A couple of languages are bouncing around in my head. The dominant ones are the language I use most often and my native language; the others are more or less on the back burner. I don’t get them mixed up. When I lived in Japan, many multi-lingual people were communicating in a kind of compound English/Japanese syntax (“I couldn’t make it last year, so kotoshi-wa zettai nanda kedo, I may be in Japan around this time”). I am not doing that. I keep my language output separated. But when I see written words, I often look at them as German words even if they are not. The results can be quite funny. At least I think so – just like some sort of multi-language pun.

Update: Dodge County man hit, killed by Jeep while getting his mail identified

For this and similar, sometimes baffling, sometimes hilarious crash blossoms, check out Crash Blossoms.

*Newspaper headlines written in a telegraphic style which often omits the copula and therefore lends itself to syntactic ambiguity, usually of the garden path type.

Just think about the problems you could have with English.

via …is a blog

Only today did I get around to Gabriele Zöttl’s post on common difficulties in localization jobs, which appeared in her blog Über-Setzer-Logbuch this past March. In it, she refers to an interesting and detailed article by English-to-Czech translator Miloš Průdek.

Průdek’s article, entitled Localization, shows how collaboration between software developers, UI designers and translators is essential for successful localization, and how (and why) you should go about organizing such a team. It explains some common mistakes software developers tend to do unintentionally and is a good primer for anyone planning a localization project or having discussions with clients about the prerequisites for an upcoming localization project.

Many (most?) people think that has already happened. Many of those same people, of course, spell “your” as “ur.” Established publications edited by grown-ups, however, are holding the line.

(From Sharp Points by Bill Walsh.)

In German, this question has an added wrinkle: “Email” (as in [ema:j], das; -s, -s) is an entirly different word with an entirely different pronunciation. Electronic mail is “die E-Mail.”

One of the great discoveries during my visit to Saarbrücken was this excellent telephone message pad (click to enbiggen):

This morning my stats program logged a surprisingly specific, albeit totally not translation-related Google search: is a subsidy pin phone specific or sim specific? But wait, back in 2006 I had a post about SIM subsidy locking and Sim locks, and that’s probably why the Google search led to this blog. The 2006 question about a German translation for SIM subsidy lock (which is not the locking/unlocking of a SIM chip via PIN) remains unanswered.

Für alle, die das immer noch nicht geschnallt haben (und das sind eine ganze Menge):

 
(via BeF’s Soup)

See and hear Stephen Fry:

… and 49 other favorite words as listed by BBC News Magazine.

If you are too lazy to click, here are the top five:

1. Defenestrate
2. Poodle-faker
3. Omphaloskepsis
4. Mallemaroking
5. Spanghew

Interested now?