"The nature and genius of the German language"

This is the name of a mammoth tome published by philologist Daniel Boileau in 1840.

Can't say I've read it all but, at one point, he draws attention to the fact that words in German are often cleverly formed by uniting two known ideas.

Listening to the radio, I heard "nun ein Ausschnitt von...", literally a "cut-out". And now, an excerpt from...

In English, we have "excerpt", formed from ex- (out of) and carpere (pluck).

Any German speaker would recognise the two stand-alone words aus and Schnitt. It's harder to spot "carpere"...

I do snow...

As many an English native speaker knows, we have lost control of the English language. Words keep cropping up everywhere and while we recognise the form, the substance has changed.

Classic Frenglish examples are, of course, le lifting or le brushing (a simple blow-dry). Incidentally, the Germans have scored a point for us by taking the French verb friser and coming up with the noun Friseur (hairdresser or barber - NB: Coiffeur tends to be used in Switzerland).

I once asked a Swiss friend if she skied and she replied Non, je fais du snow.

She makes snow...

Nonsense to ears attuned to English. The word snowboard has been shortened to snow by the youth of today. Having the word neige in French ensures there is no confusion.

So, as Hank the Yank would say, "What's the takeaway?" (Two cod and chips plus a pot of mushy peas, please).

Annual report season is upon us and, as ever, the word reporting is ubiquitous. Do we blindly translate it as "reporting" or "reported information", "company data", etc. The context will decide.

Still, let's be careful out there (!) when translating English words that have been hijacked by other languages.

Capita court interpreting contract letting down courts and taxpayers

I'd like to draw attention to this press release on the ITI website:

http://www.iti.org.uk/news-media-industry-jobs/news/544-pi4j-press-release-17-million-lost-in-translation

I heart about this contract with Capital from a friend a couple of years ago. He told me that court interpreters had been "fired" and told that they now had to work through Capita.

This is probably another example of a civil service mandarin trying to compress costs that cannot be reduced: quality interpreting costs money, especially when the stakes are as high as in the criminal justice system!

It's a shameful business and whoever is responsible should be run out of town, although he or she will probably get a year-end bonus regardless of performance plus a gold-plated pension...

Let the buyer beware

Looks like the South African government didn't have too much luck in choosing its language services firm, as attested to by all the funny commentary going round the web in recent days about the "fake" interpret.

Now it looks like the firm supplying the guy has disappeared:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25345627

Nice laypersons article on the limits of machine translation

I'm particularly glad that the writer emphasises that translations should be elegant.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/25/lost-in-machine-translation-star-trek

Resources for financial translators

Here are main resources which I would recommend for anyone wanting to specialise in financial translation:

• Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et de la gestion financière, Louis Ménard (third edition if you can ever get hold of it in Europe!) for French>English
• Wörterbuch für das Bank- und Börsenwesen, Hans Zahn, for German>English 
• The Council of Europe French-English Legal Dictionary, Frank Bridge (old but useful, the dictionary that is, not Mr Bridge, whose worth I am unable to calculate)
• Subscription to FT.com
• Subscription to The Economist
• Subscription to eIFRS (my latest move), which is vital if you translate the financial statements of any company that publishes under IFRS

Annual report masterclass in Leipzig

Last week I attended a masterclass given by Robin Bonthrone on IFRS and translating annual reports, with a focus on German to English.

A significant amount of time was given over to translation pitfalls. Especially useful was the review of latest IFRSs (especially IFRS 13).

I can recommend Robin's seminars to any translator, seasoned or otherwise, who wants to deepen their knowledge of accounting standards and how they affect us as translators.

FR > EN: "Commuter"

It occurs to me that metropolitan French has no word for "commuter" (please correct me if I'm wrong).

But Swiss French is able to (and does) borrow heavily from German. German helpfully has the word "Pendler", which has been borrowed into Swiss French as "pendulaire"(it already had the adjective "pendulaire" as in "train pendulaire").

The best the Collins-Robert can come up with is "banlieusard", which can also mean a suburban dweller who may or may not have a long commute to work. The dictionary gives the word "navetteur" but I've never heard this before, apart from in the form of "faire la navette".