Heute geht es nicht um Schäuble.
In MI5 alert on China’s cyberspace spy threat, the Times reports on 120 countries targeting other countries’ governments and economic systems through the Internet:
The Government has openly accused China of carrying out state-sponsored espionage against vital parts of Britain’s economy, including the computer systems of big banks and financial services firms.
A comment says:
Why bother,we will send them the discs.
Peter, Manchester, UK
On 4 October, the London Review of Books published an article by Adam Phillips on the new Penguin translation of Freud. It can be purchased online here (showing first few lines).
It may be as well that I haven’t read it, though, judging from this letter to the LRB in response:
After Strachey
From Michael Robertson
As a professional German-English translator, I have found myself increasingly perplexed each time I read Adam Phillips’s essay on the new Penguin translation of Freud (LRB, 4 October).
As a consultant for Penguin, he suggested to the publishers that ‘each of the books should be translated by a different person, and that there should be no consensus about technical terms.’ He suggested that the ‘general editor should not read German,’ and that there should be ‘as little scholarly apparatus as possible . . . and no indexes, given what indexes imply about a book and its genre’.
It says a great deal about the current management at Penguin that following these suggestions, they appointed Phillips himself as the general editor. If he was not supposed to know any German and the individual translators were forbidden to co-ordinate terminology, why was there any need for the translators themselves to know German? The project would have been completed much more quickly and less expensively by employing a troupe of Chinese monkeys with keyboards. So much more open to unexpected combinations and possibilities, so unconstricted and free, so life-affirming. And those terrible anal-retentive indexes, which might enable readers to locate information they were looking for: so 20th-century, so superego.
Michael Robertson
Augsburg, Germany
More on Michael Robertson here
Some vendors of Denglish at the Christmas market:
On the side of the van it says Konferenztechnik. Curiously, they do have the term event technology on their website, but they vary it in strange ways.
Company law forum (LexisNexis)
via Delia Venables
Gabi Zöttl gives a number of useful links on her translation weblog (German), including one to an article in the Münchner Merkur on the increasingly unprofitable business of interpreting for the police.
Using the example of Hans-Joachim Lanksch, the article describes the stresses of the job (working at night, in a noisy environment, interpreting the words of people who are themselves stressed and sometimes threatening) and the difficulties, and finally, of course, the payment.
Mit all diesen Schwierigkeiten hätte der Münchner Dolmetscher Hans-Joachim Lanksch leben können. Ausschlaggebend für seinen Rückzug aus der Branche war die Bezahlung. “Hundsmiserabel schlecht“ bezahle die Münchner Polizei. “Die treffen eigene Vereinbarungen und nehmen immer die Billigsten.“ Während der gesetzlich geregelte Stundensatz eines Dolmetschers bei 55 Euro liegt, bezahle die Polizei 25 Euro und weniger. “Die Qualität des Dolmetschens leidet darunter erheblich.“ Die Münchner Polizei weist die Vorwürfe zurück. “Die Dolmetscher werden zunächst nach ihrer Qualifikation ausgesucht, aber haushalterische Aspekte müssen natürlich mit berücksichtigt werden“, so Dieter Gröbner, Sprecher der Münchner Polizei. Sechs fest angestellte Dolmetscher hat das Polizeipräsidium München, bei Bedarf werden zusätzliche Freie hinzugezogen. “Die einzelnen Dolmetscher bieten ihre Dienste und den Preis, den sie verlangen, dann selbst bei uns an.“
The talk at the BDÜ Stammtisch in Nuremberg also brings stories of bad pay, or of police authorities that request interpreters to enter into contracts to be paid 25 or 30 euros an hour, with the result that qualified and experienced interpreters have a choice between giving up police work or underselling themselves and at the same time being regarded as unprofessional by other interpreters.
Meanwhile, in England and Wales (or the whole of the UK?), I gather that the Home Office has decided to outsource almost all government translation work to two private agencies.
