Chris Durban’s brochure Translation: Getting it Right – which I mentioned in this post of March 6, 2004 – has lost nothing of its effectiveness as a client-education tool and it is still available for downloading. Now there is an additional brochure by Chris Durban and Alan Melby, which explains that “using price as your sole criterion in selecting a [translation] supplier is a bad idea (maybe even a very bad idea).” It is entitled Translation: Byuing a non-commodity and can be downloaded here. I don’t know how many translation buyers will be swayed by these arguments, but it doesn’t hurt trying.

It was my first airplane ride (living in Germany at that time there weren’t that many opportunities to travel by air), and the destination was Tempelhof. Flying eliminated the border controls and tickets to Berlin were subsidized then, so with much trepidation I climbed aboard the BEA BAC 1-11 and suffered a very bumpy ride to Berlin to attend the 1967 Funkausstellung.

In recent years I learned to appreciate the location of THF. My sister lives quite close to the airport, and traveling from the U.S. through Brussels I can fly into Tempelhof and walk within 15 minutes to her apartment. Name one other capital in a large industrialized nation where that’s possible.

But it seems that THF has reached the end of the line. All signs point to a closure of airport operations in October. Even the referendum today did not help – I guess that voters see the issue from the point of view of residents rather than airport users. Had it been up to my sister, for example, Tempelhof would have been closed long ago.

BBC News reports that the Spanish police have arrested “87 Nigerians suspected of defrauding at least 1,500 people in a postal and internet lottery scam.” Checking out the list of participants of the The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference may have helped them to get better results sooner.

Found in Duden – Deutsches Universalwörterbuch the following term: der Touchbildschirm. Filed it under “Hybrid.”

Given the choice between this and this, … I forgot the point I was going to make.

A Tokyo shopkeeper about his customer, “a foreigner, either American or European or Australian, you can never tell because they all look the same:”

I asked him where he was from. He said thank you very much. Westerners can’t learn Japanese.

From: David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

I always thought that the 15 hours from San Francisco to Sydney were pushing the limit of endurance, and frequent family visits in Australia had me go that distance more often than I care to remember. Last Friday I found out that there are longer flights on this planet. I boarded Thai Airways 793 in New York and set a new personal record for being continuously suspended high above earth in an aluminum tube when I arrived after 17 hours at the other end in Bangkok. Soaking up the sun on the beach here at the Andaman Sea makes it all worthwhile, though. And the state-of-the-art on-board entertainment system (with Dr. Who episodes, Dexter, Malcolm in the Middle and tons of movies, all on demand) helped pass the time.

Photo by magical-world