Where were you on April 26, 1986? We were in Tokyo, and M. was six months pregnant – which made us particularly anxious when we heard the news. Watch the interactive essay of photographer Paul Fusco about the dark legacy of Chernobyl and the horrifying human consequences of the event 20 years ago.

Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.

From: Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

It took me a while to fix the Lizard skin, but it is up and running again. The skin selector still has this quirk where you first have to select the skin that’s up before selecting the other one. I can live with it – hope you can.

Go Translators, an Internet portal that dubs itself “The only Translators Directory in 30 Languages,” has been a steady visitor to my e-mail inbox for a long while. I kind of doubt that such free-floating databases have any value for freelance translators. Even the ATA directory and ATA-related directories lead to very few referrals – but the reason for that may be that my name starts with a “W” and potential clients don’t get there until Friday late afternoon, and only if A through V is busy.

Today, Go Translators let me know that they had to clean house “faced with the mediocrity of a number of profiles that undermine our tool.” All in all, so they told me, they deleted over 14,000 files:

• all empty CVs
• all the CVs of more or less amusing oddballs
• all CVs in which the language level would prevent one from believing that they could be the work of quality linguists
• all the CVs in which the email address was no longer valid.

I would have been interested in reading some of the oddball résumés, especially the amusing ones.

If you want to find out if you are taking more or less than your share of the planet, there is a quiz that lets you compare your Ecological Footprint with the existing biological capacity of the world: an average of 4.5 acres of biologically productive space for each of the 6.2 billion people on Earth. I wonder, though, if having a large number of children and moving into an apartment in the city (factors which would get you a “better” result in the quiz) would really help to improve ecological quality.

… The only reason “Lost in Translation” had America’s shallow trendoids gushing was because – let’s be honest – it glamorized overindulgence in alcohol, propagated the myth that straight guys actually care about women as equal human beings and because its screen was filled with more self-righteous strutting and self-pity than we’ve seen since all of those pointless Euro pix flooded U.S. art houses back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Wow! What a sentence! Credit goes to Tom O’Neil who so fondly remembered Lost in Translation in the LA Times while speculating on the success or failure of Sofia Coppola’s new movie Marie-Antoinette in the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. You can find my 2¢ about LiT here.

English is the most invasive linguistic species in the world, according to Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University, and slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. More in the New York Times article Two Literary Festivals Will Highlight Endangered Languages.

Interpreters and Translators came in as number 30 in Money magazine’s Best Jobs in America list. Not that bad, really… How did they do it?

Using Salary.com compensation data, we eliminated jobs with average pay below $50,000; total employment of less than 15,000; dangerous work environments; or fewer than 800 annual job openings, including both new and replacement positions. Next we rated positions by stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field. We then ranked the jobs, giving double weight to compensation and percentage growth … Any job that fell in the bottom third of two job-satisfaction categories, or in the pay or growth category, was removed from consideration for the top 10.

Average job growth in the translation and interpreting field is given as 19.88%, average pay (salary and bonuses) as $38,159.

Ob Redeschwall der Managerin oder Stammeleien vom Minister, Dolmetscher bleiben Profis – Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen eines anonymen Berufes

Quelle: derStandard.at

Next Tuesday are elections here in mid-Missouri. Ever since moving here I had this feeling of unease about the unreasonably wide sidewalks and pedways and the large number of parks in neighboring Columbia while our roads are dangerously crowded. I did not move into rural America just to sit in traffic jams – well, the locals call them traffic jams. So I am pleased to report that there is a candidate for 2nd Ward Council, challenging incumbent Chris Janku in the upcoming election, who has understood this problem and made it his priority: Brian Toohey. I quote from his ad in today’s Columbia Daily Tribune:

Back To Basics. Our roads are dangerous and lack capacity. But we have 10ft pedways and 6ft sidewalks and parks galore. Chris Janku has had 5 terms… 15 years to make our roads better… It’s time for a change.

Listening to: Joni Mitchell (1970)

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„Die Übersetzung von Literatur ist allerdings eher eine brotlose Kunst.“ (Angelika Eberhardt, Sprecherin des Verbandes der Konferenzdolmetscher)

Quelle: Zwischen Sprachen und Kulturen, Die Welt.de, 1. April 2006