Author Archives: MMarks

East Side Gallery cleanup

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The last time graffiti were removed from the East Side Gallery (in 2009), they put a film over it so the next time it would be easier to remove. I suppose it will no longer read Middlesbrough F.C. – Save Our Steel. These were taken on October 26 2015.

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You can see a picture of the current clean-up on the Guardian site. It shows a cleaner version of the Trabi picture than mine, with the temporary fence in front, here being looked at by two very elegant Chinese persons who I failed to photograph from the front:

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“It is a sisyphean task to keep it clean,” said Adalbert Maria Klees, the district’s chief technician, whose job it is to remove the graffiti. Standing in front of one of the most famous murals – Birgit Kinder’s painting of an East German Trabant car appearing to burst through the wall – as it is rubbed in a pungent brown graffiti remover by a worker, he said: “This looked even worse this morning. Full of ‘I love yous’ and ‘I was heres’ in every language under the sun.”
The Trabant and around a quarter of the other murals have already been placed behind a temporary metal fence …
Klees admitted the unease he and others feel about erecting another barrier in front of a barrier that was designed to prevent East Germans from escaping the GDR. “It is absurd to be protecting the Berlin Wall, of all things, with a fence,” he said.

Flood of faces of people coming through the wall – the artist said he was there at the time and noticed the people did not look happy:

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Mauerspringer (Wall Jumper).

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The Berliner Morgenpost reports today that from now on there will be a fence keeping people 1.3 m away from the wall, with signs in various languages explaining the need to protect the works of art:

Berlin. Vor den Resten der Berliner Mauer wird eine 80 bis 90 Zentimeter hohe Absperrung errichtet. Das Geländer solle Menschen davon abhalten, die East Side Gallery zu beschmieren, sagte Bezirksamtssprecher Sascha Langenbach am Donnerstag. Hinweisschilder in verschiedenen Sprachen sollen demnach zusätzlich darüber aufklären, dass die Kunstwerke darauf schützenswert seien. Berliner und Touristen sollen laut dem Sprecher künftig einen “Respektabstand” von 1,30 Meter zur Mauer halten.

Linguee or Reverso

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I mentioned the Linguee site when it first appeared. For the German>English combination, probably the first choice for the creators, it will give you quotes from bilingual websites. It has changed a bit over the years. The best change for me was the addition to the first page of URLs of the sites referenced.

Because, and this is the big problem, most bilingual DE/EN websites are probably German sites and the English on them may be non-native. It may be useful for terminology nonetheless.

Linguee is apparently very widely used. I use it much more than I ever thought I would, but I look most often at the .eu sites and usually ignore the .de ones.

Nikki Graham has the combination Spanish>English and she doesn’t find Linguee much use but likes Reverso: Time to Reverso your use of Linguee?

Reverso has a user-friendly, easy-to-read layout and a number of useful sections. I mainly tend to use just the dictionary (based on the 2005 edition of Collins for my es-en pair) and context parts of the site, although it offers translation (MT), conjugation, grammar and spellcheck sections as well. You can even download the Reverso app free onto your mobile phone to access its features on the go.
…They are right when they claim that professional translators will find the specialized entries in their dictionary very helpful, because I certainly do!

I’ve only had a quick look at Reverso, but it does not have the obscure or new German terms I usually look up. For instance Technikgeschoss came up in an architectural description recently – not actually uncommon nor unfamiliar to me, but Linguee immediately gives you several possibilities which you could then research further.

If I did not know the term service floor or plant room, I might open a dictionary on my shelves but I see it has been untouched for years. I would probably consult the Langenscheidt dictionaries online as a member of the BDÜ and Langenscheidt Technik would say:

Technikgeschoss n • service floor; mechanical equipment floor; plant room level; mechanical floor pract

Reverso does have both a dictionary (Collins) and a collaborative dictionary, but I suppose that the terms in the latter are limited to those in the former, so there is rather a lack of specialized terminology. But I have only looked at it very briefly and not in connection with a specific translation.

In the recent comments on Zahn and Dietl, I was reminded that I use scarcely any paper dictionaries nowadays. I wonder if the online versions, especially Acolada ones with a subscription, will do better at adding new terminology.

Anyway, neither Linguee nor any dictionary solve a translator’s problems – they just provide a basis for further research.

LATER NOTE: in discussion on Twitter (I tweet as Transblawg but rarely engage), Anne de Freyman says she only uses the big Collins (unabridge?) FR>EN as the Reverso version is too small – which was my impression. However, I haven’t been using the Collins Unabridged DE>EN as much as I used to. I find the Collins online thesaurus good. Anne wrote that she uses Evernote Premium to create a custom search engine, in effect, accessible on all devices, and including whole websites and glossaries. An interesting possibility, although I could collect hundreds of sites before finding one of my new terms in one.