The Guardian interviews five people who were students in the 1970s and 1980s, taking them back to their universities to see how things have changed.

They include Gary Younge, who studied Russian and French translation and interpreting at Heriot-Watt University from 1988 to 1992.

In languages, this meant three types of interpreting – simultaneous, conference (summarising chunks of a speech) and liaison (acting as an intermediary) – as well as translation. We spent hours in the dictionaries room in the basement of the library , trying to find just the right word. We sat in booths wearing headphones trying to stop Jacques Delors or Mikhail Gorbachev racing away with the end of a sentence before we had finished rendering it into passable English.

And Stuart Jeffries did German (possibly inter alia) at Oxford, where remedial grammar classes are now held for some of ‘the brightest and best qualified in the country’.

This is fairly presented, identified for what it is, probably useful for the potential buyer, and yet – some texts are better suited to machine translation than others:

[AUTOMATED ENGLISH TRANSLATION BELOW]
The monument-protected messuage claimant as rider hotel and stud. 1985 were constantly continued the main house reconditioned and at all buildings. Therefore the former manor is in a maintained condition. The park-similar exterior installation with old tree existence rounds the picture off. Zupachtung of pasturelands is conceivable. This historical ensemble has nearly boundless variants of use with numerous extension possibilities. Please you visit also our homepage with our extensive real estate offer under: http://www.pfeiffer koberstein immobilien.de/. we look forward to you! Buyer commission: 3,48% of the selling price; Pfeiffer and Koberstein real estates GmbH, specialized broker for agricultural messuages, upper Gaensaecker 23, 74673 Mulfingen, Germany, Tel.: 0049 7938-9926-0, fax: 0049 7938-9926-10, email: info@pfeiffer koberstein immobilien.de, registry office Swabian-resound…

There was an amazing query on Proz.com recently, headed Mücke zum Elefanten.

The situation was a speech balloon in a cartoon about making mammoths from their DNA. A fly is sitting on a scientist’s desk and saying: maybe you can’t turn me into an elephant, but I might make a mammoth. (A play on words from the meaning ‘to make a mountain out of a mole hill’).

This was to be translated into English.

The solution wasn’t bad (Andrew Swift:”OK, maybe my DNA isn’t up to cloning an elephant but I’m sure I’’d make a pretty good mammoth.”). I wonder what the payment was?

In this connection, there’s an excellent article (in German) by Nina-Sattler-Hovdar in today’s ADÜ-Nord Infoblatt (click on Publikationen, then Infoblatt, and select Infoblatt 1/2007/), based on her talk for the ATA last year, suggesting what to do if a client requests what is effectively copywriting. She also explains how one might go about charging and doing this kind of work if one wants to, and pleads for a category of copywriting (Texten) in translator directories.

LATER NOTE: Here’s another coot that crossed my path last week.

Here’s a list of German names for places where Germany is not the official language. German has a particularly large number of those (Mailand for Milano, Hermannstadt for Sibiu, Löwen for Leuven). The list is the second edition, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations. It is not exhaustive, but the exonyms in it are in current use.

Ausgewählte Exonyme der deutschen Sprache Deutsche Namen und ihre phonetische Umschriftung
für geographische Objekte in Ländern oder Gebieten ohne deutsche Amtssprache
2. Ausgabe
Selected German Language Exonyms
German names and their phonetic transcription
designating geographical objects
of countries or regions where German is not an official language
Second Edition
Ständiger Ausschuss für geographische Namen (StAGN)
Frankfurt am Main 2002

See also a German article in the BDÜ Info for North-Rhine Westphalia (as it is not officially punctuated): Geographische Namen in der Übersetzung.

This is a 2004 story, but you can still see a picture of the famous Escondido Library Cat (L.C.) there.

VISTA – Jurors found Friday that a disabled man’s civil rights were not violated when his assistance dog was attacked by the Escondido library’s pet cat. The jury refused to award him damages.

More links to that cat (which died in 2003).

This is a true story. Often, ridiculous untrue law stories circulate (see earlier entry).

The Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com defuse some such stories, and further down on the page are summaries of a few true legal stories that are just as ridiculous (including the story of the 12 lb. LC attacking the 50 lb. dog).