I’ve just finished reading Bernhard Schlink’s Die gordische Schleife (literally ‘the Gordian bow’, referring to the idea that every Gordian knot can be untied), a thriller that appeared in 1988. It reads well, especially at the beginning, but its plot and the relationships between its characters are not very credible, and at the end it suddenly gets tied up in unexpected philosophizing. Schlink’s strongest suit seems to be observation of the world through the eyes of a reflective young man – thoughtful observation of detail is the strongest element of Der Vorleser too.

Before I bought it, Schlink had written two better-thought-of crime novels whose main character, Selb, was a 68-year-old private detective with a Nazi past. A further one, Selbs Mord (literally, Selb’s murder: SelbsTmord means suicide) appeared in 2001. But Schlink is now internationally famous as the author of Der Vorleser (The Reader) (not just because it was an Oprah selection in the USA). But The Gordian Knot (as it will be called when it appears in English in 2004) has a main character who is a German ex-lawyer turned translator, living in France. Continue reading →

Lex Scripta is an Australian law portal (Essential Web Links for Queensland Lawyers). It’s the link of the week at the University of Saarbrücken (German). Lex Scripta contains a large number of links of wide interest. It’s opening page includes a Google search of AustLII (I did a quick search on ‘kangaroo’ and got 1085 hits, but I admit this was superficial of me). The site describes itself as follows:

bq. Lex Scripta, as the name implies, is intended primarily as a guide to finding Leges Scriptæ – written legal reference resources – wherever they exist on the Internet. But it is much more than a catalogue or index of legal reference sites. Through the links found on this site, practising members of the legal profession, as well as legal academics and students, should be able to locate any web-based resource likely to be useful in the course of their daily work.

and it says it is of interest to laypersons as well as to lawyers.

Perhaps it bears repeating that AustLII is the Australasian Legal Information Institute, a first-class portal for Australian and New Zealand law that aims to link all freely available statute and case law and has been copied, but not bettered, by BAILII (Britain and Ireland), CanLII (Canada), HKLII (Hong Kong), PacLII (Pacific Islands) and WorldLII (the world).

I was reading in the LISA newsletter about a form of translation memory software that is not tied to the sentence but instead to large paragraphs and that creates a big index of all elements of a text.

The article is by Timothy Hunt of TermSeek Inc. and actually comes from the archives but I haven’t seen it before.
The software called translation support software and two kinds being worked on are TransSearch and Translator’s Intuition:

bq. For example, Elliott Macklovitch and Graham Russell in What’s been Forgotten in Translation Memory pointed out that statistical based TM systems would say that sentence (1) below is closest to sentence (2) even though sentence (3) is closer in meaning.

bq. The wild child is destroying his new toy.
The wild chief is destroying his new tool.
The wild children are destroying their new toy.

Further web searching led to a useful page on software for translators by il8nguy, whose site I’ve seen before but also not done justice to. il8n is short for ‘international localization’.

There is also a list of language and translation blogs (under the subdirectory ‘humor’).

In today’s Nürnberger Nachrichten, in the Stadt Nürnberg section (also to be found in the Fürther Nachrichten, of course), there is an interview (in German) with Francisco Ludovice-Moreira, the President of the Bavarian section of the Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer/BDÜ, the professional association for translators and interpreters in Germany (there are others, such as ADÜ-Nord and ATICOM, and VdÜ (the last one is for literary translators). Like many German newspaper interviews, it is printed like the script of a play, with the names of the speakers and their texts. I have no idea whether such an interview is unaltered.

The main topic is interpreting for the police and courts. The police are said to be happy, often, to use a student for 15 euros per hour, and they have no interest as to whether a translator is sworn or not. There is also reference to the fact that translator and interpreter certification is a matter of Land law and should be standardized throughout Germany, and some discussion of the variation of payment for translations from court to court. The current statute, the ZSEG or ZuSEG, is soon to be replaced by the JVEG, and that may lay down a fixed line price and hourly rate.

There was a little discussion on CompuServe (FLEFO) as to why it is worth saving dying languages (a subject I rarely think about). Tony Roder, of the Translator’s Home Companion, mentioned reading a favourable review of a book on the subject. The book is Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, by Mark Abley, a Canadian journalist said to be a good story-teller, who travelled around the world investigating obscure and less obscure languages. Lawyers might find it difficult to speak Boro, a language in Northern India with scarcely any nouns. I see languagehat has already mentioned it, but I was in Verona at the time (he mentions an Amazonian language that was last spoken by a parrot, which was surely in a Larson cartoon).

The Arcata Eye site is apparently well-known on the Internet, so I am late finding it. It describes itself as ‘America’s most popular small-town newspaper’ and has a section called Police Log. I suppose this is fictitious, but it’s a very good read. Here’s an example:

bq. Monday, July 28 12:29 a.m. 12:08 p.m. Baby birds were reported stuck to the the wall of a trailer park recreation hall. A woman said management wouldn’t let her children rescue the birds. An officer arrived, collected the birdies and turned them over to wildlife rescue personnel.
12:11 p.m. A woman reported an ex-roommate ordering magazine subscriptions in her name. …

bq. 10:06 p.m. Got a pair of rottweilers? Be sure and lock them in a camper shell on 10th Street so they can explode at people who walk past.

bq. Tuesday, July 29 2:45 a.m. A vehicle sat defunct in the westbound lane of 17th Street. The driver told an officer it was out of gas and was waiting for someone to bring him some. It’s fair to surmise that planning may not be the guy’s strong suit, since he hadn’t registered the gasless vehicle since 1999. It was towed; he was cited.

I found this when following up a reference by languagehat, who is an editor, to the weblog of another editor, Theresa Nielsen Hayden, Making Light, because in the comments to her entry By my ear and hand
there was a wonderful sentence illustrating the need for the serial comma or Oxford comma, which I can’t resist quoting:

bq. Planet Ustinov – Monday, C4, 8pm
By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

And Theresa has a link to the Arcata police log.