Mary McNamara in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Seth Rogen, you cannot laugh at the winner of the best live-action short just because the title is in German. German, you will be stunned to learn, is an actual language.

For those of you who didn’t watch the awards show or read the results, the winner in the category was “Spielzeugland,” a German production, directed by Jochen Alexander Freydank.

Errors and Omissions Insurance for Translators is a subject that’s not new. It fell off my radar for a while, but recent questions and requests by clients made me pay attention again. I blogged about E&O Insurance back in April of 2004, prompted by and article on professional liability insurance written by Christopher Juillet and published in the April 2004 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Although the article had the technical writer in mind, many of the points were relevant to translators as well, and perhaps the publications is still available in the STC archive (the Intercom pages on the STC website were not available at the time of writing this post).

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It is almost time again for the annual regional conference of MICATA, the mid-America chapter of ATA. If you are one of my Midwestern readers or just happen to be in the Kansas City area on the weekend of March 13, look at the sessions the conference offers and consider attending. The venue, the Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, is easy to reach and has plenty of parking. The closing dinner on Saturday night is always a good opportunity to socialize with fellow translators. Unfortunately, I will have to pass since it is a bit too far for me to travel.

I made a reservation on-line on the Lufthansa website sometime in January. After a couple of days, I wanted to check some details. But when I signed in and clicked on “Booking Overview”, I received the following error message:

invalid format : ADDRESS_PO_BOX_1. (1451)

I e-mailed to LH, and within minutes they responded with my reservation code and asked me to try it again. The thing was, the above error message stopped me way before any codes could be entered. So I e-mailed again, explaining the situation and asking what I could do to work around this problem.

This time, it took longer to get an answer, and what I received wasn’t really and answer. They pointed me to Amadeus, the central reservation system, where I could look up my record. This still did not take care of the error message, though.

It goes without saying that I had faith in Germans in general and Lufthansa in particular, and I was convinced that once a technical problem was brought to their attention they would take care of it. Today, about four weeks later, I tried again, fully expecting that access to my reservation would work. However, all I got was the same error message.

Which raises the burning question: Is Lufthansa really German? Or is there a hidden department for broken website functions or perhaps even a secret handshake I don’t know about?

PS: For those who are, like me, challenged in the parsing department, it may be amusing to learn that the first result in my Google search for “ungerman” was “Ungerman Construction – Outstanding Quality.”

GM might tell us that, for our own safety, all servicing should be done by an authorized GM dealer using only genuine GM parts. Toyota might say that swapping your engine could reduce the reliability of your car. And Mazda could say that those who throw a supercharger on their Miatas frequently exceed the legal speed limit.

But we’d never accept this corporate paternalism as a justification for welding every car hood shut and imposing legal liability on car buffs tinkering in their garages. After all, the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.

Fred von Lohmann of the EFF talking about Apple’s defense of the iPhone DRM, which happened in reaction to the EFF request that the Copyright Office consider specific exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) rules against circumventing DRM, the first of exemption being for “computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute lawfully obtained software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications with computer programs on the telephone handset.”

[See ars technica.]

[2/18/2009: Apple’s “Responsive Comment.”]