Machine translation has its uses, but this isn’t one of them.
The giveaway is the translation of staircase as satircase, which means the person who arranged the machine translation made a typo and the MT program couldn’t deal with it. I also suspect that enter was interpreted as entering something on a computer, hence the translation of eingeben.
The famous translator Harry Rowohlt has died at the age of seventy. I remember him playing the tramp in Lindenstraße (Coronation Street transferred to Munich).
Unfortunately work prevents me from listening to this interview (tweeted by Don Dahlmann):
Gregor Gysi befragt Harry Rowohlt
Richard Schneider reports a cartoon with the caption that in comaprison with Rowohlt’s translations, there is a lot missing in the original:
Welchen Ruf Harry Rowohlt als Übersetzer hatte, bringt jedoch am besten ein Cartoon der Karikaturisten Hauck & Bauer auf den Punkt. Dort sagt ein literaturbegeisterter Mittdreißiger beim Bummel über die (vermutlich Frankfurter) Buchmesse zu seiner Begleiterin: “Das Buch musst du in der Übersetzung von Harry Rowohlt lesen. Im Original geht da viel verloren.” Die Zeichnung macht jetzt überall die Runde und ist unter anderem auf der Facebook-Seite des Zeit-Magazins zu finden.
I’ve been away for a week and not posted for a month, so while I gear myself up for more, here are a few things:
1. Der Berg kreißt und gebiert eine Maus: a translator had to render this in English and of course the equivalent The mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse (from Horace: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus) is even less used in English than the former in German. It depends on the context whether you might use it.
One suggestion was to look at this discussion at English Language & Usage Stack Exchange (‘a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts’). The discussion is interesting. The questioner thinks the expression is Japanese. ‘Without much to show for it’ might work; I have my doubts about ‘I tried to shit but only farted’.
2. It’s probably just as well that I haven’t got time to read this: Pseudo-English: Studies on False Anglicisms in Europe, edited by Cristiano Furiassi, edited by Henrik Gottlieb
3. It was the Naked Bike Ride on Saturday, though I didn’t make it with my camers. On this occasion a tweet by Matthew Scott:
Naked tourists pissing on sacred site, causing earthquake: 3 days jail.
Harmless eccentric breaching ASBO: 30 mths jail.
#NakedRambler
Scott wrote an article in the Telegraph: Naked rambler: why have we spent £300,000 imprisoning this harmless eccentric?
An Asbo was deliberately imposed so that if Gough breached it, he could be imprisoned:
It can be an offence to cause a public nuisance and to “harm the morals of the public or their comfort, or obstruct the public in the enjoyment of their rights”. But as an earlier and more successful nudist, Vincent Bethell, showed in 2001, juries are reluctant to find that merely being naked in the street does anything of the sort.
Mr Gough could have been charged with the same offence but, as Hampshire prosecutors no doubt realised, that would have required them to persuade a jury that his nakedness had “harmed the morals of the public.” Since there was no evidence that it had done so – although some people objected to the sight of him wandering around the streets of Eastleigh – a jury would have been likely to acquit. They could have achieved and did secure a few convictions in the Magistrates’ Courts for minor public order offences, but these were too trivial in themselves to put him behind bars.
4. Gamsbart
This was a word that Obama’s interpreter had to contend with off the cuff last week.
Wikipedia says:
The Gamsbart (German pronunciation [‘gamsbɑːʁt], literally chamois beard, plural Gamsbärte) is a tuft of hair traditionally worn as a decoration on trachten-hats in the alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria.
Originally worn as a hunting trophy and made exclusively from hair from the chamois’ lower neck, Gamsbärte are today manufactured on a large scale from various animals’ hair and are commonly sold by specialized dealers and also at souvenir shops.
The Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on 7 June (article no longer online):
Die wirkliche Herausforderung steht der deutschen Übersetzerin, die Obama begleitet, aber noch bevor. Merkel führt ihn zu einigen Männern, auf deren Hüten eine Art Staubwedel in die Luft steht. Es gibt kein englisches Wort für Gamsbart, aber die Übersetzerin findet offenkundig eine brauchbare Umschreibung und deutet dazu auf ihren Rücken, was an der Stelle sein dürfte, wo sie erklärt, dass die Haare für den Bart vom Rücken der Gams stammen. Obama guckt interessiert und schließlich zufrieden, auch wenn man nicht sicher sein kann, wie er Michelle in Washington erklären wird, dass es in Deutschland Tiere gibt, denen ein Bart auf dem Rücken wächst.
Well, all she had to know was what it is, and she must have realized she was going to be faced with a raft of Bavariana.
(Thanks to Übersetzer-Blog)
1. Per Döhler’s indispensable guide to VAT for translators in Germany has been updated. Umsatzsteuerleitfaden at www.triacom.com – click on Mehr, Dokumente – first in the list. The Triacom website has been updated too.
2. uepo.de reports on the publication of Handbook of Terminology (John Benjamins), online and in print. I’m not sure what it costs and I haven’t got time to read it, but I am interested in the article by Janine Pimentel, who studied in Portugal and teachers in Brazil: ‘Using frame semantics to build a bilingual lexical resource on legal terminology‘. I haven’t got into this any further, but Janine Pimentel’s website has more information, including a link to a Portuguese-English database using semantic frameworks:
The JuriDiCo is a database that describes the legal terminology that can be found in a comparable corpus of judgments produced by the Supreme Court of Canada and by Supremo Tribunal de Justiça de Portugal. The database was elaborated according to the theoretical and methodological principles of FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010) and is also partly based on the methodology for compiling specialized dictionaries developed in DiCoInfo (L’Homme 2008). Some minor modifications were made in the DiCoInfo’s database, namely the insertion of a field called frames. For thetime being, JuriDiCo only includes specialized verbs, which were extracted by means of TermoStat (Drouin 2003) and subsequently validated. 200 English and Portuguese terms entries are currently available online as well as about 40 frames that group together not only equivalent terms but also semantically related terms within each language. JuriDiCo allows users to search terms, equivalent terms and frames.
Via the website of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and academia.edu, some of her publications can be accessed (log in with Facebook or Google). I don’t know my linguistics so I haven’t read about semantic frames before, but in Juridico they seem to be contexts. If you read the articles you will know more than I do.
3. Carl Gardner has published, for Kindle, What a Fix-Up!. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (the ‘-term’ in the Act seems not to be capitaliized). As he writes, ‘the prospect of a hung Parliament after the 2015 general election has dramatically raised the Act’s profile’.
Listening to Carl Gardner and other lawyers on podcasts was one of the great innovations of internet communication for me – to hear serious yet chatty discussions of UK law and politics. There are links to many Without Prejudice podcasts on Carl Gardner’s blog Head of Legal.
4. Unreliable Evidence – BBC radio programmes with Clive Anderson.
When I started this blog twelve years ago, I think it was the only legal translation blog around. Now they are thick on the ground.
Blogging legal translators or very similar:
I’m sure I’ve missed some out, indeed possibly some in other languages.
Ignorantia haud excusat.
Stuart Bugg is a Barrister & Solicitor (New Zealand), Solicitor (England & Wales), and admitted to Regional Court of Nuremberg (Landgericht Nürnberg). I have had the pleasure of attending his seminar on translating contracts, but I am sorry to say I did not realize he had a blog, which started in January 2014. So here it is:
I’ve now added it to my RSS feeds. I’m calling it a legal translation blog because it relates to English and German law and translation too.