Deutsch für Amerikaner, my mom’s old German textbook (copyright 1960) is an interesting social-history artifact. Here’s a passage where a university student from Germany discusses the American family he’s staying with. (All these people are fictional of course, but intended to be representative of their time and place.) WHO IS HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD? The… Continue reading American girls won’t get up early to shine your shoes
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Clara Wieck Schumann (book review)
If you’ve ever read The Gulag Archipelago, you probably remember the story where nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin: The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! […] They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! […] Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man!… Continue reading Clara Wieck Schumann (book review)
RIP Ray Furness
The world recently lost an inspiring teacher and all-round excellent person: Prof. Raymond Furness of the University of St. Andrews. He was the first German tutor I met at St. Andrews, at a reception for overseas students. I saw “German” on his name tag and said, “Oh!” but when he turned my way I came… Continue reading RIP Ray Furness
These pants.
More avant-garde poetry brought to you by a machine translation system that is still learning the ropes: I put my son on my son, no. 6, and he scratched herself, thought it was all about this pants, I thought that it comes from these pants. I am still sending a picture of these pants, I… Continue reading These pants.
An appreciation of Aileen Derieg
In 2007, I was a frumpy housewife in small-town Ontario with two children running in all directions and two German degrees gathering dust in the attic. My career up to that point had consisted of a couple of poems one of my professors had seen fit to publish, an annual review of the German legal… Continue reading An appreciation of Aileen Derieg
Three translations of Parzival
Translating Wolfram’s Parzival has got to be a total nightmare, though it’s probably also fun. His style is, by his own admission, comparable to a startled hare darting this way and that. This applies to individual sentences but also to the entire narrative. Some questions you may ask yourself when reading Parzival include: Did we… Continue reading Three translations of Parzival
German adjective endings in English
The phrase “the Romanische Café” caught my eye in an English-language book about Berlin and I got so stuck on this phrase that I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the paragraph. Why? Because I would have written “the Romanisches Café” for logical reasons, but the version above also makes a kind of sense and… Continue reading German adjective endings in English
Easy for humans, hard for computers
Machine translation can do impressive things, as I’ve noted before. However, there are some things humans do easily that would be very difficult (perhaps impossible) to build into MT programs. I’m part of an ongoing machine translation post editing job for a client who needs to translate large amounts of customer feedback coming in every… Continue reading Easy for humans, hard for computers
Two songs
On Sunday I volunteered to sit in a basement for several hours doing very little. I forgot to bring something to read so I jotted down a couple of Lieder and had a go at translating them. The results, after some fine tuning at home, are below. Both of these could be improved – if… Continue reading Two songs
Ask your doctor if the blood of a virgin is right for you!
A summary of the medieval story Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue. If you enjoyed the now-defunct website The Toast, you might like this too. If not…I have other posts. Go here if you’ve never seen an American pharmaceutical ad. Are you covered in disgusting sores? Losing fingers and toes? Suffering from gangrene and blindness?… Continue reading Ask your doctor if the blood of a virgin is right for you!