Pick-A-Day

March 2024
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Whatchamacallit 91: Renouncement

This hanger was attached to a window somewhere in Germany – it is dual language with a terrible, almost literal, translation of the German text on the other side:

Liebe Gäste,

Sie verzichten gern auf ungebetene Besucher?

Dann halten Sie bitte dieses Fenster geschlossen!

Vielen Dank

[…]

On politeness… and shifting linguistics.

Back in September while visiting my Mom, there was a brief conversation about how times have changed – with respect to women.

She observed that when she got married to my Dad that she adopted his name – and I do not just mean his surname, but his full name. When she filled out mail […]

Note to somebody in my life…

I recently corrected the grammar of somebody who was writing “your welcome” whenever I thanked her for doing something over email. Instead of thanking me for pointing out her error and preventing her from looking like an uneducated idiot to a multitude of others, I’ve been treated poorly.

Maybe this comic will help her […]

Email from a “professional” translating firm…

View from Yerevan

Over the weekend I received a request from a professional translation agency to use one of my photos out of my Flickr stream on their new website.

Unfortunately my initial thought was that the professional translating firm should work on improving their English before they work on their website. I wouldn’t […]

Englisch, Englisch über alles

With living in an international city I’ve become accustomed to the fact that there are multilingual signs everywhere you would expect to find them: the train station (German, English, and French), the airport (German and English), and the Turkish Supermarket (Turkish and German).

However, I’m not offended when something is solely in German – say, […]

Google Translate Fail

I found the following sentence on Amazon.de:

Auf Lager. Zustellung kann bis zu 2 zusätzliche Tage in Anspruch nehmen.

Instead of taking the 5 seconds necessary to fully digest and understand it, I popped it into Google Translate:

In stock. Delivery may take up to 2 weeks.

After re-reading the German sentence I knew immediately […]

Sure Randy drinks the *local* Thüringen Waldquell water, but…

After a couple weeks of not remembering when I had my camera with me, I finally had my camera with me when I took a good look at the billboard below:

This is a billboard for water that comes from my (current) home state of Thüringen:

Who has the best climate protection […]

Sweet! I’m inside, but where is the exit?

Today I popped into Weimar’s remaining Douglas[1] to pick up some perfume.

I rarely go into the store because I rarely use cologne myself, but today I had to buy some perfume for a girl – a very specific perfume that is difficult to find under the best of circumstances and is never found in […]

Misogyny Gone Wild, Part Three of ???

Since it appears that my efforts to engage somebody in an educational debate over misogyny have fallen flat, probably due to my aggressiveness in wanting to understand what was going on, I want to close out the current debate by making several points that I think are important.

I’ll put them below the fold because […]

Favorite Disclaimer of All Time

I read several blogs that are devoted to issues of public transport which naturally includes discussion of the MTA, the public organization in charge of the New York City subways, buses, and trains.

All of the blogs are making note that on Wednesday, the MTA is going to unveil a new website.

While I’m sure […]