2012 — 20 October: Saturday

The sun is trying to break through quite uniform cloud cover¹ and the morning cuppa is weaving its usual magic spell. Better tidy things up a bit, I suppose. Wonder if I can find a duster?

Christa and I...

... had many interesting tussles over the years as I tried to help her with her data patent translation work, and both of us developed a very healthy respect for the difficulties inherent in accurate technical translation. The topic of humour — although omnipresent in our time together — never raised its head in her work.² But this article would have tickled her Teutonic funny bone. Source and snippet:

Might some funny bits actually get funnier in translation? In the title story of George Saunders's "Pastoralia," a character is paid to impersonate a cave man at a theme park, his employers providing a freshly-killed goat to roast daily, until one morning he goes to the usual spot and finds it "goatless." Among the many possible renderings of this made-up word, Saunders's German translator chose ziegenleer, a lofty-sounding melding of "goat" and "void" with no exact equivalent in English.

"The German translation is accurate, but the word combination tickles some kind of orthographical, sound-receptive funny bone," explained the Latvian translator Kaija Straumanis, the editorial director for Open Letter Books, the University of Rochester's literature in translation press and one of the conference organizers. "The more high-minded you make it sound in your head, the funnier it gets, implying a rusted-out box into which this man is staring and seeing a severe and disconcerting lack of goat."

Jascha Hoffman in NYT

I know the feeling.

Let joy...

... be unrestrained:

Though I'm pretty sure I've got all her books, and I've clipped out many a copy of her work from the Grauniad over the years and stuck them into notebooks. Geez, I'm a sad person :-)

The tedium of a rhinovirus...

... is happily mitigated by Mr Postie, dropping off my son's birthday treat:

I shall remain (slightly) dubious until I've watched it, although Joss Whedon is usually pretty reliable. [Pause] Lunch comes first. Let's see if I can't banish the sore throat blues with a blast of chicken curry :-)

Later

Well, that's 137 minutes of my life gone forever.

Footnotes

¹ Just as my son would have been tackling London hordes while he made his way down here later. I've asked him to delay his visit as I really don't want to give him what seems to be my splendid cold.
² I recall a surreal argument I had with an IBM translator from Sweden (while on a course in Germany) who provided me with ample evidence of the truth of Christa's repeated assertions that some of her fellow continentals (not just Teutons) could be awesomely humourless.