Craig Morris, of Petite Planète Translations (see earlier entry), has started a new weblog which is going to have something about translation in it: Always Greener. Notes from an American on the other side (the expression being ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’).

I’m looking forward to reading more.

Pending more productive times, here are some pictures for Easter:

Zonebattler beat me to this (see Aufgeblasener Wicht), but his was on Aufsessplatz in Nuremberg (when I saw that two years ago, it was too dark). This is in Erlangen.

Traum und Wirklichkeit – Sparkasse building in the background, Central-Garage (Bavaria’s oldest multistorey car park) in the foreground:

Warm weather in the Stadtpark:

Dangerous company:

A good time to photograph blossom:

I gather from CharonQC and Blawg Review that April 6 is Tartan Day in North America and is celebrated by Canadians and Americans of Scottish heritage. Craig Williams (also of Welsh ancestry) of May it Please the Court is going to feature this in his blawg review. At the time of writing this, it is only just April 6 in the USA, so we have to wait.

Some of those of us of Scottish descent in the UK actually believe that the idea of clan tartans was a Victorian invention. But obviously a well-advertised one.

Tartan Day was conceived in Canada in about 1986 and has been celebrated in the USA since 1998, so obviously after my time.

It is even said that Craig Williams will be wearing a ‘tartan kilt’. Is that redundant? Possibly not, in the days of the Utilikilt (there is also the Instakilt Kilt Beach Towel, but that is tartan).

Fox News reports that an Iraqi translator (interpreter?) has been denied a visa to live in the USA because he was involved in attempting to overthrow a government, i.e. that of Saddam Hussein. He saved the lives of a number of American soldiers. In particular, he stole Uday Hussein’s car, which is being defined as a (non-political) felony barring his admission.

Jasim, whose name is being withheld for his safety, has received strong support from the U.S. military, and the Department of Homeland Security approved his application for a visa. But the State Department has denied Jasim a visa because he was arrested in 1996 for actions against the Saddam dictatorship.

There may be more to this murky story: ‘Jasim’ is regarded as a nuisance because he has spoken up against poor treatment of Iraqi translators. See Fox News for (a lot) more details, including a PDF file of letters recommending he be given a visa.

(Thanks to Derek at flefo.org)

Word Spy reports on the use of the word kettle to describe police surrounding demonstrators:

kettle
v. To maneuver protesters into a small area using a cordon of police personnel and vehicles. —n.
—kettling pp.

Here’s an example from the Guardian on March 30:

But it wasn’t really their natty dress-sense or their flags that made them stand out so distinctively from the rest of the march. It was the very special policing tactics that were focused on them: the anarchists, the police seemed to feel, were such an imminent danger to society that they needed to be ‘kettled’ — in other words, to have three police vans crawling along blocking their left-hand side, and a tight line of police one behind another on their right-hand-side, to make sure there was no possibility of break-out.

The word einkesseln is more familiar in German. Spiegel Online, under a heading Einkesselung bei Anti-Rechts-Demo:

Am frühen Nachmittag beginnen die Einsatzkräfte, “Schließungen” durchzuführen – also große Gruppen zu umzingeln. Gleich drei solcher Kessel richten die Einsatzkräfte ein. Damit habe man circa 500 gewalttätige Störer wegen Landfriedensbruch festsetzen wollen, so die Kölner Einsatzleitung. Unter den Eingeschlossenen befinden sich neben zahlreichen Linksautonomen auch drei Kinder und 72 Jugendliche.

(These demonstrators were later taken to Brühl and put into open cages, but that’s a different procedure).

Other words mentioned by Word Spy are globophobe, pickade and summit-hop.

This is a warning in case any other readers of Vibeke Lind’s Knitting in the Nordic Tradition are passing by. This is a Danish book that has been translated into English by Annette Allen Jensen and of which I managed to secure a second-hand copy.

It has a lot of useful material, and it was probably my fault that I was misled by this diagram and photo – I thought they referred to the same thing:

The one on the left:

I did think 15 centimetres was too long, but I didn’t realize till after I’d finished that the cuff is supposed to be turned up twice. I was relying on the photo, in which you can see the black ribbing at the bottom and the black edge at the top of the cuff. (My casting off is a bit dodgy too).

Ah well. Anyone with a long small head need one of these?

I had been practising knitting with one colour held the English way and the other the Continental way, just in case I ever get round to a jacket.