Anybody else think that’s funny?

From: Muttscomics.com

I had carried Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down to Thailand and back and finally found the time to read it at the end of May. While reading it, I saw the post in Transblawg about Hornby’s Fever Pitch and the missing credit for translation (“der fehlende Übersetzer”). I checked amazon.de, and indeed, no translator was mentioned. Amazon lets you comment on the image and information of books they show on their site, so I suggested they should include the information about the translator. I got an immediate response from them by e-mail, and a couple of days later they had amended the book info (see http://snurl.com/2edre). Somebody more pedantic than me and with more time to kill could do this in a systematic fashion, I guess.

A very funny quote from A Long Way Down below the fold…

more…

If you are thirsty in the East Village, this is definitely the place to go.

There had to be a simple explanation:

toothpastefordinner.com

Yesterday’s Word of the Day at duden.de and very apropos.

In 2004 I translated two huge manuals for a direct client. Payment for the first manual was on time. Payment for the second stalled after they sent me an initial check for $200.00 – a mere fraction of the total. It took eleven months to get my money, and I guess I was lucky I got paid at all.

Two weeks ago the same company contacted me about the translation of a similar manual. About 40% of manual was identical to the the one I worked on in 2004. I handed in my estimate with some consideration for those 40% – but keeping in mind that it still takes time to read and handle that text
even if the CAT tool flags it as a match. In light of the payment issues in 2004, I also asked for prepayment of half of the estimated amount and COD of the other half.

And here is where it connects to “Dumpingpreis”: In their reply, the company told me that they had asked several other translation suppliers with considerably cheaper prices and would I consider lowering my estimate by 20%.

I don’t think so.

Chris Durban’s brochure Translation: Getting it Right – which I mentioned in this post of March 6, 2004 – has lost nothing of its effectiveness as a client-education tool and it is still available for downloading. Now there is an additional brochure by Chris Durban and Alan Melby, which explains that “using price as your sole criterion in selecting a [translation] supplier is a bad idea (maybe even a very bad idea).” It is entitled Translation: Byuing a non-commodity and can be downloaded here. I don’t know how many translation buyers will be swayed by these arguments, but it doesn’t hurt trying.

It was my first airplane ride (living in Germany at that time there weren’t that many opportunities to travel by air), and the destination was Tempelhof. Flying eliminated the border controls and tickets to Berlin were subsidized then, so with much trepidation I climbed aboard the BEA BAC 1-11 and suffered a very bumpy ride to Berlin to attend the 1967 Funkausstellung.

In recent years I learned to appreciate the location of THF. My sister lives quite close to the airport, and traveling from the U.S. through Brussels I can fly into Tempelhof and walk within 15 minutes to her apartment. Name one other capital in a large industrialized nation where that’s possible.

But it seems that THF has reached the end of the line. All signs point to a closure of airport operations in October. Even the referendum today did not help – I guess that voters see the issue from the point of view of residents rather than airport users. Had it been up to my sister, for example, Tempelhof would have been closed long ago.

BBC News reports that the Spanish police have arrested “87 Nigerians suspected of defrauding at least 1,500 people in a postal and internet lottery scam.” Checking out the list of participants of the The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference may have helped them to get better results sooner.

Found in Duden – Deutsches Universalwörterbuch the following term: der Touchbildschirm. Filed it under “Hybrid.”

Given the choice between this and this, … I forgot the point I was going to make.