More on Morgenstern…

In order to speed up delivery of a successful Covid-19 vaccine pharma companies have been urging the EU to relax its rules on providing printed translations of outer packaging, labelling and patient leaflets into all of the languages of its Member States, as covered by Directive 2001/83/EC.

This issue is inspired by a Christian Morgenstern poem.

As many of us are prevented from travelling abroad to be with family and friends this year, perhaps we’ll have a little more time for reading. You, just like me, may already have a stack of unread classics and other reading matter on your bedside table, but nevertheless I thought I’d share a few suggestions that might also serve as a last-minute gift idea for a colleague, since I have selected books where the protagonist is a translator.

Rather than the theoretical approach taken in another blog, here I’d like to provide a few practical illustrations of cases where “conventional” translation is not appropriate and where Transcreation is called for instead.

With the debate about translation and transcreation still in full swing, it occurs to me that while it is tempting to see this as two activities along the same line, progressing in a linear fashion and merging into each other, we might have to recognize that this transition may not be smooth.

A report published in November 2019 by EF Education First, a Swedish company based in Switzerland that runs some 600 language schools in 50 countries, claims that of the four largest economies in the euro zone, meaning France, Germany, Spain and Italy, “only Germany speaks English well”.

Gender equality and gender gap is clearly a topic that will be around for a while yet.

The “gender star” has seen a sudden rise in German typography, where it previously acted as an indicator for footnotes only and was therefore rarely seen outside of academic papers.

Shopping for fashion was a much coveted activity BC (before Covid-19). On my visits to Zurich, along the Bahnhofstrasse, I would see people laden with shopping bags from the high-street brands, Mango, Zara, Massimo Dutti, as well as those of luxury brands like Bally, Luis Vuitton, Bulgari and Celine and Prada.