Ostblog reports that in 2003 the German public purse made record profits of EUR 262 m from the sale and lease of land that was originally People’s Property in the German Democratic Republic. This comes from an article at NDR online (in German).

The land was nationalized after expropriations in the years 1945 to 1949, before the GDR existed. I think such expropriations were not reversed by the Federal Republic because they were not done by the GDR. After the end of the GDR they were transferred to the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency), and since 1992 the BVVG (Bodenverwertungs- und -verwaltungs GmbH) has been responsible – it’s a private company appointed by the government to privatize former People’s Property (fields and meadows, woods, buildings and waters) in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. The process is expected to last well into the next decade.

The east German farmers are still recovering from the 2002 floods and the hot summer of 2003, so they preferred to continue leasing, and less land was sold than expected.

The BVVG is now changing the rules, so that you cannot prolong a lease unless you have already applied. This will free land to be auctioned to the highest bidder; this will affect about 6000 tenant farmers.

I don’t know if anyone else is interested in this, but I’ve translated some stuff about it and it’s something we don’t think much about in the west. And Ostblog is a wonderful source (German). See also the marvellous things we liked abroad, in Czechoslovakia, in 1967: the device to separate egg yolk from white, the wall-mounted kitchen scales, the net bag that holds ten pounds of potatoes or several bottles of beer, the chopping board with a protective plastic surround.

IPKAT (aka ‘the’ IPKAT) occasionally posts an entry called Translation Watch. This is directed at the slowness of the European Court of Justice in providing translations, especially of the opinions of Advocates General. I’ll quote one in full (published on January 8th).

bq. The IPKat notes that the ECJ has delivered its judgment in the Rolex case concerning Council Regulation (EC) No 3295/94 of 22 December 1994 laying down measures concerning the entry into the Community and the export and re-export from the Community of goods infringing certain intellectual property rights and criminal penalties thereunder, even though the Advocate General’s decision hasn’t been translated into English yet. More on this case from the IPKat anon.

Now, for the first time I think, there is a cry of joy, or in fact a purr, recording that the ECJ has reacted:

bq. On 6 January the IPKat announced the welcome if long-overdue arrival on the ECJ website of the Advocate General’s opinion in Koninklijke KPN Nederland NV v Benelux-Merkenbureau on the registrability of composite words (in that case POSTKANTOOR, the Dutch for “post office”). The IPKat is now purring with gratitude at Mary Leger, of the ECJ, who has emailed us with the good news that the Court’s full judgment will be handed down on Thursday 12 February, more than two years after the date of the Advocate General’s Opinion. Thank you, Mary.

I believe the Advocates General’s (I had to think about that apostrophe) opinions are given to freelance translators and the judgments done in-house, but I’m not sure. Why a particular translation is delayed in a particular case I can’t say. It’s no doubt easier to tolerate if you can read French, I mean legal French, or some other EU language, as well as English.

In Lenz Blog (the English version), Friedrich Lenz describes a method of displaying an EU directive on EUR-Lex and from there obtaining a list of implementing legislation of the member states. The method is described in German in a comment on Lenz’ German blog.
For an example in German, see here.

Isabella Massardo in Taccuino di Traduzione reports on a story in today’s Guardian.
The Foreign Office turned down a young Russian’s application for a 12-week course on English in Scotland, apparently on the grounds that she might not understand the language.

bq. Among the reasons for her rejection was one which said: “Given that you state you will need to resit your English exam in November, you cannot satisfactorily explain why you have chosen to attend an English course in Scotland rather than your other options of Oxford or Cambridge, where you should face less difficulty understanding a regional accent.”

Of course, it’s actually easier for foreign students to understand most Scottish accents than English ones, perhaps with the exception of Glaswegian. When a colleague and I took a group of German students to Britain many years ago, and the man in charge of the hostel near Edinburgh spoke Glaswegian, they thought he was joking.

The Foreign Office is now backpedalling. Apparently this reason is not one of those permitted by law in any case.

Similar to the German word of the year is the Lake Superior State University Banished Words List. The 2004 list contains items such as metrosexual, bling-bling, embedded journalist and captured alive.

Since last Monday, Jim Meddick’s comic strip Monty has been playing with the idea that U.S. home cartoonists are so expensive that Monty Comics has relocated its production overseas. This is reported in Lifechanges…Delayed. As Carter writes:

bq. The drawings have been changed to something vaguely Mesopotamian in style, while the dialogue is made to sound “foreign.” The grammar and word order, for the most part, are standard English, except for the use of irregular punctuation — a reversed inverted question mark (¿, but flipped on its axis) and an inverted exclamation point (¡) — and odd phrasings.

Here’s an example: