Some unfinished thoughts I ought to record somewhere:

Germany has sworn translators (as I call them – beeidigt, vereidigt – the terminology varies because the law is that of the Länder, not the federal government), but Britain doesn’t.

I sometimes read in a German translator’s English cv ‘In 19xx I was sworn in as a translator for the courts in North-Rhine-Westphalia’ or something like that. I would prefer ‘I was sworn as a translator’ or ‘I am a sworn translator’.

Is swear better than swear in?

Collins English Dictionary (my preferred one-volume one): swear in tr: to administer an oath to (a person) on his assuming office, entering the witness box to give evidence, etc.
Collins does not give this meaning for swear, only for swear in.

Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage: swear is also sometimes used as a shorthand form for swear in – e.g. ‘Swear the witness.’

Oxford English Dictionary: swear 11 a To admit to an office or function by administering a formal oath.
(earliest usage 1049, whereas the first usage of swear in is in Evelyn’s diary in 1700)

It seems swear is OK then.

Another thing I am wondering is why, if swear in can refer to an office, I think it’s better to talk of swearing in a witness for one trial than swearing in a translator for an unlimited number of future occasions.

Isabella links to a report on a service that will beam weblog feeds into deep space:

bq. “We are giving bloggers the opportunity to send a piece of their lives into space to potentially connect with extraterrestrials,” said Ted Murphy, president and CEO of the Florida-based firm MindComet.

bq. The free service, BloginSpace.com, will beam web feeds of blogs into deep space via a powerful satellite broadcast, Agence France-Presse reports.

Actually, I think quite a number of translation bloggers have been beaming their stuff into deep space recently. It certainly hasn’t reached me in Fürth.

Isabella also links to a Daily Telegraph piece by a novelist who discovered his Russian translator was imprisoned for attacking an Azerbaijani fruit and veg display with a samurai sword.

The ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan, who died on Wednesday, are to be sent into space at his request.

(BBC News)

President Bush has just nominated Judge John Roberts to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. The Supreme Court Nomination Blog finds, on analysing his decisions, that

bq. when one examines the very small number of cases in which Judge Roberts disagreed in whole or in part with one of his colleagues, no clear ideological pattern emerges.

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy)

The German Federal Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is on holiday, but he’s only gone to Hannover. Meanwhile, by Friday the Federal President has to announce whether or not he will permit the Bundestag to be dissolved, meaning there will be a general election on September 18.

Will it be possible to contact Mr Schröder?

Speaker: ‘Die mögliche Erreichbarkeit, zumindest fernmündlich, ist auf jeden Fall sichergestellt.’

Somehow I don’t think we’d put it quite like that.

‘We will certainly be able to get in touch with Mr Schröder, at least by phone’.

What do other people do when the customer wants the text changed but is wrong? I sometimes suggest a possible alternative that is also correct, but it makes me angry. Why do they want a translator if they know better themselves? I just did a short urgent job, and there was a question later, via an agency. This was followed up by the information that the (end) customer doesn’t like my translation of ‘entsprechend § 5 des Vertrages’ as ‘under § 5 of the agreement’. I said, if he doesn’t like ‘under’, which is correct, he is bound to love ‘pursuant to’, because all Germans love ‘pursuant to’. I took my frustration out later on a little motorbike that shouldn’t have been parked in our entrance when I locked it in. Someone will find it takes longer to escape the building than expected.

Another time I can’t forget and may have mentioned before was the woman who wouldn’t accept Cluj for Klausenburg. Of course, I now realize I could have written ‘Cluj (German name: Klausenburg)’. At the time it didn’t occur to me, and she said the American embassy had rejected the word the last time.

Of course sometimes one understands what the customer doesn’t like. But many customers don’t concede one any expertise and know they could have done the translation themselves if they’d had the time. Maybe I should simply tell this agency that it’s their problem to suggest a different word when what I did was correct.