You may have noticed that the World Cup was big this year in the US. I’ve never seen it bigger, at least not around Turtle Bay, I guess on account of all the Germans who seemed to fill every bar on Second Avenue at times. But it’s not just Germans; it’s a pretty international set in the neighborhood of the UN. It looks like the set of Star Fleet Academy when the UN is in session.  And all the aliens among us, legal or otherwise, love football, I mean soccer.
So that’s what you would expect here at Star Fleet, but it looks like the World Cup virus is crossing the quarantine into the homeland of American football.
Global brands like Nike have ridden the World Cup wave to global marketing mastery. (Nike scored [...]

Lena Meyer-Landrut, a 19-year-old amateur singer, won the Eurovision Song Contest over the weekend.
More than 100 million viewers across Europe watched Lena’s improbable triumph Saturday night as her catchy love song “Satellite” beat out the 24 other finalists in the singing competition.
From the Hollywood Report: “While most of the acts competing were professionals, Lena is an absolute beginner. She was a complete unknown who had never taken a singing lesson before she won Germany’s televised qualifiers for the contest earlier this year. Since then she has become a national celebrity and her rushed-out debut album, ‘My Cassette Player,’ an instant hit. She has had three singles in the German top five at the same time, something not even the Beatles or Michael Jackson have managed here.”
The Hollywood Report points to [...]

Schadenfreude. Know that one? It’s a German expression that means “to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others.” A fine word, favored by middle-brow intellectual posers. Hey, works for me.
But it doesn’t go far enough. I think translators need their own special word to describe that special feeling of “pleasure in the misfortunate translations of others.” There has got to be a great German word for that too. I just don’t know it. I commission Z, the translator formerly known as Jost Zetsche, to identify the expression for me, but so far he’s ignoring my emails.
Well, I can wait no more. This is a concept that needs branding. Even the NYT is hopping on the “Translation Fail” gravy train. These are some of the best I’ve ever seen. My big [...]

Certain countries are just better for ugly Americans than others. Whenever I don my touring togs (Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts and sandals over socks), I like the natives to speak my lingo, savvy? That’s what makes Legoland in Billund a must-see on my Euro-itinerary, since all Danes speak English.
But at what price to the Danes? I recently saw a documentary on YouTube, a shocking exposé on the Disappearance of Danish in Denmark. The report reveals that the “Danish language has collapsed into meaningless guttural sounds.”
Since my Danish is hardly any better than that of the Danes, I asked my favorite Danish translator, Jane Kjems, to take a look at it. Years ago, she translated a biker movie script into Danish for us, which posed lots of interesting terminology problems, but that’s another [...]

What’s the idea? The German Language is the idea.
“German is the language at the heart of Europe,” says German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle.Westerwelle has stressed the beauty of German repeatedly ever since a press conference in late September, when a BBC reporter asked him if, possibly, the foreign minister  would answer a question in English. Westerwelle, who can speak English fluently, rebuffed the request saying, “Just like it goes without saying that English is spoken in Great Britain, it is customary to speak German in Germany.” That’s an interesting exchange, because that obviously wasn’t the custom of the BBC reporter.
So Westerwelle offered to meet the reporter for tea and speak English there, but added that “this is Germany.” It appears English in the privacy of one’s own home is acceptable, in [...]

Frank Pastormerlo, whose job is to prospect and qualify new clients for us in the medical device industry,  is still learning the ropes. He came into my office today in a state of shock.  “Is it true that everyone in the medical device industry speaks English?”
“No way.” I said, “It’s a global business. There’s plenty of people that don’t speak English. Where did you hear that?”
“I just got off the phone with this guy who said they didn’t need to translate because everyone in their business spoke English.”
I love moments like these, were I can kick back in my chair and start pontificating instead of working. (Frank didn’t seem quite so pleased since he had a lot more calls to make, but what the hell, I’m the boss, right?)
“Well, he [...]