Google Translate

I use Google Translate in my work, and like to introduce it to advanced English students who need to do translation at work. But you need to study very closely what this great tool does and doesn’t do. Based on the World Wide Web, Google Translate is really quite helpful for suggesting collocations (word partnerships) […]

Marlee Matlin and Jack Jason

An article by Nataly Kelly landed in my intray, and it was interesting to follow up: Jack Jason is actress Marlee Matlin‘s interpreter. Watch them interact here: Do you notice the places where she “says” nothing, but gives us this look, this fabulous body language, this space where we infer and bond and relate, and […]

Marlene Dietrich: Falling in Love again – Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss

Marlene in English and German and then again in English, great German accent; followed by Caroline Nin singing franco-anglo-tinged German. ICH BIN VON KOPF BIS FUSS AUF LIEBE EINGESTELLT (Friedrich Holländer) Marlene Dietrich Ein rätselhafter Schimmer, Ein “je ne sais-pas-quoi” Liegt in den Augen immer Bei einer schönen Frau. Doch wenn sich meine Augen Bei […]

Samuel L. Jackson reads “Go the F*ck to Sleep”

Samuel L. Jackson reads the book “Go the F*ck to Sleep” by Adam Mansbach. Not in my parents’ generation, and not among some of my brothers’ families, but I do think “what the f*ck” and other similar phrases using “the fuck” as an intensifier are very prevalent indeed even in everyday family talk. I had […]

Kleiner, uralter Gott – Ancient little god

In a week we’ll be burying my mother’s ashes on Drummond. We’ve decided to read some of her poems, with a translation into English. She published a volume of them in the Wilhelm Andermann Verlag in Vienna in 1944 when she was 21; a miracle, since paper was so rare towards the end of the […]

Second graders

Joan sent me a presentation with quotes from German second graders. Most of them are mondegreens that won’t work in English, but I’ve translated some of the others into English for fun: Garden gnomes have red hats so they don’t get mowed down. Men can’t get married to men because then who would wear the […]

The bare necessities

The students at the biotech company I teach at work veeeery hard, and I’m just translating a study on biotechnology and pharmaceuticals in Munich that is super interesting, so you’d think that’s what we’ll be discussing next lesson, right? Wrong. There was a request, you see, to compare the German and the English text of […]