Deutscher Eintrag, Weblog entlarvt Mörder, bei Udo Vetter.

Sek Man Ng started his weblog in October 2002. On May 12 2005, the last entry finished like this:

bq. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon, oh yeah working on the jap report as we speak!

The ‘sister’s former boyfriend’ has now been charged with the murder of Ng and his sister just after this – the weblog confirmed his whereabouts.

English-language report here:

bq. Sam Cheung, a cousin of the Ngs, is still in disbelief.
“It’s unbelievable that it was one single guy!” said Cheung, 24. “He took two lives. How can one person do this?”

The trick is to do them consecutively, I believe.

perlentaucher.de verlinkt internationale Kommentare zu den Neuwahlen.

perlentaucher.de (in German) gives a number of links to international coverage (some of it in English) on the German elections called for by Schröder.

Some papers are trying out epithets for Angela Merkel, and Kate Connolly in the Telegraph chooses iron maiden. I suppose this is meant to be a weaker form of the Iron Lady. Unfortunately there seem to be weaknesses in British educational standards – the iron maiden was a bit tougher than Maggie.

bq. She is known by the German media as the “das eiserne mädchen” (the iron girl) – suggesting that she lacks the Iron Lady’s toughness in pushing through radical reforms. Indeed she herself has promoted the idea that she is “deeply rooted” in Germany’s social-market economy.

That’s true, but still no reason to mistranslate it.

Here is another picture on a book cover (Bram Stoker translated by Steffen Radlmaier).

perlentaucher.de has an English-language site called signandsight.

There, there is a page in English on the call for elections (but some of the sites linked are in German!)

Apparently one type of the iron maiden / Eiserne Jungfrau is associated with Nuremberg, but now in the crime museum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. There have been a couple of women politicians associated with Nuremberg, but they were SPD.

Wikipedia on torture, with photo of iron maiden. The spikes pierced the victim’s eyes, chest and genitals.

I am taking the liberty of posting this announcement which I got from the legaltranslators group at Yahoo:

bq. City University, Centre for Language Studies is offering a one day
Legal Translation Seminar on Monday 27th June from 9am to 5pm, at our
main campus in Northampton Square. The morning session will be a
series of talks about various related topics as well as a comparative
study of the French and English legal systems and the German and
English legal systems. The afternoon session will be a 2 hour
interactive workshop based around the translation of a legal text.
The document will be translated, and the main traps and pitfalls
discussed. We offer 4 language combinations as follows: English into
French, French into English, German into English, English into German.

bq. The cost of the seminar is £110 (£95 concessions). The
deadline for registration is 12 June 2005. Further information
including a detailed programme of the day as well as the application
form can be found on our website
http://www.city.ac.uk/languages/seminar.
Alternatively you can email Erin Faulkner e.faulkner@city.ac.uk or
telephone +44 20 7040 3265

Actually there are seminars on June 3 and 4 too, on commercial and corporate law. I see that a City University centre for legal translation is planned and wonder what form that would take.

Angela Sigee, who is comparing English and German law and talking about EN>DE translation, is excellent. I don’t know the others, but have heard good reports of the seminars.

The Department of Applied Linguistics at Saarland University at Saarbrücken is doing an online survey of translators’ and interpreters’ use of terminology management and terminology extraction tools. It can be done here and is supposed to take about ten minutes. It is all in English.

Some of the questions are accompanied by an explanation. The terminology extraction tools mentioned were these:

TermExtract (Trados)
TermFinder (Xerox)
TermFinder (Acrolinx)
Term Finder (SDL)
Autoterm (IAI)

I felt a bit odd answering in English because I felt it was being asked by non-native speakers. So I wrote ‘studentische Hilfskraft’ once rather than trying to explain it in English.

After I had done the test I got a message saying I would be taken back to the home page:

bq. Sie werden in wenigen Sekunden zur Startseite der Fachrichtung 4.6 weitergeleitet…You will be redirec

But I wasn’t, so I hope they got the answers. 77 people have answered so far. The results will be sent to me by email.

PS Does anyone know why the main page of the applied languages department at Saarbrücken is ‘sticky’? I kept entering the Transblawg URL and returning there, but after a few seconds Saarbrücken reinstituted itself. The trouble with those people is that they know too much about software.
LATER NOTE: I have edited my links and removed the problem.

N24 quotes FAS (via vowe.net):

bq. Reporter: Mr. Lucas, könnten Sie bitte noch einmal den entscheidenden Satz wiederholen?
George Lucas: May the force be with you.
Simultanübersetzer [sic]: Am 4. Mai werden wir bei dir sein.

Wortfeld, usually a German-language blog, has an entry in English describing the background to Schröder’s announcement of autumn elections. There are a large number of links.

As Alexander rightly says, the coverage of German matters in the English-language press is often not very good (and vice versa of course).

bq. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and SPD chairman Franz Müntefering have announced their intention to hold early elections. However, German constitutional law doesn’t make that as easy as in many other countries. Article 68 of Germany’s Basic Laws allows the (otherwise relatively powerless) President to dissolve the Bundestag if the Chancellor loses a vote of confidence. However, Schröder’s coalition holds 306 of currently 603 seats, so Schröder’s troops would have to lose deliberately. Helmut Kohl did that in 1982, with early elections in early 1983 instead of late 1984. The Constitutional Court wasn’t too happy with this creative approach (full decision in German), but ultimately didn’t stop it (and will not do so this time), since all Bundestag parties agreed.