Drifting again – I assume that at least 50% of this weblog should be off topic, or no-one will be interested (here’s a very successful entry, for example): languagehat had an entry on the pronunciation of the English surname Carew, which apparently is not pronounced karoo, but like Carey.
In this connection I would like to recommend the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by J.C. Wells. Wells is a professor of phonetics at London University. He covers both British and U.S. pronunciation, and sometimes he gives the results of polls as to preferred usage.
Loitering in the comments to the languagehat entry, I found a site with some rather rude limericks and so on, requiring the correct pronunciation of some strange names. Some of these are familiar, some less so. I’d certainly seen this before:

There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley,
Whose bride was so mellow and colmondeley
That the best man, Colquhoun,
An inane young bolqufoun,
Could only stand still and stare dolmondeley.

For anyone disbelieving, may I add that the names really are pronounced in the way that makes the limerick make sense.

From Isabella Massardo’s Taccuino di Traduzione, a link to a review of a new edition of the Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Slang. The author is apparently from the south of England, but I hadn’t encountered ‘flatting in London’ before (I must have missed it). To quote the review, by Ben Lowings:

bq. This is the first edition in five years, and as such it marks the first time phrases like ‘Too much hui and not enough dui’ and adjectives like ‘aratanic’ – a term used of accident-prone ferries – have made it into print.

Some of the terms are surely used in Australia too (pointing Percy at the porcelain), but not the Maori references.

Here’s another brief reference (for tourists) to languages in New Zealand.

There seems to be a big difference between explaining NZ slang to Americans and British people, because if you look at this site of Kiwi Words & Phrases, as it says itself, a lot of the words are British.

Here is another site, called Aussie Slang, with many dialect links, not just English. It even has Swiss German slang and the Lord’s Prayer in the Germanic languages.

This week it occurred to me, in connection with some email about translation problems, that a good translation of Wegfall eines Vermächtnisnehmers is lapse of a gift (which is more like Wegfall eines Vermächtnisses).

These words are all totally untranslatable. I know everyone knows this, but a lot of the time you can get away with translating Erbe as heir. But their meanings are completely different. And suddenly, one day, there comes a translation where you have to be accurate, and the only way to do it is to use the German word and define it in brackets.

Legal systems won’t tolerate a moment when property is not owned, but German law and English law manage this completely differently. In German law, the moment someone dies, his or her Erbe(n) – successors in title, I might almost say – inherit the estate. They can reject the inheritance later, but at the moment of death there is automatic succession. The Erbe is contrasted with the Vermächtnisnehmer, a person who gets a smaller part of the estate, often an item or a sum of money, and has to claim this from the Erben.

In English, we have the word heir, and the heir to the throne has some similarity to the German Erbe. If the Queen dies, Prince Charles immediately becomes King, and the coronation (if any…) is merely a formality.

In law, the word heir has not been used in England since 1926. It used to mean someone who inherited land. A U.S. definition of heir is:

A person who is entitled to another’s real property by intestate succession. Those entitled to another’s personal property are the intestate’s distributees or next of kin. The distinction between real and personal property may no longer be significant, and many modern statutes use the term ‘heir’ to designate the intestate takers of any type of property.

(From Mark Reutlinger, Wills, Trusts, and Estates. Essential Terms and Concepts, ISBN 0 316 74112 4, a wonderful book consisting of masses of definitions of terms).

In German law, Erben exist whether there is a will or not. Continue reading →

I’ve sometimes translated descriptions of high-rise buildings and I like this one. It was built in 1935 and looks to me as if it still has its original windows. The white is nice, but I have seen a photo on the Internet where it is bare concrete. It is 42 m high. The first photograph is original, the second one corrected on my Nikon Coolpix 4500. I don’t suppose I would buy a Linhof if I could afford one. But I suppose there must be software that does this too. Have I gone too far?

The latest issue of Free Pint (August 21), mentioned here before, has an article on the problems of running a multilingual website. The site is in Britain and attempts to offer up-to-date information on benefit law in languages of the local community. The main emphasis is on the advantages of Unicode over PDF. Here is the Multikulti site the article reports on. It includes versions in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, and Gujerati.

Howard Bashman, in How Appealing, has an entry headed You know they’re criminals because they have aliases. He quotes an opinion beginning:

bq. Chittakone Chanthasouxat (“Chanthasouxat”) and Keopaseuth Xayasane
(“Xayasane”) (collectively, “Defendants”) appeal their convictions for drugrelated offenses.

Bashman’s mild query as to whether it was necessary to write “Chanthasouxat” is taken up by Eugene Volokh:

bq. Why do lawyers think it’s helpful to have obvious parentheticals like this? If there is only one Chanthasouxat in the case, people will realize that Chanthasouxat refers to that Chanthasouxat. If there is more than one, then you shouldn’t call either Chanthasouxat. Likewise, there were exactly two defendants in the cases being considered in the opinion; who else would “Defendants” refer to?

Bashman also links to a Findlaw review of Volokh’s new book on academic legal writing.

These parentheticals make me think of the technique in translation of quoting a statute both in German and English to introduce the German abbreviation. This shouldn’t be done slavishly, only as far as is necessary to help the reader.

The use of aliases for criminals reminds me of a report about two shoplifters in Fürth whose names were replaced by aliases – Oleg and Olga. Their nationality was not mentioned.