Richard Schneider links to a Youtube videoclip made by students of the SDI in Munich, advertising the school.
The SDI has a Berufsfachschule for secretaries, a Fachakademie (the staff there, unlike in Erlangen, coyly pronounce it F-A-K rather than as a word) for translators and interpreters, and since 2007 a private university for other courses – but the film explains it.
One of Denmark’s income earners is a weekend package to get married. It’s directed particularly at US soldiers marrying Germans.
Marriage in Denmark/Heiraten in Dänemark (a site in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese)
Heiraten-leicht-gemacht.de wants to help all bi-national couples who have difficulties to get married in Germany or in other European countries. We will show you the way to a fast, legal and unbureaucratic marriage.
Bi-national couples in Germany or in other European countries need to master endless bureaucratic hurdles to get married. The main problem here in Germany seems to be the ‘Ehefähigkeitszeugnis’ (a certificate which formally enables you to marry) from the home country of the non-German partner.
The latter is rather easy and legally possible to avoid when getting married in DENMARK. This is where our concept starts. We would like to show you an easy, unbureaucratic and cheap way to get married in Denmark.
Our special offer is the EXPRESS-WEDDING – you will get married in Denmark within 24 hours.
(Ehefähigkeitszeugnis: certificate of no impediment)
Nelly at Head over Heels is a German about to get married to an American in Germany (We should have went to Denmark and see also Die standesamtliche Hochzeit). She has collected tips and links for other Germans wanting to marry Americans:
This is getting ridiculous. I’ve been looking for a translator and interpreter for hours. You see, we can’t just get the papers translated by any translator and we can’t just hire any interpreter to come with us to the courthouse. I searched on the official associations website for interpreters and translators but ya know what? Most of them don’t translate birth certificates anymore, most of them don’t do the weddings anymore. It’s not good enough for them. They could lose a better job over it and we can’t afford them anyway. That is what I was told a dozens of times.
She’s unhappy at having to pay 100 euros for an interpreter for the registration and another 100 euros for the ceremony. The registration is said to take 30 minutes, but I don’t know what the interpreter’s travel time would be.
These are German translators translating long US birth certificates into German, which is more expensive than German into English (and with luck, the German can buy a multilingual birth certificate from the register office). I am not sure how they say no on the phone, but ‘I might lose a better job’ or ‘You can’t afford me’ don’t seem to be the way to go.
I think it’s true that if I charged the right price for a certified translation of a private document (the price that gives me an hourly rate I can live on), only one in ten potential private clients would not be outraged. I used to charge a lower price and half the clients were also outraged. On top of that, a lot of time can be spent when the customer brings the original documents and collects the translation, and of course one doesn’t charge for that time. It seems to compound the problem common with other customers too that they may think translation is typing in another language.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 12, Mr Micawber:
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
Fürther Nachrichten, and possibly the German translation of Dickens – this comment on the financial crisis puzzled me in the daily paper:
Jährliches Einkommen zwanzig Pfund, jährliche Ausgaben neunzehn Pfund und sechs Schillinge, Resultat Glück. Jährliches Einkommen zwanzig Pfund, jährliche Ausgaben zwanzig Pfund und sechs Schillinge, Resultat Elend.
No, Projekt Gutenberg has a better translation – presumably done before 1971 – the foreword is dated March 1909:
Jährliches Einkommen 20 Pfund. Jährliche Ausgabe 19 Pfund 19 Schilling 6 Pence. Fazit: Wohlstand. Jährliches Einkommen 20 Pfund. Jährliche Ausgabe 20 Pfund und 6 Pence. Fazit: Dürftigkeit.
In Neukunden-Magnet, unter der Überschrift Entspammung vor dem Wochenende, beschreibt Thomas Kilian, wie er zweimal von einem Übersetzer angeschrieben wurde und zitiert den heftigen E-Mail-Austausch dazu.
Die Kommentare sind auch lesenswert.
This German blog entry quotes enough emails in English to show a translator’s overreaction after the blog author objected to receiving advertising of the translator’s services twice.
Via Susanne Aldridge
On August 10, I posted an entry stating that I was suspicious about an article in the Times about EC translators. Today I read on the ITI website – members’ forum – that a member of the ITI Council had spoken to the DG in question and it appeared that either the Times reporter did not understand the discussion or the DG was misquoted. The DG decided not to issue a correction to the article because they did not think it was necessary.
I added a note to the entry, which I sometimes do, but I thought it was worth posting here too.
1. On Sarah Dillon’s weblog, there is an entry headed 5 Qs with Marc Prior:
Based in Germany, Marc Prior is a freelance translator with over 20 years’ professional translation experience under his belt. By day, he translates from German, Italian and Dutch into English, specialising in occupational health and safety and environmental engineering. By night, he’s a mentor on the very popular ITI Professional Support Group and is also active on support forums for a range of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools. Read on for Marc’s take on life without Windows and getting started as a translator.
This is an interesting interview, mainly about Linux and becoming a translator. Marc was in his mid-teens when he decided to become a translator, so he presumably went through the whole process consciously, which makes him well-suited as a mentor.
2. I know Marc from FLEFO on Compuserve, in the good old days. When I was talking to him recently, I was mentioning Brian Mossop’s book Revising and Editing for Translators. I read the first edition and found it very interesting. Part of it I implemented, and part I read away from the office so never got back to. Mossop discusses degrees of quality, since checking has to take place under constraints of time and money. He also quotes empirical studies – what do translators actually do when they revise? I wondered if the second edition was much different? It looks as if it has more on computer aids to checking.
I only just realized that Brian Mossop has a website, and there are some articles of his there too, for instance “Approximately 3037 ships”: Translating French approximation words, and Empirical studies of revision: what we know and need to know
.
3. Finally, I accidentally discovered a new translation theory e-journal (only available online), trans-kom. The first issue has an emphasis on theory:
In this thematic issue launching the e-journal trans-kom, the important question
of universality in translation will be reflected upon from a number of different theoretical
and empirical vantage points, and in particular from the perspective of “intervention” –
which may be taken to be the very opposite to universality. If universality constitutes
something like the “stable core” of translation, intervention is the way originals and
their translations vary or are deliberately made to vary, in the act of translation.
Further information in the first PDF:
trans-kom
trans-kom ist eine wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Translation und Fachkommunikation.
trans-kom veröffentlicht Forschungsergebnisse und wissenschaftliche Diskussionsbeiträge zu Themen
des Übersetzens und Dolmetschens, der Fachkommunikation, der Technikkommunikation, der Fachsprachen,
der Terminologie und verwandter Gebiete.
Beiträge können in deutscher, englischer, französischer oder spanischer Sprache eingereicht werden.
Sie müssen nach den Publikationsrichtlinien der Zeitschrift gestaltet sein. Diese Richtlinien können von
der trans-kom-Website heruntergeladen werden. Alle Beiträge werden vor der Veröffentlichung
anonym begutachtet.
trans-kom wird ausschließlich im Internet publiziert: http://www.trans-kom.eu