Recently at a local store, the stereo piped in the Christmas carol “The Little Drummer Boy.” It’s one of my favorite Christmas carols, though some versions are better than others. But what struck me was that the more recent versions modify the traditional words “The ox and ass kept time,” replacing them with “The ox and lamb kept time.” I’m sure the word “ass” was replaced because in post-modern usage, the word refers to a body part— and these days, its use might incur hefty fines from the FCC.

A Google search on “the ox and * kept time” reveals more (including a mule).

Censorship meets Religion?

Louise Frances Denyer, of (or connected with) Birmingham University, has a PDF on the Web of an 85-page paper (about half of it consists of appendices with language examples):
Corpus study carried out on three ‘legal’ verbs to demonstrate their similar and different usage for the purposes of legal translators and lawyer-linguists.

The paper aims to show the valule of corpus studies in translation and legal-language teaching. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but unfortunately the corpora used, which are English, Spanish and French, don’t appear to be specifically legal texts. The three verbs were chosen because the author’s students wanted to know more about them – I remember this problem with another collection of verbs mentioned here: abolish, override, set aside, quash etc.

The following is really only based on skimming the article:

Breach often collocates with peace, security, contract, confidentiality, rules, rights, and fiduciary (MM: should be fiduciary duty, not just ‘breach of fiduciary’ as suggested).

Violate collocates with rules, codes, covenants, terms, prohibitions, and court injunction; also with airspace. It is very common in connection with US constitutional rights, whereas in British English it can relate to minor offences.

Infringe collocates with IP rights, such as patents, copyrights, fundamental rights.

I found this article via the programme of a conference on corpus linguistics in Murcia this week, tweeted by Matthew Bennett, seeing the topic and then Googling the author’s name.

I have got a book on corpora that seems very good, but I am only part-way through it: Working with Specialized Language. A practical guide to using corpora, by Lanne Bowker and Jennifer Pearson, Routledge 2002.

Walt Disney did Pinocchio a great disservice. A new English translation by Geoffrey Brock sounds as if it puts things right.

Interesting podcast interview Tim Parks at the New York Review of Books – scroll down.

Collodi was very much about the unification of Italy, but this aspect has gradually been ironed out of the book for children.

Observer review.

(My copy of Tim Parks’ A Season with Verona is being held captive by a football fan in Erlangen).

Thanks to Trevor.

Further to the recent entry on The web as dictionary, a Swiss site has a form for multilingual web searches for translators.

This will find sites with more than one language. You choose a combination of EN with DE, ES, FR, IT, NL, PT or SV, and you have further choices – for instance, in German you can choose sites in DE/CH/AT – but apparently not individual countries. Thus if I were translating from Swiss German, I might search for CH sites or UK sites (the UK option isn’t given).

Via Jost Zetzsche’s newsletter.

Learn to speak a bit of Gothic on Youtube.

via languagehat