In Air Berlin’s latest issue of its inflight magazine, the CEO, Joachim Hunold, wrote an editorial headed Das kommt mir spanisch vor!, much to the disgust of the Catalan speakers of the Balearics. He’d received a letter from the government requesting him to use Catalan, the official language of the islands. He replied in the form of this editorial – backed up by a cartoon at the end of the magazine showing a Bavarian insisting that Catalan speakers who come to Bavaria must speak the Bavarian dialect.

Hunold starts off well by quoting Charles V (‘German Emperor who was also the King of Spain’), who introduced Spanish – Castilian, not Catalan. Nowadays, according to Hunold, there are whole villages in Majorca where the children don’t even understand Spanish, which is supposed to be the national language.

This doesn’t seem to have hit the news in Germany, but it has got Catalan bloggers showing pictures of an Air Berlin plane with a swastika on it. There are initiatives afoot to publicize alternative flights to Air Berlin’s. It’s also made the mallorcazeitung.

Air-Berlin-Chef Joachim Hunold hat mit einer scharfen Kritik an der Sprachpolitik der balearischen Landesregierung eine Debatte um die Verwendung von Spanisch und Katalanisch ausgelöst. Auslöser war ein Brief an die Fluggesellschaft, in der ein “adäquaten Gebrauch der offiziellen Sprache” eingefordert wurde, das heißt, dass katalanisch-sprachige Kunden in ihrer Sprache angesprochen werden sollten. Hunold kritisiert die Politik als Rückschritt, die spanische Sprache werde benachteiligt und sei praktisch keine offizielle Sprache mehr. Ihm sei versichert worden, dass es schon heute auf Mallorca Dörfer gebe, in denen Kinder kein Spanisch mehr könnten.

Air Berlin’s in-flight magazine can also be read online: air berlin magazin (if that doesn’t work, go to www.airberlin.com, choose German and Germany, then the magagzine is the last item under ‘Presse’)

Trevor sez: I wonder whether there are more Bavarian than Catalan mother tongue speakers on Mallorca.

Thanks to Catalonia.

Photographs aren’t permitted during trials, so courtroom artists traditionally make sketches in the UK, the USA and Germany. (Germany lets cameras in before the trial, but can’t force people not to cover their faces).

The big difference is that UK courtroom artists aren’t even allowed to draw in court – they have to do it all from memory afterwards!

I was reminded of this when reasing in the WSJ Law Blog about Guantanamo inmates’ reactions to drawings of themselves. Janet Hamlin was actually prepared to correct Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nose.

A military spokesman, apparently accustomed to criticism about the treatment of prisoners here, said the attention to Mohammed’s feelings demonstrated the humane nature of the Guantanamo detentions.

Well, it’s OK about the canvas boarding, but what about the waterboarding?

CBS News reports too:

Still, American courtroom artists may have it easy compared to their British counterparts: U.K. law prohibits drawing in the courtroom, so artists have to sketch from memory. British artist Elizabeth Cook has sketched courtroom figures as diverse as Elton John, General Pinochet and the Spice Girls. She says she studies a subject’s forehead length, distance between the nose and top lip and jaw width before she goes off to sketch.

In the CBS gallery of courtroom drawings, there is one by Elizabeth Cook of General Pinochet (here incorrectly referred to as Picochet).

Gerichtszeichner (Wikipedia)

As part of an art initiative in containers throughout the pedestrian zone, this container has magically appeared in front of this building. On one set of shelves I can put stuff from my ‘household’ that I don’t need or want, and people can help themselves, or I can destroy my stuff on the spot and put the results on the other set of shelves.

Mysteriously, the Raumgestaltung website of the artist Barbara Denzler is optimized for IE, but it looks OK in Firefox as far as I can tell. I mean, I think it’s supposed to look like that.

Somehow I feel that the rubbish I would deposit there is too finished to be really arty.

Udo Vetter reports that he constantly receives requests to fill in a questionnaire or survey about lawyers’ use of weblogs for someone doing research in some educational institute or other:

Seminararbeit, Diplomarbeit, Doktorarbeit. Ich habe allein seit Ende letzter Woche elf Anfragen erhalten, ob ich nicht an einer Umfrage über Weblogs teilnehmen möchte. Früher habe ich ab und zu mal Kreuzchen gemacht oder Fragen beantwortet. Aber in der Masse ist das nicht mehr zu bewältigen.

The equivalent for translators is ‘I’m doing a survey on translators and translation memory software’.

The Legal Antiquarian posts an advertisement placed by Calvin Fletcher and J.A. Breckridge in the Indianapolis Gazette (Gesetzblatt) in 1822.

Sinngemäß bieten die zwei alle juristischen Tätigkeiten an, einschließlich solcher, die in Richtung Winkeladvokat gehen, im 5. Circuit. Sie interessieren sich nur für gut bezahlte Aufträge. Sie versprechen auch nicht, “korrekt, gewissenhaft und pünktlich” zu arbeiten, sondern, wie die meisten Anwälte, “so gut sie können”.

The Masked Translator has a great post about the seven deadly sins of translators.

Wrath
For translators this can take several strange forms. At first glance you may not think a freelance translator would find much to be wrathful at in their work. But many are the times Masked Translator has ranted about the horrendous rudeness of panicked agencies who call and wake our household up in the middle of the night trying to get us to do a job in a language combination we don’t even do. MT has also been known to rail in anger at the people who wrote the ******* documents in the first place. People with abysmal writing skills, terrible spelling, illegible handwriting, documents irritatingly peppered with slang or cryptic, in-house terms… MT has even been struck by conniptions of ire at the petty/stupid/irritating things people bothered to write down in the first place. Actually, come to think of it, that’s a lot of wrath. Translators should definitely work to get enough exercise and meditate or talk to other translators or do something to dissipate the wrath. We find blogging helpful…

I mean, not that I recognize myself there, of course…