Following the last entry (see comment), Udo points out that most German statutes are available online as PDFs. I don’t know how long this has been the case, but I missed it. It’s a joint project between Juris GmbH and the German Ministry of Justice.

From Sascha Kremer’s legal weblog vertretbar.de (German): at RA-MICRO E-Buch-Verlag you can download German statutes free of charge as e-books. You can read them on a Pocket PC or PC using Microsoft Reader (which is free of charge). There’s also a Mobipocket Reader so you can read them on Palm PDAs.

I use a CD-ROM called BundesDeutscheGesetze, which contains over 400 statutes and costs about 15 euros. (Internetshop link at the bottom of the page; order either as a one-off CD, or in subscription, which means you’ll be advised of new issues about four times a year, but you won’t have to buy them unless you want to.

Deutsche Gesetze als E-Bücher kostenlos downloaden und auf PC oder Pocket-PC mit dem ebenfalls kostenlosen Microsoft Reader lesen, oder mit dem Mobipocket Reader auf Palm PDA.

Oder für ca. 16 Euros gibt es BundesDeutscheGesetze auf CD-ROM.

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Mayence is out of date.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’.