Fürther Freiheit last Friday.

Under the heading Oh Gott in Frankreich, Ullrich Fichtner writes in Der Spiegel (my emphasis):

Ach, Frankreich! Im Land der kulinarischen Weltmeister ist Verfall im Verzug: Käsemacher geben auf, Bauernhöfe werden still gelegt, in den Supermärkten herrscht der Fertigfraß. Und wer hat Schuld an der Misere? Wir selbst, die Amerikaner und die “Desperate Housewives”.

(found on a mailing list)

Sandwich art

(Via Boing Boing)

João Roque Dias announces a conference in Lisbon from 19 – 20 October 2007. Conference website Portuguese, English.

If you can’t get to the conference, don’t miss his website.

There are a large number of talks and workshops, including a legal translation workshop by one Mark Robertson, of whom it is said that he ‘holds a Degree In Sociology from the University of Essex (UK) and a Degree in Law from the College of Law (Chester, UK). Mark has been admitted to the Roll of Solicitors in 1981 and practiced law in England between 1980 and 1987. Founded and is the managing partner of Juízos de Valor Lda., a Lisbon-based company providing expert legal translations, language lessons, legal training and language consultancy services to some leading Portuguese and foreign law firms. Mark is currently co-authoring a Portuguese-English-Portuguese Encyclopaedic Law Dictionary.’

Incidentally, the ITI has for a long time now had on its website – open to non-members – an international calendar of translation events. Please enter your events there, then we’ll all know where to find them (the Lisbon conference is already in there). To see the calendar on the ITI site, click on the title just to the right of the brilliant ‘Welcome to our Home Page’.

This is a partial answer to a topic that has sometimes cropped up in the comments, here for instance. This was posted after I put something like boiled potatoes in the green bin. Usually, if in doubt (as in the case of meat), I look at the Fürth website, and there it says Essensreste (remains of meals) are OK. The worst (and only other) occasion was when I got a highlighted flyer pushed under my door. I don’t mind being corrected – well, I do really – but I don’t like to think that if there are brown paper bags from eight flats and a shop in the green bin, someone recognizes which is mine.

Hence the query: who else uses the rubbish bins in the street for private refuse, to avoid detection ? And what euphemistic term could one give that –
Fremdentsorgung?

Here’s the list of what goes in the green bin, from the website of the city of Fürth:

Küchenabfälle:
Obst- und Gemüseabfälle,
Kaffeefilter und Teeblätter
Essensreste
Gartenabfälle:
Grasschnitt, Laub
Schnittblumen
Heckenschnitt
Zimmerpflanzen
Sonstige kompostierbare Abfälle:
Kleintierstreu, -mist aus
Stroh, Heu, Holzspänen

For a long time in English we’ve spoken of a person wearing two hats if they combined two functions. Probably the expression wearing a double hat is not completely new, but most of the ghits are very recent.

It usually refers to a future position in the EU and it looks as if Tony Blair made it popular in a speech in November 2002:

There is an overlap between the work of the High Representative and the External Relations Commissioner. Some have proposed that in future this role should be occupied by a single person wearing a double hat. As Javier Solana has said, this would raise practical problems that we need to debate. My point is simply this. Double hatting cannot be a way, through the back door, of communitising the CFSP.

Wearing a double hat sounded odd to me when I first read it. Even odder is the plural: ‘For our session this afternoon, I am wearing double hats’ said Eneko Landaburu in Brussels in January 2006.

This has now gone into German as the Doppelhut.

In der Diskussion über den Vertrag über eine Verfassung für Europa (VVE) ist oft vom sogenannten Doppelhut die Rede. Mit dem Begriff Doppelhut wird auf die Besetzung zweier Ämter durch eine Person verwiesen. Dabei verweist der „große Doppelhut“ auf die Stellung des Präsidenten des Europäischen Rates und die des Kommissionspräsidenten. Der „kleine Doppelhut“ bezieht sich auf die Rolle des Europäischen Außenministers.

Die Welt calls Doppelhut ‘EU-Jargon’. It also comes up in a list of important EU terms.

Here’s a picture of someone wearing two hats, but not a double hat: