In an earlier entry, I mentioned the way novels are adapted for the American or British market.

There’s a reference to this in the interview with Neil Gaiman on Slashdot (Gaiman is British but lives in the USA). One of the questions is:

6) As a Brit living in the US I feel very aware of… –
….how you tailor your writing to which side of the Atlantic your intended audience is on. When I read Neverwhere it was the US edition and clearly contained language and explanations that would seem a little inappropriate to readers in the UK. Do you carry out your own ‘translations’ of your books? What differences do you see between American and British audiences to which you need to adapt? And how involved are you in the translations to other languages and hence cultures?

Here’s the beginning of the answer:

I try to stay on top of the US and the UK editions of books (sometimes I fail). Neverwhere needed quite some work for the US readership, which I did 98% of, and the other 2% was done without my knowledge. (For example — I kept the word “flat” for where Richard lived, in my US version. It’s not a universally common US word, but it’s comprehensible. The US editors unilaterally decided to change the word to “apartment” and did a universal find-and-replace, and in the bound galleys that were sent to reviewers there were people who believed the Earth was apartment and people started to say things apartmently.)

There is some more, including an acknowledgement of the importance of translators.

The ABA website links to an article in the November issue of the ABA Journal, about the lack of qualified interpreters for immigrants, entitled (what else?) Lost in Translation.

bq. These cases will multiply as immigrants continue to pour into the United States, says Chicago public defender Marijane Hemza-Placek. She represents Omar Aguirre, who was wrongfully convicted and spent five years in prison for the murder of a Chicago furniture-store owner. His conviction was based largely on a confession, now in doubt, that was elicited by a police officer who acted as a Spanish-speaking interpreter, says Hemza-Placek, who works in the felony division of the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. …

bq. But unfortunately, Hemza-Placek says, there is a common misconception that simply being bilingual is enough to qualify someone as an interpreter. Certification varies widely among the states, within a jurisdiction and even from judge to judge.

bq. In some instances, anyone from a clerk to an officer is drafted to interpret a confession, and they “more or less guesstimate” what the suspect is saying, Hemza-Placek says. These stand-ins often have unexplored biases, and more often they lack the requisite skills.

There is a separate article on ‘Interpreting your Interpreter’, with advice on how to tell if an interpreter is qualified and competent.

In 1938, Homes and Gardens published an article on Hitler’s home Haus Wachenfeld in the Bavarian alps. This article was available on the Internet this summer, and now that copyright problems have been removed, there is an article in the Guardian by Simon Waldman on how he discovered it and the reactions to his publishing it on the Web.

The original article can also be seen on the Guardian site.

bq. The curtains are of printed linen, or fine damask in the softer shades. Herr Hitler is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect. He is constantly enlarging the place, building on new guest-annexes, and arranging in these his favourite antiques – chiefly German furniture of the eighteenth century, for which agents in Munich are on the look out.

There is also a version of the article together with a transcript on the Wyman Institute site.

Delia Venables, in her portal for English law, gives a site for law relating to dogs.

The site has links, for instance to Battersea Dogs Home, and to information at Defra on who can take dogs and cats into Britain and out again without the traditional six months’ quarantine.

Susan Hall, a partner in the English law firm Cobbetts, has written an article for the Law Society Gazette on legal aspects of the Harry Potter novels. After discussing various points, she concludes:

bq. There are two more books to go, but as Ms Rowling has already tackled natural justice, abuse of process, conflict of interest, the burden of proof, the limits on emergency powers, the effect of legal discrimination on promoting civil unrest among disadvantaged groups, and employment discrimination against those suffering contagious conditions, it will be interesting to see where her commentary on contemporary legal topics by means of their wizarding parallels will take her next.

Scott Martens in A Fistful of Euros writes about the future needs of clients for big translation companies in Europe:

bq. I work for a medium-sized Belgian translation firm. We have some 200 freelance translators who take work from us and a handful of full-time staff. Our freelancers can and do take work from other sources, what we do is mostly dealing with clients. Like all good middlemen, we make it possible for businesses to negotiate a single price for their translation work and we act as an insurance policy.

…

bq. The ability to charge less for translation, and to invest in technologies that enhance translation productivity and quality, depends quite closely on the size of your firm. As recently as the early 90’s, it was still rare to find pan-European translation firms. The translation market in the EU wasn’t very integrated, and as a result, firms tended to be fairly small. The large, integrated markets – the US and Japan – are monolingual; they don’t do very much translation.