The following message/mail is frequently seen in mailing lists or email. At least it gives the correct title of the book (Dave Barry is constantly being quoted with no attribution), although the author is missing and the details confused (the book wasn’t published by court reporters, but the examples were taken down by them):

bq. This is from a book called Disorder in the Court. The book is about things
people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published
by court reporters. Here is one of the exchanges I like best:
Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the
autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law
somewhere.

I have the book Disorderly Conduct. Verbatim excerpts from actual court cases selected by Rodney R. Jones, Charles M. Sevilla and Gerald F. Uelmen, with illustrations by Lee Lorenz, 1987, ISBN 0 393 30597 X
I used to read bits to students, so I recognized them when they were quoted on the Internet without attribution.
Charles Sevilla wrote a later book, Disorder in the Court
At www.amazon.com it’s possible to ‘look inside’ books nowadays. Continue reading →

openbrackets has an entry giving statistics on how often translators are characters in films. She cites the Internet Movie Database.

Here are a very few of the entries:

Leonardo da Vinci: 16
Interpreters: 215
Translators: 136
Serial killers named Bob: 1

You do the search by selecting ‘Characters’ in the pull-down search field and entering ‘translator’ in the second search field. It gives 99 men and 37 women. I wouldn’t trust the database to distinguish accurately between translators and interpreters, however.

The Austrian RDB (Rechtsdatenbank) website has links to a number of databases and journals (via Handakte WebLAWg). Its main aim seems to be offering access, at a price, to a large number of journals, collections of cases and other resources (if you need fewer than 50 documents a month, there is still a setup cost of 243 euros and a cost of 4,13 for each RDB document search).

Free of charge: a magazine with a number of interesting articles, including one on Justitia 2003, the latest round in a competition for Austria’s best legal websites. Tax firm Szabo & Partner (with English and Hungarian versions – at a glance, the PDF documents are in better English than the sentences on the website), tax adviser Thomas Brandner, Ernst & Young Austria and the private investigation firm Bernhard Maier (with English and Greek versions – the English is not MT and is comprehensible) are some of the winners, as is the Bundeskanzleramt /Federal Chancellery site.

This is odd. Last year was surely the 500th anniversity of Albrecht Dürer’s painting of the hare (the most famous painting to come out of Nürnberg – send it as an e-card from here). Now it is apparently the 500th anniversary of Das große Rasenstück. This shows a lump of grass with plantains and dandelions and is variously translated as The big turf, The great piece of turf, The large turf, The tall grass (How about The big sod?) Here is the real thing, and here is a version amended by Klaus Staeck.

So now we are to get 7,000 hares on the Hauptmarkt in Nuremberg, the work of Ottmar Hörl. These commemorate the Turf and are called Das große Hasenstück.

The installation is being put up this week and will be opened on Saturday. It can be seen till 17th August.

A press release dated 30 July says that at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair will have a stand for translators – not just literary, apparently, but it sounds as if the general idea is published translators. Translators can be accredited, which seems to mean given the seal of approval
Pressemitteilung deutsch
Press release in English
Thanks to Andrea Doerges.

Dawid Wiskott usually translates into Hebrew and German. One day someone needed a translation of a two-page contract from Aramaic into English. It turned out to be a Hebrew witch’s spell.

NOTE ADDED LATER: (these instructions are from Dawid, not me, and possibly apply only to Netscape): if you look at Dawid’s page (some of this and all the rest of the site are in Hebrew), select View-encoding-hebrew (Windows). Netscape will accept only U.S. ascii as default. You can choose between good Hebrew and mucked-up English or vice versa (left-to-right / right-to-left problem).

Vielleicht könntest du die Leser warnen, dass sie nach aufrufen der seite View-encoding-hebrew(windows) waehlen muessen. netscape setzt sich ueber jeden versuch hinweg, einen anderen default als amerikanisches ascii aufzuladen.
ausserdem habe ich festgestellt, dass der betrachter die wahl hat zwischen ordentlichem hebraeisch mit vermurkstem englisch (right to left) und ordentlichem englisch mit vermurkstem hebraeisch (left to right).