop – aimed at both established and aspiring legal translators working from German into English and English into German – will boost your knowledge about German and English contracts and improve your translation skills in this field.

During the session, you will:

Discover the difference between English and German legal language and the implications for legal translation

Have put theory into practice, identified and discussed legal translation problems in specific language direction, based on a short contract

Learn how to solve terminological problems and improve your legal writing style

Know how to acquire the necessary linguistic skills and improve your proficiency in this particular field

 

Speakers Angela Sigee and Rebecca Smith

Translation blogging

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I think this year I will probably ignore this blog’s birthday (early April, 15?). When I started there were a few translation blogs, although probably no other legal translation blogs. I thought that after I stopped teaching legal translation, I still had a lot of things to say about it. But nowadays I am more likely to post interesting links to Twitter. Goodness knows how many I am missing.

A websearch brings up a lot of posts on ‘Best translation blogs’. I am fond of this description of mine:

  • Transblawg is dedicated to German-English legal translation. The posts, written by Werner Patels, are full of humor and entertainment, which makes his blog fun and quite useful at the same time. It offers help and information to translators on a variety of topics and specializations.

This should teach me not to be so full of myself.

Here’s a new legal translation blog: Language with a Pinch of Law.

Like many, it’s the offshoot of a legal translation firm. It’s run by Paula Arturo and its languages are US English and Spanish (Argentina) and Portuguese (Brazil). There is an active Twitter feed too. It goes into US legal usage quite a lot (often quoting  Ken Adams or Bryan Garner (Black’s Law Dictionary)). There is also apparently a Facebook group called Legal Writing and Translation, (‘For those who passionately pursue linguistic excellence’), but I haven’t investigated it. The main emphasis of the blog is probably translating US contracts (common law) into Spanish (civil law).

Nikki Graham in her Tranix blog (My words for a change) started a translation and interpreting BLOG survey in January of this year, and she has now published a first post on the results: Blogging is not dead.

She had 190 responses. One finding was that over 84% of those replying do read blogs (but then why would they fill in a survey about blogging if they didn’t?). The next question: is blogging good for your business? The majority did not think so.

I had a problem with that question because I did not create this blog directly to be good for my business, although it might appeal to other translators, and if legal translation is not their special field they might recommend me to their clients. But then again I seem to have enough work.

There are a lot of quotes from survey answers. There is to be a second part:

In part 2 of the survey results, we’ll look at the reasons why people do and don’t blog.

I will be interested in that. When I started this blog, the world of advertising yourself as a translator was very different.

From another blog: Martin Crellin, in false friends, good and bad translation, posts on becoming a German. He writes in German, despite the English title. I was amused to read that one of the places he had to apply to asked for a handwritten c.v. – although he found out later he could have done it on the computer. I remember handwritten cvs!