I see that the MacMillan Open Dictionary thinks Zugzwang has entered the (non-chess) English language:

The Spanish debt-drama shows that Europe is in Zugzwang – a situation in chess when there is no useful move – every possible move will make the situation worse.

(Submitted from United Kingdom)

What do people think? I find this claim highly dubious. The writer, Laine Redpath Cole, also seems to suffer from the ‘the Germans have a word for it but we don’t’ disease.

Zugzwang is used in English as a chess word. It comes from German, and in German it’s used both as a chess word and in a figurative sense. But the example ‘submitted from United Kingdom’ above explains the word in attempting to introduce it.

It looks to me like the work of a translator from German who didn’t know what to do. And it comes up with reference to the EU.

Via Lisa John

The topic of the German Impressum has come up here frequently. And elsewhere.

Some claim that it’s a German phenomenon, but it’s actually an EU thing. However, it’s implemented differently in different countries.

At the IT-recht Blog, Max-Lion Keller has a post in German on the situation in the UK at Impressumpflicht in Großbritannien.

From this, it appears that the requirement mainly relates to online sellers, whereas the German requirement is a bit wider – for example, my weblog could be called commercial in Germany if it’s seen as promoting my translation business (a questionable matter).

Anyway, even the German implementation of the directive doesn’t actually use the word Impressum. I wonder who first used it? Hence an English translation as legal notice or maybe just contact is possible but can’t be said to be binding. The main idea is that the person responsible for the website should be contactable with a minimum of clicks.

I found an online discussion of the matter which did little to increase my understanding. My favourite bit was the commenter who had done a web search for contact + imprint and found only German sites!

LATER NOTE: I have seen the English website of a big German translation company using the term editorial information. That seems wrong too (their French version looks better). The word imprint is only used in connection with a printed publication, such as a book or a newspaper. However, the word imprint is not normally used as a heading there – it is just used by the printers when they refer to it: ‘Where shall we put the imprint?’ And in that context, imprint means editorial information. I imagine the old situation in Germany was that Impressum meant the same thing but was actually used as a heading in texts. But when it was taken over for websites, it meant something more like contact information as required by law.

Of course, in a website you need a headword to click on, but nevertheless no single word has been established in the English-speaking world.

Archbishop of Canterbury on German TV (ZDF news): ‘Not everyone appreciates how genuinely funny the Queen can be’.
ZDF interpreter: ‘Die Königin kann sehr lustig sein – das kommt nicht bei allen gut an’. I have the same problem.

It seems less than 60 years since we celebrated the Coronation at my junior school. That’s probably because it is only 59 years.

The Local reports:

…perhaps the highlight of Germany’s ambassadorial celebrations will be Sunday’s Rhine flotilla, where 800 “Anglophile Rhinelanders” will join Ambassador Simon McDonald aboard the MS Rheinfantasie as she sails towards Düsseldorf.

They and others aboard more boats will take cucumber sandwiches and tea as the Queen herself simultaneously enjoys a similar naval parade on the Thames.

Curses! I have no cucumber. And no bread either. I have got some home-made scotch quails’ eggs (perhaps that should be quails’ scotch eggs – I think they were French quails, and the sausage meat was Franconian). Highly recommended.

Here’s a display of stuff to make your Jubilee cakes. Not sure what the Dr. Oetker gelatine is doing there – not very patriotic, I say.

I expect British Corner Shop will be selling these off cheap soon.

Philip Oltermann, Keeping Up with the Germans. A History of Anglo-German Encounters, Faber and Faber 2012, ISBN 978 0 571 24017 3

Philip Oltermann was still at school when his parents decided to move to London and take him with them. He was not too keen at first, but after trying England for a year he decided to stay, instead of returning to Germany to do the Abitur.

There’s an interview with Philip Oltermann at Granta in which he reads from his memoir piece for Granta, describing his arrival in the UK with his parents at the age of 16 and the gradual failure of the British sash window and absence of the German mixer tap. (I myself have suffered many years of visits to hardware shops looking at mixer taps with a brother visiting from England). He also talks about how English became his first language and about writing on the book which has now appeared. He says that he felt he was too young to write the book as a ‘memoir’ and so it is a history of Anglo-German relations. Here are the chapter titles (capitalization sic):

Heinrich Heine Can’t Bear William Cobbett’s Swearing
Christopher Isherwood Listens to Marlene Dietrich
Theodor Adorno Doesn’t Do the Jitterbug with A.J. Ayer
Kurt Schwitters Reinvents Dada by Grasmere Lake
The Beetle Overtakes the Mini
Freddie Frinton Teaches the Germans to Laugh
Kevin Keegan Runs past Berti Vogts
Astrid Proll Wishes She Wasn’t on Joe Strummer’s T-shirt
There’s also a preface, an epilogue, and a useful index.

In fact I can see what Oltermann means: perhaps the occasional nuggets about how he gradually became accustomed to British schools and schoolboys and life in Britain in general are more the material for a Sunday paper than a full-length book, but they were the most interesting part and I found myself searching them out.

It was a problem for me that the book is written for English speakers who don’t know much about Germany. And yet, the most likely readers might be those who do know something about Germany. Thus, in the chapter on Freddie Frinton, one has to wade through a lot of basic description and narration in order to get to the personal bits. And actually, the style gets heavy and routine when filling in the historical background. And it is, after all, a heavy task to describe the Baader-Meinhof Group to an English-language readership. I wonder how much of this is the fault of an editor who thought the personal experiences ought to be shored up with some heavier stuff.

Trivia note: I see Oltermann gives Watership Down as evidence of the British love of boats and water (it was incorrectly translated into German as Unten am Fluss).

Katy Derbyshire beat me to reviewing the book in her blog love german books, but I wrote the above before reading the review. She nails down as over-generalization some of what Oltermann says about the sexual obsession of teenage English boys. Read Katy’s review for a deeper discussion. She says his book is being translated and adapted for Germany.

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports on a Supreme Court decision on the definition of interpreting. A 1978 federal Act (the Court Interpreters Act) permitted the winner of a case to have interpreting expenses paid for by the loser. Did this include translated documents? The court said no.

Justice Alito said translating documents doesn’t count as interpretation. His reasoning relied heavily on dictionaries current in 1978, most of which defined an interpreter as one who translates oral communication. The Oxford English Dictionary included a definition of an interpreter as one who translates “books or writings,” but described that definition as obsolete, Justice Alito wrote.

… While other appellate courts had found that “interpreter” includes translators of written material, Judge Posner ruled otherwise in 2006, prompting the Supreme Court review to resolve the conflict. Justice Alito cited Judge Posner’s comment that no one would refer to the translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey as an English-language “interpreter” of those works. Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan joined the majority.

I’m surprised these people understand the difference beween an interpreter and a translator, so often do we read of translators where interpreters are meant.

The WSJ post includes a link to a PDF file of the decision.

I’ve mentioned Autobahnkirchen before.

Here’s the one at Medenbach near Frankfurt am Main:

They had a useful brochure showing all the motorway churches in Germany. You can see them here – Medenbach is number 16. I’m sorry I missed the right turn-off for number 20, which I also passed – it’s more impressive than I realized, but also in the middle of the heavy goods vehicle services station, and you can scarcely move for lorries on Sundays and public holidays.