Richard Schneider at Übersetzerportal links to an Afghan weblog, Afghan Warrior (Schneider article).

bq. Der 20-jährige Waheed arbeitet seit zwei Jahren als Dolmetscher für die US-Armee in der Hauptstadt Kabul.

Waheed says he’s the first Afghan blog, and he reports on events in Afghanistan rather than on interpreting and translation.

Richard Schneider liefert regelmäßige Nachrichten über Übersetzung und Dolmetschen, oft sind es Berichte, die man nirgends sonst findet.

Richard reports regularly in German on interpreting and translation news, and many of his stories are firsts.

Was meint ihr juristische Blogger hierzu: eine amerikanische Gesellschaft, www.kellysearch.com, bietet eine global business search. Dort erscheint mein Name, URL, Adresse und Telefonnummer. Offensichtlich wurde es aus meinem Impressum genommen.

Natürlich sollen Kunden mich finden können, wenn sie absolut wollen, und neue Kunden wollen auch sehen, dass eine Internetpräsenz da ist. Aber ich habe keiner solchen Veröffentlichung zugestimmt und suche nicht auf diesem Weg.

Vielleicht sind solche Erscheinungen nicht zu vermeiden? Ich werde um Löschung bitten, wenn es einen Sinn hat.

I found Paul Frank’s Language Jottings in the links at geotransblog.

It describes itself as follows:

bq. Here you’ll find occasional jottings on language, translation, and whatever strikes my fancy. I’m a Chinese-English translator for Sinorama magazine in Taipei, China Rights Forum in New York City, and a few other folks here and there. You can reach me at paulfrank@post.harvard.edu.

I seem to think the author was or is a member of LANTRA. He says El País is selling El Poema del mío Cid for one euro tomorrow. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The new edition of Gabe Bokor’s excellent Translation Journal is available. It has two good obituaries of Tom Snow, Flefoid and previous awarder of the premature TJ Snow memorial prizes, who used to add a long sig to his name:

bq. Well, it was originally

bq. Thomas J. “Any serious offer considered” Snow,
non-Failure, ATA Not Absolutely Incompetent Qualification, German-to English,
Sponsor, the internationally acclaimed and highly coveted Anticipatory Thomas J. Snow Memorial Prize for Significant Contribution to the Mistery,
Founder and Executive Director for Life, The Big Hug Club (Inernational, soon to be a major Walt Disney Enterprise),
CEO, Cheap-O Translations,
“when cost is the only considuration”,
formerly Quick and Dirty Translations,
formerly For Information Only Translations,
successors to Accurate and Reader Friendly Translations,
a subsidiary of Extreme Translations, Inc.

bq. I am really broke. I had too small a customer base and they were dying and retiring at an alarming rate, so I decided to represent myself in a more serious light.

There’s also an article by Betty Howell on her life in translation, in part on something I’ve heard her talk on:

bq. I developed my own technique, which consisted of not reading the text first but immediately doing a draft translation, leaving the dictionaries and the library research until there was a text in English ready to work with. Once there was something down on paper I could work with, it was time to make sure that my translation made sense and really expressed the message of the original. I found reading out loud to be an especially helpful way to make sure that the result was idiomatic English. These techniques I would later call my “patented approach” to translation. It has always aroused vigorous opposition from academics and strong support from students.

I don’t usually think of myself as an academic, but I obviously am here!

Apart from that, I have looked at ‘The Bottom Line’, the agony aunt column by Fire Ant and Worker Bee. I find this fascinating. I have it on the highest authority that the letters are genuine, but why do they all sound the same and have the same kind of nicknames (e.g. ‘Roped in Expert’, reply begins ‘Dear Roped’)? Still, I have seen missives like that of ‘Sherri, of the Grossly Talkative Clan’ elsewhere.

Worker Bee is rather on the serious side and Fire Ant rather on the trivial side, so they should meet in the middle. From this issue’s selection, we derive that we translators should be professional, should be sensitive to language, especially our target language, but should know our source language very well, and that we should have an SOP.

Also hat Kafka doch Felice Bauer geheiratet:

bq. Proces Kafka focuses on the real-life scenario of Kafka’s relationships with Felice Bauer (who later became his wife) and her best friend, Greta Bloch, interweaving sung letters, which reveal Kafka as self-centred, needy and vacillating, with scenes from the trial.

(‘Scenes from the trial’ is rather mystifying too)

From a review in The Observer of the opera Proces Kafka by Poul Ruders.