In my experience, a shooting star (in English) means someone or something that shines brightly for a few minutes and is then extinguished and falls to earth (the translation Eintagsfliege was suggested on pt, see below).

Certainly in German it is a wholly positive metaphor, applied to something that goes up and up rather than down and down. This despite the fact that meteors fall in the same direction in Germany as they do in Britain, and that is not up.

But maybe other English speakers have met the positive use? That is the impression I got when I last investigated the matter on Google.

Matthias in the pt group at Yahoo reported today on an interview with Hilary Hahn on the HR2 radio station. I don’t know if she was speaking German or interpreters were used – probably the former – but she’s a native speaker of English.

HH is full of praise for her collaboration with the conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

ANDREAS BOMBA: [explaining] … the shooting star from Venezuela …
HAHN: [indignant] No, I hope not! I hope he isn’t a shooting star.
BOMBA: [continues with his questions without reaction]

No, not judges again, but the Richter scale. Following a small earthquake in Kent, John Wells points out that we usually pronounce Richter wrong:

Saturday’s minor earthquake in Kent meant that the newsreaders made several references to the Richter scale. As usual, they mostly pronounced it either [MM: in the German way or in an approximation of it]. But Charles Richter, the creator of the earthquale magnitude scale, was not from a German-speaking country, and the newsreaders’ otherwise admirable familiarity with German pronunciation is here misapplied. He was an American, born in Ohio. Being American, he naturally pronounced his name [MM: like Rictor, as in Victor] , and we should do the same …

I am not taking the time to reproduce the phonetic alphabet here, nor could I identify a permalink in John Wells’ weblog.

For German, Muret-Sanders and Collins both recommend the German pronunciation or the Rictor pronunciation.

das Erdbeben erreichte Stärke acht auf der Richter-Skala the earthquake registered eight on the Richter scale
© Langenscheidt KG, Berlin und München [Collins]

I see that today the Dutch Queen’s Day is being celebrated on the South Bank, so time to mention the presentation at the ITI conference on unclogged English last weekend.

Dr. Joy Burrough-Boenisch has spent many years editing scientific English written by native speakers of Dutch. Her book is Righting English that’s gone Dutch. Unclogged English is the name of her company.

This presentation was ideal for those of us living outside an English-speaking country. It all sounded very familiar: the unattributed alteration of one’s English in a non-grammatical direction before publication (the publishers I translate for don’t do that, but many do); the editors in Britain who have no framework to identify what has gone wrong because they don’t speak the foreign language that is causing interference (it was suggested that translators are the ideal people to train others to correct foreign English); the tendency of national ‘dialects’ of English to develop.

Joy mentioned two organizations that are attempting to train translators and others in mainland Europe in editing and negotiating: SENSE (Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors in the Netherlands) and MET (Mediterranean Editors and Translators).

The idea of this editing is not to turn everything into perfect British or U.S. English: some globalization is necessary.

I was particularly interested in considering tactics as to how to approach authors. It strikes me as easier to make a plan if I recognize that German authors are increasingly going to have my English reviewed by non-native speakers and that this is an international phenomenon, I will be more likely to devise some rules of etiquette and consider how to phrase comments to the author, rather than seguing into a rant about stupid foreigners who think they can write English. (Recent example: I was asked to change ‘in more detail’ into ‘more in detail’).

It will be worth following the activities of these organizations. Links on the sites.

One thing I’d like to know more about is typical differences in sentence structure between German and English. I change sentences around but am not conscious of a technique. Grammatical and vocabulary differences are much more obvious to me.

Is this just the new habit of celebrating St. George’s Day, or is it the BNF? (Similar questions would arise if Germany had a patron saint’s day)

Quorn in Sainsbury’s, Hornchurch:

Mysterious sign:

Local wildlife:

If you get home and find an urgent request to add this to your translation:

eine Himmelfahrt Mariä, die mit einer Gürtelspende an den Ungläubigen Thomas verbunden ist

see here:

Gürtelspende , * Thomas, der als einziger der * Apostel bei der Himmelfahrt Marias (* Dormitio Mariae, * Assumptio) nicht zugegen war, wollte an das Ereignis nicht glauben. (Thomas hatte schon an der * Himmelfahrt Christi gezweifelt.) Der Legende nach erschien Maria deshalb dem Zweifler und reichte ihm ihren Gürtel, als Beweis für die leibliche Aufnahme in den Himmel. Die Gürtelspende war im Barock ein beliebtes Motiv der christlichen Kunst.

you will be as glad as I am for Hall’s dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art and in particular Anabel Thomas’s Illustrated Dictionary of Narrative Painting:

Matteo di Giovanni also chose to show one apostle figure only at the side of the Virgin’s tomb. This is Thomas who doubted that the body of the Virgin had indeed been transported to heaven. According to apocryphal sources the Virgin had to let down her girdle so that Thomas would realise that both her soul and fully clothed body had ascended to her maker.