This publication on the EU judicial systems is available only in French, either as a book or as a free PDF file.
It’s so wonderful that the EU lets us all read things in our own languages.
(Via ComparativeLawBlog)
The Independent has now published an obituary of Erwin Wickert (see my earlier entry).
Among other postware matters, itt records an encounter with Tariq Ali during a protect at the German Embassy in London in 1968.
three percent, a ‘Resource for international literature at the University of Rochester’ (links, weblog, translation program), has published a longlist of the best literary translations in 2007. Not much German, but Der Gehilfe by Robert Walser could be fun.
Here’s the analysis.
Twenty-one languages are represented on the list, with French (11 books or 22%) being the most, Spanish (10, 20%) in second, and German (4), Russian (4), and Japanese (3) rounding out the top five. Two titles from both Arabic and Hebrew made the list, and the following languages each had one title: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish. Overall, a pretty nice balance.
(Thanks to Trevor)
The British media are spreading lies about Germany yet again.
From today’s Guardian:
And a number of us will need to beware of what Germans call the Tantenverführer (aunt seducer) at this year’s office Christmas party, a young man of suspiciously good manners you suspect of devious motives…
Admittedly the article is by someone who wrote a whole book about odd words in foreign languages (‘Adam Jacot de Boinod is the author of Toujours Tingo published by Penguin’, another young man who may have devious motives). One wonders who gave him this one. Perhaps Mark McCrum?
Like Spinatwachtel (another rare word) in the LEO forum, I found Google suggested this was not known to German speakers:
googelt man nach “Tantenverführer” – Seiten auf Deutsch, erhält man bezeichnenderweise die Nachricht, daß es da nichts gäbe, ob man in einer anderen Sprache gucken möchte. Man klickt “ja”, und hey presto! 14 Hits, die fast alle mit diesem Buch zu tun haben.
Poodle-faker habe ich jetzt immer noch kein Gefühl für, welcher Slang ist das denn? Und kanntest du es schon, bevor du im Wörterbuch nachgeschaut hast? Ladies’ man hingegen habe ich schon gehört.
I’m not the first to comment on this. But I hope no-one gives me this for Christmas!
LATER NOTE: At Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer did a nice, if premature, piece on the author’s earlier book in 2005:
The multitudinous errors in such books should not be surprising; as Mark Liberman has reminded us, when a factoid about language is attractive enough, “the linguistic truth of the matter is beside the point.”
There was a discussion of the IAB Glossar on a translators’ mailing list recently. I was interested to know if anyone else found it useful. There came praise in the highest tones from an in-house ministry translator. I suspected the book was of most use to German civil servants who knew the topic and were working into English.
Here’s an entry on Freisetzung von Personal (click to enlarge):
It looks to me as if that definition is a definition of the German term, which happens to appear in English. The identical definition appears in the EN to DE half.
This sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. Where did they find their English definition? I’d have to research it. Dietl is completely different: in the DE to EN part, it will have a definition of Amtsgericht, for example, in both languages. And I know as the reader that that is Dietl’s definition summarizing the German situation. But the IAB approach is not good for people translating between two systems of law. If I don’t know which system is being referred to, how can I assess the quality of the suggestion?
Another thing I found odd was that the word Freistellung was not given in the garden leave sense, which is quite common nowadays, of preventing people from working out their notice.
I did post a query, but unfortunately it was misunderstood as a request for more information about gross misconduct:
Könntest Du mir ein Problem erklären, das ich mit diesen Glossaren habe: im EN>DE Teil (2004 Ausgabe) unter “gross misconduct” steht eine lange Definition auf Englisch: “gross misconduct represents a serious transgression of disciplinary rules, which is normally punished through dismissal without notice …”, ohne Quellangabe. Im DE>EN Teil steht unter grobes Fehlverhalten keine deutsche Definition, sondern genau die gleich englische Definition, wieder ohne Quellangabe. Unter “Verfehlung” steht zum dritten Mal genau die gleiche englische Definition, wieder ohne Quellangabe.
EN>DE steht “schwere, / grobe Verfehlung, grobes Fehlverhalten” als
Übersetzungen.Ich habe den Eindruck, dass hier eine Definition aus dem deutschen Arbeitsrecht steht, aber da wäre es leicht, einen Paragrafen zu nennen. Und die deutsche Fassung der Definition müsste auch zu finden sein. Das ist mit ein Grund, warum ich das Buch selten öffne, gerade weil auch ich mich mit feinen Unterschieden beschäftigen und auskennen muss. Ich habe den Eindruck, hier ist ein internes Werk, das für Deutsche Beamten gedacht ist, die deutsches ins Englische übersetzen und denen die deutschen Definitionen bekannt sind, aber die gerne Hilfe bei der englischen Formulierung hätten.
(For details of this book, see earlier entry – it’s apparently available as a CD too now)
In The Parking Ticket Awards: Crazy Councils, Meter Madness and Traffic Warden Hell, Barrie Segal (described by some as Britain’s leading expert on traffic tickets) collects odd parking tickets.
amazon.de link:
The Parking Ticket Awards: Crazy Councils, Meter Madness and Traffic Warden Hell
Examples in this article:
Robert McFarland’s horse was given a parking ticket under the heading, “Vehicle Description: Brown Horse”.
A motorist who received a ticket in an NCP car park, despite returning to her car an hour early, was told the attendant had fined her because he had “reasonable cause to think she would stay longer than the four hours for which she had paid”.
Here’s a picture of a British parking ticket (not my car):
Segal also runs a website helping people to fight parking tickets.
www.strafzettel.de looks considerably more strait-laced.
(via Legal Juice)
