This van stands next door all day on Tuesdays. Not that I shall be giving it any custom tomorrow – I am making baked beans.

The Juristisches Internetprojekt Saarbrücken has a link of the week, and a year or two ago I used to look at these regularly. Now I have been back after a gap, and I have three useful links to pass on:

Portal des Fürstentums Liechtenstein – a Liechtenstein portal

Juriblogs – Le répertoire des blogs juridiques: a large annotated collection of French blog links – click on the second tab for a list

European Forum of Official Gazettes – click on the tab

Their latest link is to blawgs.

I also found another translation weblog, transubstantiation – can’t remember where.

Professor Salvatore Averna has kindly posted his legal translation bookmarks – Italian and English – on the legaltranslators group at yahoogroups. This looks like a blog with only one entry.

Professor Ulrich Noack’s blog Unternehmensrechtliche Notizen has frequent and interesting posts. Today he posts a link to an English PDF file, intended to introduce people who don’t read German to the current situation in German corporate law (87 pages).

Germany’s Corporate and Financial Law 2007: (Getting) Ready for Competition

ULRICH NOACK
Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf – Faculty of Law – Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
DIRK A. ZETZSCHE
Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf – Faculty of Law – Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC) May 2007

It looks excellent. I wouldn’t mind it in German, but I suspect from the footnotes that the whole thing is designed for English speakers (I wish I could switch off the EFL teacher in my head).

Hans Wollschläger, best known for translating Ulysses, but also Raymond Chandler, died this week, I see from the local rag. Wikipedia has him in German and English.

In connection with the G8 conference at Heiligendamm, the media have turned to the ever-fascinating topic of What is an interpreter?

The Süddeutsche Zeitung magazin today has a long article on the topic, fortunately available online.

And the German political TV channel Phoenix repeats a 30-minute film on interpreters called Die Flüsterer, both tonight at 21.45 and tomorrow at 18.45. This is well worth watching.

Both the film and the article comment on how odd it is that interpreters (at conferences like this) are treated as if they did not have an existence of their own.

Dolmetscher werden als Augenpaar im Raum nicht mitgerechnet und als reine Durchgangsstation der Wörter angesehen. »Wir sind das Schmieröl, das den Motor am Laufen hält«, sagte ein EU-Dolmetscher in einem Zeitungsinterview einmal; von dem langjährigen Russisch-Dolmetscher der US-Regierung Bill Hopkins stammt die Aussage: »Ich bin eine Leitung, sonst nichts.« Diese technischen Vergleiche haben ihren Grund. Denn Dolmetscher nehmen in den Gesprächen, die sie übersetzen, nicht die Position eines beteiligten Subjekts ein, sondern eher die eines reibungslos funktionierenden Mediums.

LATER NOTE: On the Übersetzerportal, Richard Schneider points out that there is a longer version available on DVD. In fact, I think this longer version was on TV two years ago – it included a trip to Africa.