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X-ray

Röntgen, Roentgen & X-Rays, or should they be called Lenard Rays?

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Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

Professor Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, and the formation of the British National Health Service changed my life. Although it took another fortuitous discovery, almost forty years later, for me to understand why, and what had happened to me as a very young infant.

Who discovered X-Rays?

But first, let’s get back to the history of X-Rays and the peculiar title of this piece. There cannot be one German citizen who hasn’t had a Röntgendiagnostik and knows what it is about. Over here, it’s same with X-Rays, although not one in ten thousand would connect the name Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (or Roentgen as we tend to spell it in Britain) with the discovery. A discovery which not only revolutionised medical practice, but told us that there are just 92 naturally occurring elements, and transformed my own subject, the high temperature corrosion of metals.

X-ray

There is something of a shaggy dog story to what I found about the discovery, and why one might suggest that another German scientist, Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard, should get more credit than usually acknowledged. Rontgen is commonly thought to have discovered X-rays by accident. This is just not true. But he was lucky. He just happened to be using a sheet of paper that had been saturated with barium platinocyanide, that turned out to be one of the best detectors for X-Rays. And it just happened to be lying around, waiting to fluoresce when the X-rays struck.Continue reading full article…

Storm throwing debris in the air

Shitstorm travels to Germany

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Article by John Morrish

Storm throwing debris in the air

Words travel, and sometimes in surprising ways. An English slang term has been enthusiastically adopted by the Germans. It has been embraced by the business and political classes, appeared in big headlines in the serious press, and been accepted by the Duden dictionary, an important work of reference. Angela Merkel has been known to use it. Nothing so unusual in any of that, except that the word is “shitstorm”.Continue reading full article…

Home office or work from home?

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Thoughts on working from home and the term ‘home office’, by HE Translations director Herbert Eppel

Like many language service providers, I have been working from home for many years now, as described in the Leicester Mercury article from 2009 under the heading “Home work – we love it!”, which is available for your delectation here. Although the article didn’t foresee corona, it could perhaps be regarded as rather prescient in that it described a growing trend towards home working and envisaged a future in which this could become the norm, rather than an exception.

During the corona pandemic the term Homeoffice (alternative spelling: Home-Office) found its way into the standard German Duden dictionary – see here. Intriguingly, and perhaps mildly entertainingly, when Germans say or write Homeoffice, more often than not they refer to the activity (e.g. “ich mache Homeoffice“, literally translated as “I am doing home office” but indicating “I am presently working from home”), rather than a physical space.

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Fred Widmanstatten pattern

Widmanstatten meteorites

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Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

In an earlier posting I mentioned the barely explicable Widmanstatten structure, seen in the iron-nickel Marburg meteorite, which was found by local people as result of Alfred Wegener offering a reward. Although a good deal is known about the Widmanstatten pattern or structure, I want to explain, why, in my view, there are some unanswered questions.

Fred Widmanstatten pattern

Etched section from part of a meteorite discovered near Muonionalusta, northern Sweden

To see the Widmanstatten structure one must take a slice from the meteorite, grind and polish the surface so it gleams like a mirror, and then gently etch it using a weak solution of nitric acid, dissolved in alcohol. The underlying structure is then visible to the naked eye. It has the appearance of a pattern consisting of fine strips of paper laid on top of one another. Sometimes the strips are at right angles. Other times they can be at 30° or 60°.

The German Professor, Fritz Heide, published the “Kleine Meteoritenkunde” in 1934, one of the first books on meteorites. It was subsequently brought up to date by Frank Wlotzka and translated into English in 1994. Although missing more recent accounts of meteor phenomena, and in situ investigations of the asteroids and planets, it remains one of the standard works on the subject. Nevertheless, this book, and what I have read on the internet, doesn’t really tell us where Widmanstatten meteorites come from. Heide and Wlotzka were more interested in the stony meteorites, that are much more common.Continue reading full article…

Alfred Wegener: Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, 1929

Alfred Wegener: author of the theory of Continental Drift

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Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

It was just a mention from our Welsh Geography master, in one of the better schools of Stockton-on-Tees, where, back in the 1950s, I first heard of what is now loosely called Continental Drift. It was also from this teacher that I learnt that there was a paper called the “Manchester Guardian”. The only paper you can trust, he affirmed. Since 1961, under its new name, “The Guardian” I have been buying this left wing rag ever since. His purchasing of the Guardian and his espousal of what was then a somewhat weird account of Earth’s geological history, suggests that my Geography master was in a small but thinking minority. He was also against nuclear power, when the rest of Britain was all for it!

