Boing Boing gives a link to a site with pictures of odd office equipment – a good opportunity to present a photo of my nose pencil sharpener.

Novalis is the subject of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel The Blue Flower. That novel, which is on my list of ‘must read again’, has a curious way of placing the reader in 18th-century Germany by rendering German speech and writing in a rather literal way, a kind of translatorese: characters are called ‘the Bernhard’, ‘the Mandelsloh’, ‘Söphgen’.

‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’
Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.
‘You are beautiful, gracious Fräulein,’ said Fritz.
…
Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedrime as a sedative, if his mind was too active – only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.

languagehat reported recently that Jeremy Osner of READIN is inviting readers to help produce a translation of Hymnen an die Nacht. He presents George MacDonald’s translation, which he finds unsatisfactory, opposite the German and a working version of his own translation in between.

This is great fun, and would be even more so if one actually wanted to translate Hymnen an die Nacht into English.

When I was searching for the last entry, I discovered a Fürth pedestrian zone webcam I didn’t know. It belongs to the Hirsch Apotheke and is practically on my corner. At the time of writing you can still see both the old and new rubbish bins beside each other. You can see the pretzel kiosk and Wurstbude, and the ticket machine that used to be a nice shade of green. Sometimes a couple of cats used to walk from one window on the roof of the building with New York on the ground floor, but maybe that no longer happens. Also the Rathaus in the distance, of course. And you don’t have to refresh the page to update the camera every 60 seconds.

Here’s another reference to the same webcam, on a page that leads to others. It was entered there on September 15.

Here are two shots of the webcam which I sneaked out and took.

Anfang Juli erschienen in der erneuerten Fürther Fußgängerzone bronzefarbene Abfalleimer, Baumumrandungen und Sitzgelegenheiten. Ich berichtete über die Bronzierung des Fahrscheinautomats und die Begrünung der Abfalleimer durch Hundeurineinwirkung.

Heute sieht man neben den bronzenen Abfalleimern wieder die alten. Die neuen “kommen weg” (Zitat Müllabfuhr). Man beachte auch den Baum, dessen Metallumrandung angefahren und nicht ersetzt wurde, jetzt mit Holzumrandung.

Hot off the press: the new bronze rubbish bins will be disappearing (tomorrow, I think).

Danilo Nogueira beschreibt ein enttäuschendes englisch-brasilianisches Rechtswörterbuch und einen erfolgreichen Plagiatsprozess gegen einen Nachfolger.

In Hey, counsel, you’ve plagiarized my book! in the latest Translation Journal, Danilo Nogueira summarizes a case of dictionary plagiarism and how it was proved. Surprise, surprise – people in Brazil too buy dictionaries by price rather than quality.

I have never put much stock in Noronha’s. I do not even think it deserves to be called a dictionary. It is just one of those rough-and-ready bilingual wordlists loosely put together by the staff in offices where they have to cope with a foreign language. People just go and throw in everything that comes to their minds on the quod abundat non nocet principle, so dear to Brazilian lawyers. Noronha’s book provides no usage notes, no examples, no collocations, no explanations. Nothing but a term, a hyphen and one or more translations. … It also tells you

* intoxication = intoxicação.

and fails to mention that intoxication translates both as intoxicação (what happens when you eat bad fish) and embriaguez (what happens when you have just had a couple beers with the guys) and nobody ever gets arrested for driving while intoxicado, but driving while embriagado may get you in trouble with the law. In other ways, it does not give you the translations most likely to appear in legal contexts.

There is to be an appeal, apparently. I was surprised the case even went to court, but it’s often claimed you can’t plagiarize the content of dictionaries.

At Christ Church, Spitalfields:

Round the corner from the church:

Smokers, driven out of doors since July 1st, outside Liverpool Street Station; Children of the Kindertransport sculpture by Frank Meisler: