From Thursday June 4th, Lidl are offering what they call British specialities. You can see them at the website now, but only for a week or so. You may have to enter a postcode – 90762 works!

Yes, I too was surprised to read that British cooking had a higher reputation than French in the past. (In the Dark Ages?)

Here’s another surprise:

Fish and chips, individual pieces, in batter, with extra thick crunchy chips. But Alaska-Seelachsfiletstücke! I spend a lot of my time in Germany avoiding Seelachs. It’s probably coley, which we used to feed to the cats. Pollachius virens. Pollock sounds better, but still, I’ve never encountered that at a British fish and chip shop (cod, skate, rock eel/rock salmon, plaice, haddock).

Those are the first two of four pages. The others have mint sauce, mustard, brown sauce (Englische Würzsauce), caramel shortcakes, marmalade, jam, shortbread, salt and vinegar stick, Ribena substitute, and hand cooked chips (‘Our Lidl quality UK brand Hatherwood’ couldn’t manage to say ‘crisps’, so a bag of these, with a picture of Tower Bridge and some tartan on it, could be a curiosity.

Do they have a British week at Lidl in the Netherlands, commenters?

Don’t watch this if you’re an admirer of Michael Flatley or neo-Irish step dancing:

Stavros Flatley

(Via The Thoughtful Dresser)

The Germans do do some things very well (I’m not sure if Craig and Robert would agree).

New Orleans Rhythm Brass Band from Nuremberg

10. Fürther New Orleans Festival

David Jackson has initiated legal proceedings in Spain. The other side seem a bit slow on the uptake and failed to notice Jackson was represented by a law firm. His lawyers replied, inter alia, that it must be blindingly obvious that Spanish lawyers wrote the correspondence, since it was impossible for British citizens to write clear technical and legal Spanish:

To which I have just spotted (in the middle of 55 pages of closely typed legal arguments) that our reply is:

(..)no se concreta “ en ningún momento , que se trata de un Despacho de Abogados” , ello no es asumible pues, por un lado, del contenido del escrito de alegaciones se infiere claramente su carácter técnico-jurídico, por lo que difícilmente lo podía redactar un ciudadano inglés(..)

Thanks to, er, Barcelona.

I have mentioned Linguee and LinearB – see comments under the latter.

At first I disliked Linguee because I could not see where the texts came from without clicking through, and most of the English equivalents were bad. Admittedly this is not a full investigation, and readers are invited to do their own searches. My first impression of LinearB was good, because the sentences were good English, although they didn’t reveal the source at all.

I now realize that LinearB is full of Europarl, a database of bilingual documents from the proceedings of the European Parliament. Meanwhile it transpires that Linguee incorporates the acquis communautaire TM (I assume), and Europarl too. If I therefore look up the word Rechtsbehelf on both sites, I get masses of quite good EU equivalents, equivalents I could find myself on the Web anyway. Actually, it’s surprising that LinearB doesn’t use that material too.

I just looked at the example in the comments, Bestand as a noun, in Linguee and the results are not bad at all. I also think it is likely that Linguee is expanding and will expand fast. However, I suspect that when I have a genuine question to ask it, it will give me some more Gerglish and not much help.