An editor emailed me: a monastery guide I translated contained several references to Mainz. Should it be Mayence or Mainz in English? (I think this query must come from the monastery).
Mayence is out of date. I have read it from an English technical translator. The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, for example, says not to use it (whereas it permits Brunswick as an English form, which I find dubious). Google search in UK sites only gives Mainz 11,600 and Mayence 131 (not all hits are my situation – some are company names and addresses in Germany).

But some place names are less certain.

We use: Munich, Cologne, Saxony, Thuringia, North-Rhine-Westphalia, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate, Rhine, Baltic Sea, Lake Constance, Black Forest
We don’t use: Aix-la-Chapelle, Brunswick, Mayence, Ratisbon
I have stopped using: Hanover (except for the dynasty: then, it should be used), Hesse; I sometimes use Nürnberg, sometimes Nuremberg.

I’m bound to have forgotten something.

I would like to recommend the monastery, however. I haven’t even been there but I like the sound of the wine tours where six different wines are placed in six different parts of the monastery.

bq. Offene Schlenderweinprobe
Preis: EUR 20,00 je Teilnehmer
Leistung: Eintritt, fachkundige Gästeführung, Klosterrundgang, unterwegs Verkostung 6 ausgesuchter Weine an 6 verschiednen Orten im Kloster

If you enter the following in Google:
~work
you will also get hits for job and career. beSpacific reports that Google has added this new search feature, using the tilde (~), because it means ‘approximate’. Or enter
browser ~help
that is, hits containing tips, support and tutorial too. More information here.

Microdoc News is informative too.
Originally from the Google Weblog.

Markus Kuhn (latterly from Uttenreuth!) explains the ISO paper system (A4 etc.) – via Boing Boing. Window envelopes are not standardized.

There are interesting notes on the history of paper sizes. The DIN formats were adopted in Germany in 1922, and in Britain in 1959 (but I can remember using foolscap and quarto long after that).

bq. The United States and Canada are today the only industrialized nations in which the ISO standard paper sizes are not yet widely used. In U.S. office applications, the paper formats “Letter” (216 × 279 mm), “Legal” (216 × 356 mm), “Executive” (190 × 254 mm), and “Ledger/Tabloid” (279 × 432 mm) are widely used today. … The “Letter”, “Legal”, “Tabloid”, and other formats (although not these names) are defined in the American National Standard ANSI X3.151-1987. …

bq. Using standard paper sizes saves money and makes life simpler in many applications. For example, if all scientific journals used only ISO formats, then libraries would have to buy only very few different sizes for the binders. Shelves can be designed such that standard formats will fit in exactly without too much wasted shelf volume. The ISO formats are used for surprisingly many things besides office paper: the German citizen ID card has format A7, both the European Union and the U.S. (!) passport have format B7, and library microfiches have format A6. In some countries (e.g., Germany) even many brands of toilet paper have format A6.

There is advice for North Americans (can they get A4 yellow legal pads?)

Last Friday was some kind of anniversary of the German spelling reform and I read that people are less certain of spelling than they were before. I suppose it depends what point they start at.

The following photo is from Paul Thomas of Ehningen, a British DE>EN technical translator. It was seen outside a café in the north of England. As usual, click to enlarge.

I am told that QUASONS is the reformed spelling of ‘croissants’.

What I am moving towards is an entry on TextCount, a German text counting program, and counting text in MS Word. But basics first:

Some broad generalizations here:
Translators usually charge by length of the text, roughly speaking. At least, that’s the starting point. Sometimes a translator and client/agency have a standard rate. With direct clients, it’s more common to look at the nature of the text before deciding a rate.

Length can be measured by words or by keystrokes.
Words are normally actual words (typing speed is measured by theoretical words 5 letters in length): German words are on average longer than English words, and average length varies by subject matter, so you have to be careful when agreeing on payment.

In Britain, charges are per 1,000 words; in the USA, per word.

Keystrokes: in Germany translators measure by the line, usually of 50 or 55 keystrokes.

Literary translations are often counted by the standard page (Normseite). (In Germany, this means taking the lines as they come – if a line is half full, it is still a line. Literary translators fight against attempts to introduce a Normseite of 1800 keystrokes per page, where every line is full – I suppose the traditional standard page is nearer 1500.

On the computer, you can count a text as a whole and divide it. On a typewriter – and typewriters still leave their traces on some counting practices – you can’t. Sometimes rules like this are used: ‘If an incomplete line is over half the length of a complete line, it is counted as a complete line; if it is less, it is disregarded’.

In Germany, translations are often charged by the lines in the target text. The target text is always on the computer and therefore easy to count; but the customer doesn’t know the price of the translation until it is finished. Translations into Chinese, for example, are counted from the German source text.

Now that many translations are received as computer files, and I scan and OCR nearly all the rest (using the Russian program FineReader), I usually give the customer a quote in advance, because I know the length of the English (in keystrokes) is about the same as the length of the German (but in words, about 15% longer, I imagine). Continue reading →

On the blawg review, Stephanie Tai has posted an annotated bibliography of amusing law review writings:

bq. Professor Thomas Baker of the Florida International University sent me his article, A Compendium of Clever and Amusing Law Review Writings: An Idiosyncratic Bibliography of Miscellany with in Kind Annotations Intended as a Humorous Diversion for the Gentle Reader, published in the Drake Law Review, for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Of course, it is only useful to those near a library, preferably in the U.S.A. But the annotations make it worth looking at. Categories include biography, book reviews, case studies, contracts, law practice, legal humour and miscellany. A quote from miscellany overleaf: Continue reading →