I have a link to the British National Corpus in my sidebar. But that is for a simple search. I gather from separated by a common language that Mark Davies has an interface which can be used to compare the BNC and COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English at Brigham Young University. I will add that to the sidebar soon. Here’s a quote from Lynne today showing how it can be used – she was comparing the use of prepositions with ‘protest’ in BE and AmE (sorry, the table hasn’t come out properly):

I used (as I usually do these days) Mark Davies’ wonderful interface for the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and searched for in protest with six prepositions: at, against, of, over, to, and about. The last two only occurred at tiny rates in both corpora, so I haven’t included them below: These are the results, expressed as percentages within each dialect:

BrE AmE
at 70 3
against 24 34
of <1 42 over 7 18

A colleague today received some translations as reference material and was surprised to see they capitalized ‘claimant’ and ‘defendant’. Is this correct? I don’t do it myself, but I thought it was unnecessary rather than wrong.

It is definitely common in translations into English done in Germany. Is it more American?

In the BlueBook and Ritter’s Style Guide I found information about capitalization / upper case, but not this point. But Googling a combination of words such as “the defendant” “seeks an order” did get some American and UK ghits that looked correct. “The claimant” will narrow it down to the UK more or less (even in inverted commas, I don’t think Google is case-sensitive). I suspect, therefore, that it has at least become acceptable.

Or has anyone any evidence to add here?

Incidentally, last week I learnt the term camel case, which refers to words like WordPerfect that suddenly have a capital letter, like a hump, in the middle. The New York Times even had a rant against it in November.

LATER NOTE: Adrian says that all statements of case (pleadings) in England and Wales always capitalize the parties (by capitalize I mean initial capital – I don’t think ALL CAPITALS is good style). He recommends the Bar Manual on Drafting. Despite heavy recommendation I refuse to buy it without taking a look!

This is off topic, but it made good soup. I used a recipe from a Nestles site, I think, where the chicken is simmered in salty water for two hours, some vegetables (later discarded, so I stuck to things with flavour like onions, celeriac and parsley root) join it after one hour, and after that there was a lot of meat that wasn’t too shredded up (unlike my earlier attempt with a maize-fed chicken) and I added some shredded veg for ten minutes.

This is the cross-reference, by the way (in German).

This snow isn’t actually melting. It may have been last Saturday.

Of course, it seems a bit tasteless to post this, in view of the heavy snow in places like Barcelona, which is covered by a white blob on the weather maps.

Last Sunday:

I added two translation weblogs to my blogroll. I actually follow more in Google Reader. And it’s time I weeded some dead ones out.

The first new one is Patenttranslator’s Blog, by Steve Vitek (of FLEFO on CompuServe in the old days). Steve is originally from Czechoslovakia, as it then was, spent some time in Japan but has long been in the USA, for a long time in California and now in Virginia.

The second blog is MA Translation Studies News, which calls itself ‘A blog for students and graduates of the MA Translation Studies at the University of Portsmouth’. It looks interesting. I liked the entry on a dispute about how Michael Hofmann translated a Gottfried Benn poem.

Linguatools has context dictionaries between German and several other languages. I tried this, and Linguee, and MyMemory, with my word of the day, Gestaltungsspielraum, and they were all more useful than they used to be. But look at the sources! The big advantage of Linguee is giving precise URLs, and it now does it immediately beside the quote. MyMemory has only europa.eu, which I suppose is the DGT CAT database that anyone can download, and Anonymous! And Linguatools has only vague terms like Parlamentsdebatte – presumably another of those widely available databases – and in one instance Zeitungskommentar.

Here is a curious feature of Linguatools: it gives me synonyms for the source term, not the target term – actually, this could be quite useful:

Gestaltungsspielraum : freedom
wird noch übersetzt mit: Freiheit, Freiraum, Ungebundenheit, Ungezwungenheit
Gestaltungsspielraum : leeway
wird noch übersetzt mit: Abdrift, Abtrift, Rückstand, Spielraum
Gestaltungsspielraum : sphere of influence
wird noch übersetzt mit: Interessensphäre, Machtbereich