The Masked Translator has a great post about the seven deadly sins of translators.

Wrath
For translators this can take several strange forms. At first glance you may not think a freelance translator would find much to be wrathful at in their work. But many are the times Masked Translator has ranted about the horrendous rudeness of panicked agencies who call and wake our household up in the middle of the night trying to get us to do a job in a language combination we don’t even do. MT has also been known to rail in anger at the people who wrote the ******* documents in the first place. People with abysmal writing skills, terrible spelling, illegible handwriting, documents irritatingly peppered with slang or cryptic, in-house terms… MT has even been struck by conniptions of ire at the petty/stupid/irritating things people bothered to write down in the first place. Actually, come to think of it, that’s a lot of wrath. Translators should definitely work to get enough exercise and meditate or talk to other translators or do something to dissipate the wrath. We find blogging helpful…

I mean, not that I recognize myself there, of course…

David Barnish represented himself in the county court and won damages from the travel company Thomson, but his case was snapped up by the newspapers and ridiculed nonetheless.

He booked a holiday in a hotel where so many of the services were in German and for Germans that he couldn’t use them. There was only one non-German TV channel, and there was a children’s club his daughter couldn’t use because it was German.

The Telegraph report is fairly subdued. But then there’s the second Telegraph report, with obligatory photograph of a lounger with a towel on it.

There are plenty of British holidaymaker who can’t bear the thought of a certain nationality always being first to the sun loungers – but one got so angry about being surrounded by Germans on holiday he sued his tour company, and won.

The Sun goes to town, of course (Brit’s holiday from Helmut). Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine is silly – an unrelated photo captioned:

Urlauber lieben die griechische Ferieninsel Kos – wenn dort bloß nicht soviel Deutsch gesprochen würde.

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)

Aus für Windows Vista. Zumindest auf dem Papier. Das in Fürth ansässige Medienunternehmen Computec Media AG nimmt die Computerzeitschrift nach der Juli-Ausgabe, die am 18. Juni erscheint, vom Markt. Objektleiter Thilo Bayer begründet den Schritt auch damit, “dass Windows Vista als Betriebssystem die hohen Erwartungen bis heute nicht erfüllt hat.”

Fürth leading the way.

From textintern, via Volker Weber.

Musings from an overworked translator is by German-English translator Jill Sommer in Ohio, who is active in the ATA and spent six years in Bonn.

(Via Thoughts on Translation)

Fränkische Dasdatur (and others)

(Via downwärts)