This Piraten poster is the one I have most often seen defaced.

Here the original:

And here an altered version – on a close inspection it did not look tampered with:

It’s looking rather colourful here. Not only did Bavaria have elections last Sunday, Hesse has them next Sunday at the same time as the Bundestag elections.

This seemed inappropriate in retrospect:

Local. Notice complete Great Dane:

This one I saw in a spot where I could neither park nor photograph (that’s where some of the worst posters always are):

In Frankfurt last week, near that church:

Sat-nav devices have at least three times let me down just when I wanted to drive back to Germany, and I once got lost in Frankfurt am Main and found myself facing this Russian Orthodox church of St. Nicholas.

I was lucky enough to actually stop there on Sunday.

However, we were not welcome. The church is not for tourists, but for God. My friend said she was from Frankfurt, but this made no difference. Photos of the interior were not welcome and we were rapidly escorted out.

We were told that had we attempted to photograph the inside of a mosque, we would have found our heads cut off next to our bodies. The Russians were less aggressive, however.

Somehow I feel Nathan der Weise would have seen things differently.

Ken Adams drew my attention to his post on German speakers and the use of ‘will’ in contracts. The subject is why some Germans don’t like the use of ‘will’ as opposed to shall.

The theories seem to be:

1. ‘will’ and ‘wollen’ have completely different meanings (I’m not convinced by the wordreference definitions, or rather by the examples it gives, which to me seem to be ‘also rans’ rather than good illustrations.

2. Germans think ‘will’ is a ‘simple future’ (horrible term) and expect ‘shall’ for compulsion (this is the view I incline to)

Apropos ‘simple future’: there are at least five ways of expressing the future in English and they overlap with modal meanings. ‘Will’ often implies a promise.

Ken refers to ‘will’ in contracts as ‘language of policy’, which I need to investigate further.

In my experience, contracts of insurance often use ‘will’ for the insurer and ‘shall’ for the insured. I take the two verbs both to mean an obligation, although stylistically (but not legally9 there is a sense of ‘will’ being an act of grace and favour from the more powerful party.

In translations, I sometimes use ‘will’ mixed with ‘shall’ myself, but I may avoid it because I fear the German client may not like it. At one of the conferences I attended some weeks ago, someone mentioned the phenomenon where translators simplify the English language in order to avoid arguments with clients.

It’s been pointed out to me that Ron Pattinson has been down my way, and in fact as a beer lover (who eschews taking notes) he visits Franconia every year. Mind you,
Franconia day six looks a bit like Munich. I wonder if his downloadable little ePub book on Bavaria includes Franconia? I think when it comes to beer, Franconia needs its own book.
Anyway, scroll back for the earlier days of Franconia, starting with What I did on my hols:

It wasn’t a particularly long or complicated trip. Four nights in Ebermannstadt and one in Munich. A day at Annafest, one in Bamberg and another at the Kellers of Buttenheim. A return to places I love, beers that quench and a peace to be cherished.

I love Lager. Annually renewing that love has become part of the rhythm of my life. It’s not about drinking the rarest, oddest or strongest beer. But about reconnecting with the gloriously simple Franconian approach to beer. Where drinking a beer with your breakfast evokes no condemnatory glances. Where the beer isn’t trying to show off and the food not straining to be clever and quirky and new. Where there’s time to just sit and enjoy life, watching it meander past like lazy brook.

There wasn’t a beer I didn’t enjoy, though one really sated my thirst for Lager’s perfect simplicity: Neder Export. Sublimely drinkable.

With thanks to Trevor.

Style guides are always fascinating. I wish I could forget about them, but various clients have different ideas about how they want English to be written, and on top of that I used to teach English grammar, which meant laying down some laws. Here’s the UK Government digital style guide (link updated Dec 2015).

This is weird:

2.17 Numbers

Write all numbers in numerics (including 1 to 9) except where it’s part of a common expression and it would look strange, eg ‘one or two of them’. Use common sense.

‘One of the 13 words in this sentence is causing problems: this 1.’

This sentence would be better with ‘one’ as the final word.

My rule would have been to write ‘thirteen’, and indeed to write all numbers up to ninety-nine in words (German often says to write from one to twelve in words, but even there I am constantly encountering ‘1.’ (‘first’) in the middle of quite serious and non-abbreviated texts). Of course the problem then arises, as it did for me recently in a translation about genetics, that when you are discussing statistics you should write all numbers as figures. But then there comes a bit of text where it’s no longer about statistics.

Also: write all numbers in numerics! they mean figures, I think.

But the idea of writing ‘this 1’ even in error never occurred to me!

Now down to legal style:

2.14 Legal language

If you’re talking about a legal requirement, use ‘must’. For example, ‘your employer must pay you the National Minimum Wage (NWM)’.

If you feel that ‘must’ doesn’t have enough emphasis, then use ‘legal requirement’, ‘legally entitled’ etc. For example: ‘Once your child is registered at school, you are legally responsible for making sure they attend regularly’.

When deciding whether to use ‘must’ or ‘legally entitled’ etc, consider how important it is for us to talk about the legal aspect, as well as the overall tone of voice.

If a requirement is legal, but administrative, or part of a process that won’t have criminal repercussions, then use: ‘need to’. For example: ‘You will need to provide copies of your marriage certificate’.

This may be a legal requirement, but not completing it would just stop the person from moving on to the next stage of a process, rather than committing a more serious offence.

They are obviously totally avoiding the word ‘shall’. Of course, ‘shall’ in that sense is only used in contracts and statutes, not in writing about them.

‘Need to’ if no criminal repercussions. I love it.