I think they want us to stop running over cyclists here.

I don’t suppose we’ll have to wait long for Susan Boyle. They just have to cut some footage of listeners with Telekom devices.

This was a week ago, on Easter Sunday, when I got a closer shot of a muskrat (Bisamratte) while hiding behind a tree.

If this had been Detroit, it would have been very appropriate, as there is a rumour that Catholics there were permitted to classify the muskrat as a fish and eat it on Fridays in Lent.

Blogwiese often reloads earlier entries. I must have missed this one: Dialekt ist Privatsache in Deutschland.

In Germany, people do often speak both a dialect and standard German (Hochdeutsch). But the dialect is regarded as a private matter – not the case in Switzerland. In Germany, dialect is spoken at home and with your friends, not in public. The teacher speaks standard German, and the pupils believe their dialect is inferior.

Linguee is a site that is collecting a bilingual corpus of texts on the internet.

The idea is that you enter a German word and the site returns pairs of sentences containing that word in German and English.

I looked for a recent problem, Evidenzfall. It wasn’t there (unsurprisingly – the site is new).

I then looked for Evidenz. IMO Evidenz is not always evidence, but can have to do with things being plain or manifest. I translated Evidenzfall as case of a plainly void administrative act, and I came to this conclusion mainly with the help of German online definitions and in particular a textbook on German administrative law.

The hits I get with Linguee almost exclusively have Evidenz, bold, in the German half and evidence, bold, in the English half. ‘More results…’ produced more examples, without bold. I didn’t see any examples from administrative law.

One result was given three stars out of three (most had two):

Die Evidenz, dass auch Pflanzen Stammzellen haben müssen
The evidence that plants also have stem cells

Note, incidentally, that the translation omitted ‘müssen’ – probably OK here. But one obviously can’t rely on translations being good – when one searches the Web, it is more in a spirit of hope.

Certainly some of the translations were not good. ‘We will keep your application in evidence’? It rather looks to me as if the program is designed to look for ‘evidence’ when I enter ‘Evidenz’.

I’m oversimplifying it, because this problem arises only when I enter Evidenz. If I enter evidence, I get a very useful page giving a variety of equivalents, from which I can choose. And it’s not just English words this happens with – the same happens with Aufgabe. So perhaps my Evidenz is too obscure.

I do think, however, that the examples given have been collected and sorted in advance. This gives the service of LEO or dict.cc. It interposes a brain of some sort between me and the corpus, without the useful forum discussions found on other sites.

What impressions do other people have?

(Via Übersetzer-Logbuch – originally via Twitter)

The End
When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five, I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.

From Now We Are Six, by A.A. Milne

I suppose it isn’t the end. Although when I started there were scarcely any translation weblogs, and now there must be hundreds. Most of them with a cheerful positive attitude to life. I’m still working on that.