It was years afterwards, when I took up a casual interest in geology and fossil collecting that I learnt that it was the German, Alfred Wegener who was behind the idea of Continental Drift. But learning about the geology of Britain, I was struck by the fact that that hundreds of millions of years ago this country was covered by deserts. If it was that hot, at 55 degrees north, what was it like at the equator, I wondered? Literally boiling hot??? Continental drift would explain it all, but why didn’t died in the wool, professional geologists ask such an obvious question, instead of rejecting the theory.

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Portrait of Johannes Kepler

Kepler: the first cosmologist

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Johannes Kepler 1571-1630

Another view

Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

Johannes Kepler was, arguably, the first and most important scientific son of Germany, long before it came to be a nation. Kepler was a true genius, who had to move from one country to another to earn a living and to avoid religious persecution, and he can also be claimed for Europe itself.

Kepler’s insight into how the planets move round the sun showed the need for a new physics of the Universe. That is, one that proposed a rational and testable scientific theory. Before Kepler, the belief that the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved round the Earth once a day, being kept in position with invisible rotating crystalline spheres, required no further discussion. Copernicus was stuck with circular motions for how the planets moved, as was Galileo.Continue reading full article…

Plugin or plug-in?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

We remember reading somewhere that there is a demonstrable pattern in English: two separate words become a hyphenated compound, then eventually the hyphen disappears. In other words, most if not all hyphenated versions are ‘on their way out’, the only question being how long it will take.

In the case of plugin vs plug-in, the hyphenated version still seems to be the clear winner in the hybrid car market, for example – see Wikipedia page here. Google Ngram Viewer also shows the hyphenated version in the lead, although the rapid decline of the hyphen is obvious from the chart here. See also the pertinent discussion at English Language & Usage Stack Exchange here.

Conclusion: we will write plugin henceforth, except in cases where we want to differentiate something from a (code) plugin, e.g. “they were looking for a plug-in charging point”, which makes it clear that they were not looking for a piece of software 🙂

Binoculars

Do we have a British Covid Stasi?

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By HE Translations team member Mike Gayler

BinocularsDuring the Coronavirus crisis there have been a number of allegations that people in Britain are ‘behaving like the Stasi’ or that we have a ‘Covid Stasi’, but how do these claims stack up against the reality of Germany’s past, and how does it relate to Britain today?

The Stasi was the official state security organisation for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. The full name was Staatssicherheitsdienst, and is acknowledged to have been both pervasive and effective. Its main task was to perform surveillance on the citizens of the country in order to quell dissent, although it operated in foreign countries through espionage and covert operations.

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Hamster with hazelnuts

Happy hamsters squirrel away supermarket stocks

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Hamster with hazelnutsHamsters have been emptying shop shelves across Germany and now seem set to cross borders as other countries take up the telling term Hamsterkauf. Wise advice to stock up on essentials before being confined to home by an anti-coronavirus diktat, combined with an angst attack in the face of a pandemic, has seen runs on toilet paper, pasta, flour and hand gel – snatching away all available wares. The German language term for this buying more than you need is Hamsterkauf, meaning literally hamster buying, or buying like a hamster. The tiny hamster with its puffy cheeks full of nuts is a lovable symbol for sensibly storing what you need for later, like its bigger cousin the squirrel, but neither actually pay for what they accumulate and have never been seen panic buying.Continue reading full article…

Quarantäne

Covid-19 update from HE Translations

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QuarantäneWe are pleased to report that HE Translations continues to operate as normal at this challenging and surreal time. After all, we have been practising home working for 25 years, as illustrated in a Leicester Mercury article back in 2009.

We are regularly in touch with our technical translation team members in various countries, and it is interesting to hear the experiences in different locations. On the whole, we are impressed by the way Leicester, the UK and indeed the world is coping with the unprecedented situation. That said, the long-term consequences are unfathomable, both economically and otherwise. Our sympathies to all those struggling in these difficult times, when many are losing so much. Let’s hope that when this is over some good may also come out of it, and that the path to sustainable living for all will be clearer. All in all, we remain cautiously optimistic.

If you would like to get in touch to discuss a potential translation project from or into German or a wide range of other languages including Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Swedish, please email us at [email protected] or call our usual office number, +44 (0)  7808 967196.

Best wishes to you and your families and friends.