Taking the underground to Nuremberg airport (I had to rebook to England three times), I was surprised to hear the voice saying ‘Next train to Airport’ – that is, the tube station Flughafen is translated into English. At the station itself, both versions appear on the wall.

Now here is the Hamburg Railway system with all the station names in English:

HVV Railway System Map

(via Christiane Bergfeld’s weblog Übersetzen und Literatur, doch nicht nur)

I remember when I studied German in London that we translated some of the London underground names into German. A fuller version is available at Vienna University:

London Underground map in German

Heathrow comes out as Heidenreihe, Hounslow as Hundslangsam and Ealing Common as Gemeinsames Aalen.

By Horst Prillinger

On the Omniglot blog, today’s problem is how to translate:

Recht haben und Recht bekommen sind zwei verschiedene Dinge (ist/sind zweierlei)

It means: Being in the right and getting justice are two different things.

It isn’t very easy to translate it elegantly. Lukas seems to be doing best so far (5 entries at time of posting).

I am thinking of The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki. I can’t swear it was recommended to me, but I remember a friend who lived in Japan mentioning it. I have read it at least twice and could imagine reading it again. I might not have found it if it hadn’t been mentioned.

I am now in the UK, after Lufthansa eventually booked me onto Air Berlin. A young woman architect disappeared in Bristol on December 17th and it sounds as if her body has now been found. She had been out with colleagues, then bought a pizza at Tesco on the way home, but no trace of the pizza was found and her keys and purse were inside her flat, her boyfriend found when he arrived back from a weekend visiting his family.

In Wortfeld, Alexander Svensson compares the website of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary with that of the Lower Saxony police.

Zunächst einmal gibt es dafür eine Webadresse, die zwar immer noch zu lang ist, aber vielleicht gerade noch auf Fernsehbildschirme passt: http://avonandsomerset.police.uk/jo ist ein Redirect zur eigentlichen Seite. Dort gibt es (1) eine Karte mit den Orten, an denen sich die Vermisste zuletzt aufgehalten hat, (2) ein Video mit einem Appell der Eltern, (3) einen Kasten mit Twitter-Einträgen zum Stichwort #helpfindjo, (4) Meldungen und Fotos — die Bilder enthalten alle die URL der Website — sowie (5) Social-Bookmarking-Buttons. Dazu gibt es ein Online-Kontaktformular für Hinweise.

There’s a URL for this search, redirecting to the police site, with a map, a video showing her parents appealing for information, tweets, reports and photos, and also social bookmarking buttons.

I’ve been racking my brains but can’t think of an example. In any case, from love to hate seems a bit too big a step. I can think of books that have lost their appeal. I once thought James Fenton‘s poems, such as The Memory of War, poems about Germany and Vietnam, very impressive, but the magic seems to have gone.

Local press in Nuremberg station bookshop. Many of these have mainly the same content.

An advert by the German lawyers’ society in Nuremberg Station:

Fürth Christmas tree This morning with real snow on it for once. To the left, the refurbished building that was the earliest department store in Bavaria. By the tree, the peculiar sculpture that has five sides, each showing the shape of a window in the street it faces, or at least that was the idea, but it was installed wrongly.