Transblawg

Ralph Stenzel and Dr. Christopher Hornstein et al. have started a multi-author blog (in German) about Fürth, called Fürther Freiheit.

It has entries by nine authors to date, but others may apply to post (their work has to be 'inhaltlich kompetent und sprachlich versiert').

It looks as if some of the main topics will be architecture and local politics.

You can get the entries and comments by separate RSS feeds. The archives can be inspected by month, and there is a tag cloud too.

I started a Fürth blog myself some years ago, with the similar title Fürther Freiheiten. It was on Typepad, so when I stopped writing it I deleted it. I thought there would be lots of interesting things to write about Fürth, but it seemed to me to demand a wider range of entries than I felt like writing. It's surely much better with several writers. If I wrote about one article in the local paper, there were many more I could have written on, and then the question arose: why

Another problem was that I wasn't going to collect many German readers, nor did I want to write for a potential expat community. Forums like Toytown Germany I find very useful, but they aren't what I would write.

Lexiophiles has expanded its list of blogs to vote for (Top 100 Language Blogs).

The best place to look is the list of nominated blogs for language professionals, where there is a very brief description of each blog in the Language Professionals category.

Transblawg has come up on their radar (my thanks to the unknown promoter). They have Peter Harvey, but not Kalebeul or fucked translations, nor Patenttranslator - and no fidus interpres. So it's all a bit touch and go, and in any case they are not looking specifically for translation blogs. There are four categories: Language Technology, Language Learning, Language Professionals and Language Teaching.

To find similar lists for the other three categories, start here.

There's probably no point in saying that blogging may be slow in the next few weeks, since it has also been slow in the last few weeks.

I have added a photo to the entry where you can buy the Pope for your train set, and another to the entry with the ad for a Fürth lawyer.

It seems to me that blogging is slowing down. Some German weblogs, meanwhile, seem to be mutating into food blogs when they weren't before. This is not a food blog, so I won't give the recipes for recent successes - sucking pig's head before and after, and coconut pyramids:

Transblawg is seven years and three days old today. Sorry about the slow posting. None of my three readers reminded me. However, a description of a different birthday celebration, at the restaurant Essigbrätlein in Nuremberg, will follow (with pictures).

Ukulele & Languages is a blog by a Frenchwoman married to a Norwegian (does the ukulele playing come via Norway?). Some ukulele videos.

Via Ukulelia

I added two translation weblogs to my blogroll. I actually follow more in Google Reader. And it's time I weeded some dead ones out.

The first new one is Patenttranslator's Blog, by Steve Vitek (of FLEFO on CompuServe in the old days). Steve is originally from Czechoslovakia, as it then was, spent some time in Japan but has long been in the USA, for a long time in California and now in Virginia.

The second blog is MA Translation Studies News, which calls itself 'A blog for students and graduates of the MA Translation Studies at the University of Portsmouth'. It looks interesting. I liked the entry on a dispute about how Michael Hofmann translated a Gottfried Benn poem.

Linguatools has context dictionaries between German and several other languages. I tried this, and Linguee, and MyMemory, with my word of the day, Gestaltungsspielraum, and they were all more useful than they used to be. But look at the sources! The big advantage of Linguee is giving precise URLs, and it now does it immediately beside the quote. MyMemory has only europa.eu, which I suppose is the DGT CAT database that anyone can download, and Anonymous! And Linguatools has only vague terms like Parlamentsdebatte - presumably another of those widely available databases - and in one instance Zeitungskommentar.

Here is a curious feature of Linguatools: it gives me synonyms for the source term, not the target term - actually, this could be quite useful:

Gestaltungsspielraum : freedom
wird noch übersetzt mit: Freiheit, Freiraum, Ungebundenheit, Ungezwungenheit
Gestaltungsspielraum : leeway
wird noch übersetzt mit: Abdrift, Abtrift, Rückstand, Spielraum
Gestaltungsspielraum : sphere of influence
wird noch übersetzt mit: Interessensphäre, Machtbereich

Congratulations to me for winning a Twitter competition on the weblog separated by a common language against a field of six! and thanks to Lynne, who is going to send me a packet of McVitie's ginger nuts, thus bypassing the many expat British food sellers.

The test was to find a tweet that was either in American English and incomprehensible to speakers of British English, or vice versa. I went for the vice versa.

As Lynne writes, it's often easier for British speakers to understand American English, because they hear so much on TV or in the cinema. I did try to find some incomprehensible American tweets, by searching for words like grits, but nothing was really convincing:

I had the "Going to bed alone" dog. Lots of kraut, garlic, red onion sauce and pastrami.// well done, well DONE!

I found one American who'd been on Chatroulette and asked a British person what crumpets are. The answer: they are like 'English muffins' but sweet. (Sweet?) Not good for international understanding.

Here are comments I have either removed from the blog or failed to approve (links removed)/
Folgende Kommentare wurden entweder entfernt oder nicht zugelassen (Links entfernt):

On German courts using the English language:

Are you willing to get buy resume, that conform the field of study you wish?. You can rely on our resume writers, as you trust yourself. Thanks because this is the interesting

On Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage:

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On European Union Law:

I opine that university students shouldn't overlook a chance to order classification essay using the assignment writing services, simply because it would plainly be the best pathway to present the writing skillfulness.

On German bread:

what dose it looks like

Anatol Stefanowitsch reports that he is moving from Bremer Sprachblog (where he was virtually the only contributor, but this was not so intended) to wissenslogs at the scilogs portal: scilogs. The entry is also a report on the history of the blog.

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks.

(Via Awful Library Books)

Stolen coffee cake bei Criggo.

Note the comments: Hans knows better.

In her weblog, Frances Crook, Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, reports on visits to prisons (Tegel and Neustrelitz) and compares them with the equivalent in the UK (A note from a visit to German prisons).

There are 160 staff who include officers who run the programmes, apprenticeships, farm with pigs, do training (they take dogs from a local rescue and train them), and they offer real qualifications.

Young people undergo a “diagnostic test” on reception and a sentence plan is devised to address their “deficits”.

All well and good, and the most noticeable thing was how physically fit and articulate the young people were. They were all tall, looked as though they got decent food and exercise, and engaged in conversation with us, even trying out school English. Such a contrast to some of the poor little things I have seen in English, and Scottish, prisons. Generations of poverty in the UK have taken their toll and I am not sure things have improved much since Lord Kitchener complained about the health of his conscripts a century ago.

On the whole, she was impressed, but she was shocked by the Fixierung (Fesselung) at Neustrelitz.



Via German Joys

An article in the Tagesspiegel about Ich werde ein Berliner. How to blend in wiz ze Germans, the blog by Wash Echte (he reveals that he isn't an American, so he can't go back there, despite the wishes of some of his commenters).

Two newish weblogs on teaching legal English:

Legal English Teacher by Andrew Nathan in Warsaw, and

Anglaw Budapest by Jeremy Wheeler.

I've been following the Hospital Food photoblog for some time now.

They collect photos of hospital food from all over the world.

Now the Independent reports on a British patient who is taking photos of his own hospital food because it is so horrible. He invites readers to guess what the meals are.

The blogger, who identifies himself as “Traction Man”, has been in hospital for 20 weeks undergoing treatment to correct skeletal problems. He says he was “struck down by a bone and flesh-eating bug”. To pass the time the 47-year-old has taken to provided a daily review of his meals – uploading photographs from his mobile phone.

The blog is Notes from a Hospital Bed. Here's a hospital food bingo entry.