law.arts.culture blog

via Juris Diversitas

The Local has an account in English of Anatol Stefanowitsch’s sensible defence of JFK: JFK cleared ‘I am a Jam Doughnut’ gaffe

Stefanowitsch said the construction with the article “ein” is used when a speaker wants to say that he doesn’t literally belong to the group, Berliners in this case, but rather wants to express that he has something in common with them.

“That is exactly what Kennedy wanted to do – he did not want to claim to actually be a resident of the city of Berlin but rather to say that he shared something with the Berliners, namely their love of freedom,” Stefanowitsch said.

At the end of his 10-minute address, Kennedy uttered the immortal words: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.”

So there would have been no blank stares or giggles from the crowd of 450,000 Germans that summer’s day?

“Kennedy not only delivered a grammatically correct sentence but rather the only sentence that made sense there,” Stefanowitsch said.

My only quibble is how Kennedy would have referred to a jam doughnut in American English.

eCPD Webinars are offering an online course in November. The first module has to be done before choosing one of the second and third modules, which give practical experience in translating either DE>EN or EN>DE

Module 1: Two separate one-hour lessons:
Translating and Interpreting in a legal context, in particular between common and civil law systems.
German law – institutions, sources and application, with particular focus on linguistic issues of relevance for translators/interpreters.

The webinar leaders are Angela Sigee and Richard Delaney – both experienced and recommended by me, at least I’ve heard Angela before and read things by Richard.

It seems there is a ‘satirical’ Fürth website/weblog that has won the Grimme online award. It is called Der Postillon and run by Stefan Sichermann. The Nürnberger Zeitung reports (interview with Sichermann):

Der “Postillon” ist eine typische Interneterscheinung: Das 2008 ins Leben gerufene Satireblog verzeichnete nach Angaben seines Gründers und Betreibers Stefan Sichermann im ersten Jahr des Bestehens zwischen 1 und 100 Leser. Heute sind es über 100.000 Klicks am Tag bei etwa 25.000 Einzelbesuchern.

Apparently the success was partly driven by Facebook, so perhaps it’s not surprising I’ve never heard of it.

QED

My blogroll is never quite up to date, but I have added Tim Windhof’s blog Columbus meets Cologne. Tim is a lawyer and legal translator who spent some years in Munich after studying in Cologne and New Zealand. There’s an audio interview with him on Translation Thoughts (just under 20 minutes), from which I gather that German is his native language and so he translates into German.

I also added Margaret Hiley’s Post from Pudding Bag Lane – she translates academic stuff.

And I added Translator Thoughts, for interviews with translators.