The Austrian RDB (Rechtsdatenbank) website has links to a number of databases and journals (via Handakte WebLAWg). Its main aim seems to be offering access, at a price, to a large number of journals, collections of cases and other resources (if you need fewer than 50 documents a month, there is still a setup cost of 243 euros and a cost of 4,13 for each RDB document search).

Free of charge: a magazine with a number of interesting articles, including one on Justitia 2003, the latest round in a competition for Austria’s best legal websites. Tax firm Szabo & Partner (with English and Hungarian versions – at a glance, the PDF documents are in better English than the sentences on the website), tax adviser Thomas Brandner, Ernst & Young Austria and the private investigation firm Bernhard Maier (with English and Greek versions – the English is not MT and is comprehensible) are some of the winners, as is the Bundeskanzleramt /Federal Chancellery site.

This is odd. Last year was surely the 500th anniversity of Albrecht Dürer’s painting of the hare (the most famous painting to come out of Nürnberg – send it as an e-card from here). Now it is apparently the 500th anniversary of Das große Rasenstück. This shows a lump of grass with plantains and dandelions and is variously translated as The big turf, The great piece of turf, The large turf, The tall grass (How about The big sod?) Here is the real thing, and here is a version amended by Klaus Staeck.

So now we are to get 7,000 hares on the Hauptmarkt in Nuremberg, the work of Ottmar Hörl. These commemorate the Turf and are called Das große Hasenstück.

The installation is being put up this week and will be opened on Saturday. It can be seen till 17th August.

A press release dated 30 July says that at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair will have a stand for translators – not just literary, apparently, but it sounds as if the general idea is published translators. Translators can be accredited, which seems to mean given the seal of approval
Pressemitteilung deutsch
Press release in English
Thanks to Andrea Doerges.

Dawid Wiskott usually translates into Hebrew and German. One day someone needed a translation of a two-page contract from Aramaic into English. It turned out to be a Hebrew witch’s spell.

NOTE ADDED LATER: (these instructions are from Dawid, not me, and possibly apply only to Netscape): if you look at Dawid’s page (some of this and all the rest of the site are in Hebrew), select View-encoding-hebrew (Windows). Netscape will accept only U.S. ascii as default. You can choose between good Hebrew and mucked-up English or vice versa (left-to-right / right-to-left problem).

Vielleicht könntest du die Leser warnen, dass sie nach aufrufen der seite View-encoding-hebrew(windows) waehlen muessen. netscape setzt sich ueber jeden versuch hinweg, einen anderen default als amerikanisches ascii aufzuladen.
ausserdem habe ich festgestellt, dass der betrachter die wahl hat zwischen ordentlichem hebraeisch mit vermurkstem englisch (right to left) und ordentlichem englisch mit vermurkstem hebraeisch (left to right).

This might interest technical translators. From Boing Boing, Darren Barefoot has a Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness (but surely the meaning of the Chinese one is obvious? The shoes are made of leather, cloth and rhomboids).

Via How Appealing, The Smoking Gun presents the Legal Document of the Year for 2003 (they couldn’t wait till December):

bq. The winner is not for the faint of heart, because in it the Colorado State Public Defender’s office provides what possibly may be the most comprehensive history of the “F-word” one could ever hope to find.

I particularly enjoyed the table contrasting the frequency of two forms of the F-word with that of other common expressions such as Mom, apple pie, freedom of speech, baseball, hot dogs and Chevrolet (well, in Britain we do sometimes talk about apple pie).

I have used the Smoking Gun archive before. It has rather extreme cases, as scans, showing the original layout, signatures and certificates of service.

Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog has a monthly interview (twenty questions) with an appellate judge, as Denise Howell reminded us yesterday.