I have already mentioned Lundmark’s Talking Law Dictionary, which has been very silent for some time now. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, a LexisNexis representative told me it will be on the market by December 2004 at the latest.

December 2004 is quite soon in publishing terms!

Meanwhile Langenscheidt has announced another for spring 2005. This is described as a ‘Medienpaket’:
Fachwörterbuch Kompakt & e-Fachwörterbuch 4.0 Recht
In Kooperation mit Alpmann-Schmidt
Von Stuart G. Bugg B.A., LL.B. (Hons), M. Jur (Dist) und RAin Heike Simon
EN>DE und DE>EN
Rund 11.000 Fachbegriffe und mehr als 22.000 Übersetzungen je Sprachrichtung, Paperback, mit CD-ROM
3-861172410, EUR 44,90

You can buy the paper dictionary separately, 3861172402, for EUR 29.90.

Aus dem Inhalt: juristische Grundtermini, Zivilrecht (Schwerpunkt), Vertragsrecht, Gesellschaftsrecht, Handelsrecht, Steuerrecht.

Yet another Franconian law dictionary! I’ve met one of the authors and spoken to the other, but knew nothing about this. Heike Simon was the co-author, with Gisela Funk-Baker, of the Beck introduction to German law and language.
Einführung in das deutsche Recht und die deutsche Rechtssprache

One thing I’d like to say is that the software divergency is driving me mad. I use Dietl-Lorenz on CD, which is compatible with the Acolada Collins.
I added the Alpmann-Brockhaus German law dictionary, but that runs on different software. It could be combined with Duden-Oxford, but I like that less.

I’m not convinced that Alpmann-Brockhaus is better than Creifelds, indeed, I think it is not as good. In the last instance, it’s the text that counts. But it does come with book and CD, and it uses nice two-colour printing. Alpmann Brockhaus Fachlexikon Recht

I haven’t got the latest Creifelds CD-ROM, which may be compatible with Dietl. I admit Beck’s software has tended to be clunky. At least you can do a full-text search, which is essential But I don’t want to have two separate dictionary interfaces. Here’s a link to the paper version: Creifelds Rechtswörterbuch

A word about law dictionaries: once I’ve got Dietl on the CD and Romain at hand, I don’t want to open much else. So my old von Beseler-Jacobs-Wüstefeld gets neglected. Köbler I wouldn’t use – it’s just a glossary. Pons Fachwörterbuch Recht is not a bilingual law dictionary, but an excellent learners’ dictionary for English usage, with a German index. It gets rotten write-ups at amazon.de by people who buy it as a cheap bilingual dictionary and are then disappointed it isn’t what it never meant to be (it’s unfortunate that the cover says Englisch-Deutsch and Deutsch-Englisch!).
PONS Fachwörterbuch, Recht

I have already praised the small Lister-Veth. I hope the Bugg-Simon dictionary is good, but almost more I hope for an expanded Lister-Veth, with the obviously very useful Frau Isolde Kübler in the background.
Taschenwörterbuch Recht : DE>EN

Taschenwörterbuch Recht :EN>DE
The cheapest of the lot is the tiny Krimphove, which has French too. It actually has definitions, and even a tiny little CD-ROM – I think I’ll water it and see if it grows. Rechtsbegriffe deutsch – englisch – französisch

This might be worth knitting/crocheting if the weather gets any colder. It might also make me look younger.

From Felieke van der Leest, Jewellery and Objects (note also the nifty tampon holders), via Cobwebs of Petty Inquisitiveness.

An article in the Boston Globe reports that Lernout & Hauspie’s auditors have agreed to make payments to investors ($115 million, but market capitalization was $10 billion). Thanks to Robin Bonthrone for this link.

bq. During the late 1990s and 2000, Lernout, a pioneer in systems that convert speech to text and computer commands and also turn digital text into synthesized speech, engaged in a host of schemes to inflate its revenues and bolster its soaring stock price, which hit $72.50 a share in March 2000. They included $100 million in bogus sales in South Korea and the creation of shell subsidiaries in Belgium and Asia to create paperwork for phony sales reports.

bq. Caught in the scandal was the former Dragon Systems Inc. of Newton, a speech recognition company that agreed to be bought for $460 million in June 2000 by L&H, just months before accounting problems erupted. Software vendor ScanSoft Inc. of Peabody agreed to buy most of Lernout’s remaining assets for $53.8 million in December 2001.

Via jurabilis and Handakte WebLAWg: there is a new weblog (in German) by the apparently fictitious German member of the Bundestag Jakob Maria Mierscheid. Here’s his Bundestag entry. Here we see, for example, that in 1967/1968 he published a four-part series on the route taken by a probably invented species of pigeon – a hooded and collared dove – and its flight characteristics.

There is a famous German invented creature called the Steinlaus (stone louse), which was invented by the German comedian whose stage name is Loriot and found its way into the Pschyrembel medical dictionary, but I had never heard of this ‘phantom of the Bundestag’ (there is a reference to a Steinlaus symposion in his bio linked above).

Mierscheid has apparently been around for quite a while and has his own page on the Bundestag website.

Steinlaus in the German Wikipedia.
Mierscheid in the German Wikipedia.
Bundestag page on Dr. Dietrich Sperling, a ‘friend’ of Mierscheid’s.
Mierscheid’s new blog, Geschichten aus dem Bundestag.

Recently someone posted a comment on one of my entries advertising not one URL, but 176 URLs. With Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist plugin for MT 2 (I believe there’s a variant for MT 3), it’s easy to remove. And I can block comments altogether if I go away. Every time I look at the Activity Log, I can see many attempts to post URLs that are already on my blacklist being warded off.

Then there are comments that are not spam. There is a school of blogging that won’t remove anything without a note saying something has been removed, and won’t alter a spelling without indicating by strikethrough what the original error was. I have deleted a few comments, but not always with a note. I remember once deleting a comment by an Austrian who felt the other comments had been getting at Austria and used a swearword or two. I don’t see why swearwords should be smeared all over my comments, unless we’re discussing them, of course.

Werner Patels, who has a German-English translation weblog and sometimes comments here, has stopped comments altogether, in part because some people who comment on his site are just advertising themselves:

bq. In case anyone has wondered: I have disabled the comment feature on this blog. There is simply too much spam flying around out there (not to mention some wise guys who think that their less-than-intelligent comments will get them those “15 minutes of fame”……).

Absolutely right – as the Germans say, ‘Wo er Recht hat, hat er Recht’. I think I’ll take this as my model and if I feel like it, I’ll remove a comment that is just posted for self-aggrandizement. Of course, if I myself post such comments on other people’s weblogs, I would not like to be removed.