Isabella links to LibraryThing, an online book catalogue service, free for the first 200 books, $10 thereafter.

I would find this useful so when I wanted to recommend a book to someone. The service doesn’t look quite like a proper academic bibliography. But you can enter books automatically if they are in the Library of Congress catalogue – or in amazon.com? I wonder if it’s better for the USA than Europe. You can enter books manually too though.

language hat mentions this too, and you can see his library (as far as entered) and that of Tim Spalding, the creator of the service.

You can add tags to books and explore other people’s libraries. You can have a private library if you prefer. Otherwise it could become a bit Flickr-ish. I could imagine looking at other people’s lists. I could also imagine some translators finding out a member has a particular book and pestering that member by email (presumably only if available) for a quotation.

There’s also a blog, where Tim says he’s added a few more requested social features. It looks as if Tim is constantly rethinking the system, so I am certainly going to give the service a try.

But I often find social features a bit odd. For instance, if you join flickr, you get people coming along and writing stuff like, ‘Wow, great picture!’ or ‘Yay!’ under your photos or adding you to their list of friends. (Like Live Journal, with this ‘friend of’ and ‘friend to’ distinction, active and passive). Isabella very kindly gave me a subscription to flickr, so I should not be so negative, but when I got the first mail from them saying, ‘You lucky ducky!’ I began to feel out of place. It’s either my age or the W.C.Fields in me.

There are references to other programs for cataloguing in language hat’s comments, including a Mac one and a Linux one.

I really do not intend to get involved in political discussion on this blog. I take both SPD and CSU free biros and bumph outside on Saturdays.

Still, I would just like to say some women seem very odd to me (and I’m not referring to Angela Merkel). How can someone call three of their children Donata, Gracia and Egmont?

Probleme beim Übersetzen in eine andere Sprache als die der Word-Version.

I use German Windows XP Pro and German Word for Windows 2002. I get a German file marked as German language from a client. The inverted commas are German

„Ausgangstext“

How do I get English inverted commas? I can get them if I change them one by one, but not with search and replace.

One thing I might try: first, automatically change all inverted commas to non-typographical:

Mark the text as English language. Then set the AutoFormat options to change non-typographical inverted commas to typographical inverted commas, and to do it on the fly.

Then automatically, with search and replace, replace ” with “.

This only works in the English version of Word. In the German version, although the language has been set to English and the inverted commas stripped of their typographical quality, it seems they still remember what they once were.

I can confirm this because I tried it on an English version of Word and Windows and it worked. And a German colleague in Britain has the problem in reverse.

Someone else said there are differences in Word between the American, British and Australian versions going beyond what you would expect.

Dominik Kreuzer has some macros.
Note also his glossary of Translation and interpreting vocabulary.

Further information:

bq. His grandfather was a tailor, his grandmother a school teacher. Rehnquist grew up in Wisconsin, the son of paper salesman and a translator. …

bq. In 1952, he graduated first in his class at Stanford University’s law school, where he briefly dated O’Connor, the high court’s first female justice.

bq. Rehnquist caused great amusement when he departed from tradition by adding four shiny gold stripes to each sleeve of his black robe in 1995. The flourish was inspired by a costume in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.

How did I miss this for so long?

Erstes Wiener Gemüseorchester

I wonder how many of those CDs they sell?

Via mimi smartypants, who writes:

bq. The first vegetable orchestra, which I actually found by Googling “vegetable orchestra” for no reason at all. You can read it in English by clicking at the top of the page. I just think the German page is funnier, somehow, even though I do not speak or read German.