The guys Geoff Pullum is looking for are http://www.translationgold.com/–just google the phrase and check the source of the result pages. The priority audience for their translations seems to be machines rather than humans and their primary aim is to boost Google rankings for pages written in the original language. Since you can achieve the same…
Mr B may be between jobs, but there’s no end to the man’s industry. Here he is in action up at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. [ “The world is inhabited by two categories of people,” anticipated officer Fumero to himself as he slunk after the couple through the Plaza Real and into the…
MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian (via Transblawg) is rightly surprised that the latest OED update only manages to take portobello mushrooms back to 1990. They appear in 1989 in Bruno Ellmer’s Classical and Contemporary Italian Cooking for Professionals and in the 1942 edition of Agriculture Decisions, a publication by the US Dept of Agriculture, which is…
Not many people know this, but apparently (background) he went up to his host Patijn and demanded something that better reflected France’s phenomenal contribution to European society. “What kind of thing had you got in mind?” asked the mayor. “Well,” said Chirac, who had noted with envy the PR points scored by Mitterrand with the…
Dave has kindly sent me the URL of the online version of a superb book packed with brilliant photos, The story of the Tour de France by Bill and Carol McGann, who in their spare time run Torelli, a Californian racing gear import business. Dave liked the blinding of Honoré Barthélémy story quoted in the…
Congratulations on Catalan users for hitting 50,000 articles on Wikipedia. Although quantity isn’t everything–articles in English are almost invariably far better than in other languages–they’re way ahead of Arabic and Klingon speakers, to mention several. Just for fun I’ve taken data for the first fifty languages by articles published from Wikipedia’s multilingual statistics and total…
Thinking about the origins of exclusivity, various biblical suggestions as to how to deal with idolaters spring to mind like a gazelle in wellington boots: Exodus 34 12 Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst…
Via GBS, from Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal for January to June 1844, where the original is attributed to the Emperor Trajan: Let Dick one summer’s day expose Before the sun his monstrous nose, And stretch his giant mouth, to cause Its shade to fall upon his jaws, With nose so long and mouth so wide, And…
The Visigoth church knocked down by the Moors was built on a Roman temple, and I’m told that both faith communities have now asked for time and space in the current building, should the request by Spanish Muslim converts prove successful. Jerry Falwell (“I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough by both Muslims…
Nick Lloyd enters 2007 a feedless and no doubt unrepentant Luddite, but he’s got an excellent story over at Iberianature (13/12/2006) about José Sideburns and his lynx waistcoat, re which: Francesc Candel‘s Han matado un hombre, han roto el paisaje (Antonio Rabinad recently sold me a copy at Sant Antoni) derives its dramatic strength in…
Moving house, so orders may take longer until mid-February - mail me first if in doubt. Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss