When I wrote about the Oberster Gerichtshof als Kartellgerichtshof, I forgot this list (not that it contains that particular term): from the Official Journal of the EU, a list of court names in the original language and English. The site is not free in the long run, so I don’t know if the list will remain accessible (I originally Googled it).

Austria
Bezirksgericht für Handelssachen District Commercial Court
Bundesvergabeamt Federal Procurement Office
Handelsgericht Commercial Court
Oberlandesgericht Higher Regional Court
Oberster Gerichtshof Supreme Court
Landesgericht Regional Court
Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Regional Civil Court
Tiroler Landesvergabeamt Procurement Office of the Land of Tyrol
Unabhängiger Verwaltungssenat Independent Administrative Senate
Verwaltungsgerichtshof Administrative Court

I really must stop writing about this topic – it’s getting boring.

I’ve written more than once about Austrian court names. I don’t feel obliged to do what the EU does, but I wanted to find out what they did with Kartellobergericht (one of the functions of the Oberster Gerichtshof).

So I did a site search at EUR-LEX:

site:europa.eu.int kartellobergericht

(Actually I used the Google toolbar for Firefox, which has an icon you can click on for a site search).

Here’s what I found on that site: Cartel Supreme Court, “Kartellobergericht”, Supreme Cartel Court, Supreme Restricted Practices Court, Superior Cartel Court.

The EU English style guide has lists of court names at the end, but probably drawn up before Austria joined.

An ordinary Google search for
Kartellobergericht
also throws up: Cartel Court of Appeals, Appellate Cartel Court.

Oh well. I was just wondering.

Translationfound is the occasional weblog of Gisela Strauss, a technical translator in Munich. I t describes itself as follows:

bq. Translation Found is a loosely typed bilingual – English-German language blog, discussing language, translation and localization-related topics. Native English Speakers abroad, translation professionals and business persons alike may find it a useful blog. Kind regards Gisela Strauss, Munich and Milan

She comments on a mistranslation of an expression used by Condoleezza Rice, ‘Thank you very much for having me here’:

bq. Eine der größten Hamburger Tageszeitungen, BILD, die sich sicherlich nur erstklassige Übersetzer leistet, beging folgenenden Fehler:
US-ENGLISCH: Thank you very much for having me here.
FALSCH: Danke dass ich hier sein darf.
Das klänge anbiedernd und unterwürfig im Deutschen.
Thank you very much for having me here, ist eine Höflichkeits –
f l o s k e l die nichts anderes meint als :Danke vielmals für die Einladung.

I do believe there may be a touch of irony in some of the entries.

These cheap bread shops let people use the bread slicing machine themselves:

And here are some German cushions after getting the karate chop. Even 40-odd years of the German Democratic Republic didn’t remove this habit. The end result is called the Kissenknick.

Blair entschuldigt sich bei zwei Familien.

The Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, wrongly imprisoned in the 1970s, received an apology from Tony Blair completely exonerating them yesterday, because it’s one thing being not guilty and another being innocent.

The Independent reports, and gives a summary of events and also a comparison of the situation when the arrests were made and anti-terrorism legislation was in place and the situation now, in view of the moves for new anti-terrorism law and the discussion about the British inmates of Guantanamo Bay.

Eleven people spent up to 15 years behind bars before being cleared while one man, Guiseppe Conlon, died in prison. They were jailed in relation to the 1974 Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings in which the IRA killed seven people.

Mr Blair’s apology was delivered in a TV statement in his office in the House of Commons and then in private to those wronged by the British legal system. He said: “I’m very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and such an injustice. That’s why I’m making this apology today – they deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated.” He then shook them by the hands.

The two cases were particularly well-known. Gerry Conlon and Annie Maguire both wrote books, and there was the film In the Name of the Father, which unfortunately did not aim to be factual (the scene where all the defendants in both cases were crammed into the dock was also unintentionally funny). But Daniel Day-Lewis was good. Roger Ebert did justice to this one:

Convinced by the film’s documentary detail, we assume all these facts are based on truth, and it is a little surprising to discover that the sadistic British policeman is a composite of several officers, that Conlon and his father were never in the same cell – and that the crucial character of Joe McAndrew (Don Baker), an IRA man who confesses to the Guildford bombings, is a fictional invention. All the same, the main thrust of the story is truthful: British courts found that Conlon and the others were jailed unjustly.

Philip Lenssen, a German contributor to the group blog Google Blogoscoped, has used Google to collect a list of 200 German towns and what words are used as a carnival salute (Alaaf or Helau) and for carnival (Fasching or Karneval – the word Fastnacht, Fasnet etc. isn’t even considered).

bq. I can’t say this strikes me as very authoritative. Incidentally, I heard a Fasching event about ten days ago where the cry was ‘Fürth Alaaf – Franken Helau’.
The Googleshare algorithm here is simple enough. Let’s take Hamburg as example. If the page-count for the Google result for Hamburg Helau is higher than for Hamburg Alaaf, it will assume “Helau” is indeed the way to salute during carnival in Hamburg. As most automated data mining with Google, this algorithm isn’t failsafe; in particular, it disregards the fact some of the cities do not have carnival in he first place.

Duden says Alaaf is from Cologne and from ‘alles ab’ meaning ‘alles (andere) weg’ (Kluge’s etymological dictionary agrees, saying it is a call for more space), and Helau means Hurrah.

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)