The page Curiosities of biological nomenclature has some odd examples:

bq. Piseinotecus divae Er. Marcus, 1955 (gastropod) “Piseinotecus” means “I stepped on Teco.” Teco was a dog belonging to a diva (or to Prof. Diva Corrêa). One of the Marcuses (Evelyne or Ernst) stepped on the dog on the way to the kitchen in the middle of the night.

bq. Bufonaria borisbeckeri Parth, 1996 (bursid sea snail) Etymology: “Ich widme die neue Art Boris Becker, dem meines Erachtens größten deutschen Einzelsportler aller Zeiten.” [Spixiana 19(1): 129]

bq. Strigiphilus garylarsoni Clayton, ~1989 (owl louse) “I considered this an extreme honor. Besides, I knew no one was going to write and ask to name a new species of swan after me. You have to grab these opportunities when they come along.” – Gary Larson

But when I read this Independent headline, I thought people had been crushing Volkswagen cars: Fans ‘exterminate’ Hitler beetle

bq. Some biologists have suggested that Sheibel’s naming of a blind beetle after the Führer was, in fact, an attempt to ridicule him. Such antics aren’t unimaginable. Last year, three newly-discovered types of slime mold beetle were named after members of the current US administration: A bushi, A cheneyi and A rumsfeldi. All done with the greatest of respect, of course, claim the scientists at Cornell University, who named them.

Yes, but have people been rushing to collect these three?

More information at Wikipedia (English)

Artikel auf Deutsch

If I’d got any closer to this I would probably have fallen into the Pegnitz (on its way to join the Rednitz and form the Regnitz). And then there wouldn’t have been a picture!

SPÄTER HINZUGEFÜGT: Anscheinend geht es bei Google nur um private Startseiten, die man auf dem eigenen Rechner hat.

LATER NOTE: Apparently Google provides feeds only for private pages on a person’s own computer, start pages in the browser (see comments). I still need to look into it, though.

Schon vorgestern fand ich mein Weblog, ohne Ads, auf einer IT-Website in Nordirland. Heute finde ich dies.

Is Google offering my copyrighted contents further?

People can quote an entry of mine or a photo if they acknowledge my name. The usual way is to link. I don’t want people to take a whole entry or put a picture on their site normally. But to take the whole RSS feed? Without asking or reading the copyright notice?

Walisische Radfahrer, die vom Rad vor einer Baustelle absteigen sollen, werden stattdessen informiert, dass eine Blasenkrankheit zurückgekehrt ist (icWales.co.uk):

The temporary sign, placed in front of the roadworks at Barons Court roundabout between Penarth and Cardiff, correctly says ‘cyclists dismount’ in English, but says ‘llid y bledren dymchwelyd’ in Welsh.
Owain Sgiv, an officer for the Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, explained: ‘Roughly translated, llid y bledren dymchwelyd means bladder disease has returned.

Apparently road signs are often mistranslated, because people use online translators. Does that mean there is an online Welsh translation program somewhere?

Cyclists dismount is an awkward sentence to translate as there is no Welsh word for dismount,’ he added.

‘But the correct translation would be something like dim beicio, which means literally no cycling, or man disgyn i feicwyr, which means fall-off area for cyclists.

There are a lot of bolshie cyclists in Germany who would love a language with no word for ‘dismount’. I wonder what Morfablog would make of this – I wish I could understand what they are saying.

A bit of googling (wash my mouth out with soap and water) shows that there is a flickr pool of pictures of bad translations into Welsh, according to a Live Journal diary:

So there’s a flickr pool called Scymraeg, for bad translations into Welsh. And most of what’s in there are roadsigns. BBC News today has a story about one such sign today, which tells English speakers to look right and Welsh speakers to look left.

Sounds like a plan to exterminate the Welsh. Unfortunately most of the pictures aren’t explained in English, but I suppose that’s understandable.

(Thanks to Joe)

1. John Wells, professor (or ex-professor) of phonetics and author of my favourite pronunciation dictionary, has a blog (via Mark Liberman at Language Log).
The discussion there on the mispronunciation of Blaenau Gwent reminds me we were right in the family always to refer to Bluenose Ffestiniog – no-one could believe we thought it was correct (which it isn’t).
Among other things, Wells links to sound clips of Judge Judy.

2. Some time ago, Arrogant Polyglot considered the origin of the middle finger gesture. I was surprised to see that Wikipedia offers exactly the same story for the middle finger as for the British two fingers (V, but not victory V) gesture (scroll down for V sign as an insult). Both entries have links to German Wikipedia entries.

bq. “The finger” is traceable to Roman times [citation needed], but may be unrelated in origin, as the insulting V sign is largely restricted to the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Spain, where it is popular among taxi drivers in Madrid. The insulting V sign is not widely recognized in other countries.

3. The BBC has pictures of Boy George doing community service in New York

4. Julio Juncal’s Transnotes is a wiki of Translation Notes – more information here. (via Carlos Ferrero Martín at Las palabras son pistolas cargadas)

In April I posted a photo of an egg-shaped building going up near Fröttmaning in Munich. I couldn’t find out what it was.

In July I photographed a later stage of development. I also established on a Munich online map that there were a Klärwerk (sewage plant) and Biologische Versuchsanstalt marked there. In view of the local wind power plant, I didn’t think the biological experiments were recreating Frankenstein’s monster, but even Googling got me no further.

But now Brian has written to tell me (see comment under Döner Kebab Killer entry) the following:

bq. The domed buildings are being erected above the city’s water treatment plant to trap gasses that rise from the huge ponds where waste water is rotated to aerate it and mix in the algae.
The gas is then used as a source of energy. The technology is fairly new, so expect to see towers like that everywhere eventually.

I may even need to know this one day (I have been translating contracts about wood chip power plants and green electricity, where the energy and the greenness are sold separately).