The German motto “Nicht ärgern, nur wundern” is extremely useful and calming. In many situations it can avoid the need for Baldwin’s Nervous Pills. As long as we don’t start to worry about how to translate it into English! 😂
Personal note: The drawing was produced in 1944 by Herbert’s uncle, Bruno Gutfleisch, who sadly passed away in 1971. It hangs in Herbert’s office and helps him keep calm (and indeed carry on) in stressful translation situations 😇
As evidenced by the photo below from August 2014, our visitors from Germany took their ironing duties quite seriously, in the knowledge that Extreme Ironing was in fact invented in Leicester. Needless to say, we have the book, as shown on the table in the photo.
Extreme ironing has not yet translated into a professional sport sponsored by manufacturers of irons or ironing boards, although the German language once again demonstrates efficiency by condensing the translation of extreme ironing down to just one word, albeit a compound word.
For further edification see the fascinating article under the heading The Finely Pressed, Death-Defying World of Extreme Ironing.
Deutsche Infos zum Extrembügeln gibt es auf Wikipedia.
Das Drama, das sich gestern Abend in Leicester abspielte, wirft auch linguistische Fragen auf. Laut Tagesschau schloss die Polizei “einen Terroranschlag vorerst aus“, was einem in Deutschland ansässigen HE Translations Teammitglied zu denken gab. Zitat:
Als Unbeteiligter an diesem tragischen Ereignis habe ich, bei allem ehrlichen Mitgefühl für die Opfer, dabei jedoch vor allem folgende Frage: Ist die oben genannte Pressefloskel eigentlich eine neu-deutsche Flachsinns-Redensart journalistischer Sprachprofis, oder gibt es dazu auch ein englisches Äquivalent? Oder sind es gar tatsächlich Polizisten, die offenbar weltweit eine seltsame Auffassung vom Ermitteln angenommen haben?Denn: Seit wann schließen Ermittlungsbehörden Dinge vorerst aus?? Bin ich da irgendwie verwöhnt von unrealistischen Krimis, oder dürfen Behörden nicht erst dann etwas ausschließen, wenn sie sich sicher sind, dass es als Ursache nicht in Frage kommt??
Diese sprachliche Lauluft weht m.E. erst seit begrenzter Zeit durch allerlei Polizeimeldungen in der Presse (z.B. auch bei Verkehrsunfällen), dafür aber umso penetranter.
Der “schwachsinnige” Ausdruck vorerst ausschließen war uns bisher noch gar nicht so recht aufgefallen. Er scheint in der Tat auf deutschem Boden gewachsen zu sein, denn der entsprechende, offenbar mehr oder weniger offizielle englische Ausdrucksweise lautet:
Dass die Medien immer wieder negative Vorkommnisse in den Vordergrund stellen kann als recht deprimierend bzw. ärgerlich und wenig hilfreich angesehen werden. Dabei hätte es in den letzten Jahren so viel Positives aus Leicester zu berichten gegeben:
Today we undertook another little linguistic research jaunt as a result of the Cornish weather and its sea mists.
An old friend from Yorkshire, (sadly no longer with us), always used the term sea fret when he was talking about the rather eerie and somewhat depressing sea mist on the north coast of Cornwall.
We assumed it to be a northern term, which indeed seems to be the case, with Oxford dictionaries giving the noun fret’s fourth definition as a Northern English term for a “mist coming in off the sea; a sea fog”, mid-19th century of unknown origin.
Continue reading full article…
We are currently translating The Madhouse Effect, a popular and very readable illustrated book on climate change, by leading climate scientist Michael E Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles. The book, originally published in 2016, was motivated by the authors’ urgent desire to clear a fog of manufactured and self-interested climate scepticism around the greenhouse effect. The full original English language title is The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. The German translation is a collaboration between Herbert Eppel and project initiator Matthias Hüttmann.
So far the best working title for the German language translation has been Der Tollhaus-Effekt. The English word madhouse suggests a place of chaos, lunacy and foolishness, as well as clinical mental illness, but not fun or enjoyment. Tollhaus might suggest to an Anglophone a toll-taking station, such as in the book The Phantom Tollbooth, but the German adjective toll actually means “splendid” or “super!” The compound word Tollhaus can indeed describe a madhouse, both in the colloquial sense of a locus of lunacy, and in the technical sense of a mental hospital, but in the present day some businesses are using this word as a name for a themed safe play area or nightclub. That might sound a bit like the innocuous English term funhouse, so in this case the book’s cover illustration may ease the translator’s task by hinting at what sort of madness the book concerns.Continue reading full article…
Donald Trump’s recent description of Caribbean and African countries as shitholes has crea
ted a shitstorm in the translation world, with translators and censors struggling to find words to convey Trump’s meaning. The need for a German language translation of the term has seen the media popularise the term Drecksloch, a previously little used noun, which denotes literally a hole of, or for, muck. Technically Dreck does not exclusively refer to excrement, as it may also describe dirt, mud, rubbish, and manure. Interestingly, Drecksloch was previously recognised by dictionaries Dict.cc and Leo.org but not yet by the authoritative Duden.
The Oxford English Dictionary has recognised a new phrase imported into English from English by an animated cartoon character who appears to be a wealthy Russian rodent trading in insurance protection, though a meerkat is in reality a mongoose and eats rodents. Simples? What does that mean? You might ask that if you don’t watch UK commercial television, and even then you might not know that it took expenditure of over £90,000,000 to get this word into the OED.Continue reading full article…
Observations from HE Translations linguist and researcher Chris Mawer
Having been a lover of, and visitor to, Cornwall since childhood holidays throughout the 1960s, the decision to retire to the end of the land (I now live less than a mile from Land’s End) seemed a natural choice.
As a linguist the Cornish language has always been of interest to me; over six decades many words now seem very familiar and relatively easy to understand, with similarities to other languages e.g. eglos and église – apparently Breton and Cornish fishermen in the 18th century could converse in their respective languages and understand each other.
Although Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777, is often cited as the last known person to speak Cornish as a first language, Cornish persisted as a local dialect through the 19th century. Despite this, the language was officially declared “extinct” in the early 21st century. However, there was a gradual and growing movement to revive the language, and indeed a conscious investment in keeping it alive, with the result that Cornish was recently reclassified as “critically endangered“.
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Eggcorn is the term coined by linguists to describe the error that results from a mistaken analysis of commonly heard words and phrases.
I decided to start a discussion on this in a an e-group for professional translators, during which I learned about Lady Mondegreen (allegedly common knowledge, but it turned out that several translator colleagues hadn’t come across her either – see Google, if you haven’t a clue what it is about) and, courtesy of Wikipia, an unexpected connection with Monty Python. Doune Castle is now on my list of places to visit on one of our journeys to or from Scotland.
If the difference between icon and symbol is obvious to you, you can ignore this blog post. If not, this page on the DifferenceBetween.com website seems to describe the difference very well.
In essence (quoting from the DifferenceBetween.com page):
