The Independent:
Just why it has taken so long for the hidden manuscripts to see the light of day is a story of Kafkaesque proportions in itself. Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka – whose surname means "magpie" in Czech – was a little-known Jewish writer with a handful of published German stories to his name when he died.
I don't know why we need to be told that Kafka means magpie in Czech - especially since it doesn't, it means jackdaw. Not that I know any Czech, but Google thinks magpie might be straka.
LATER NOTE (August 2010): here is a photo of a jackdaw on Fürther Freiheit:
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Erwähnenswert ist vielleicht noch, dass "jackdaw" auf Tschechisch richtig "kavka" und nicht "kafka" geschrieben wird.
Another example of a Kafkaesque mistranslation would be the title of Dvorak's so called "New World Symphony". It is actually called "Z Noveho Sveta" in Czech which means "From the New World" in English. There is actually a big difference between the two titles, on several levels, if you use your brain. I would not be surprised if there was a dumb Brit somewhere behind this mistranslation too. I am not sure what the official title is in German translation, but in Japanese they have the correct translation "Shin Sekai Yori", which means "From the New World". The Japanese did not translate the title from English.
Another example of the pernicious influence of Brits on the English language:there were many British broadcasters who were talking about Milosevic on CNN in the nineties and mispronouncing the "s" in the middle of the word as "s", although it is actually pronounced as "sh" (palatalized) in Serbian. And since American reporters know that Brits know foreign languages, they started mispronouncing the name as well and the mispronunciation is now the official pronunciation of this name in English, although English speakers are perfectly capable of pronouncing it the right way.
I didn't realize CNN used British reporters. On the few occasions I have watched it, it seems to like locals with a very strong accent when speaking English, possibly to create an air of authenticity.
I'm sure the 'Brits' have had a pernicious influence on English, although the pronunciation of Milosevic is not perhaps the most striking one.
I am not in a bad mood, just tired. I just finished a long project, endless pages of descriptions of circuit block diagrams in Japanese, it took me about two weeks and yesterday and today I was proofreading. So I'm dead tired.
Anyway, I generally like English people, what I meant was that Americans are too quick to adopt things like translations from another language if it comes from England. And I never saw "From the New World" here, it's always "The New World Symphony". How do they say it in German? Aus der Neuen Welt?
You know how they pronounce "Zeitgeist" here, right? Like a "z" in English. Do they know how to pronounce it in England?
I did a Ph.D. in German literature and 5 hours a week teaching students for a couple of years. A long time ago. I miss the close reading. And the Novelle. But not teaching Heinrich Böll!
If 'magpie' is so common, I wonder who started it. There are a lot of jackdaws here living in the Rathaus tower.
I don't know how they pronounce Zeitgeist in Britain - I can only fear the worst. Probably just like Vorsprung durch Technik.
Wil from Vienna ... that must be the guy who was supposed to ride his bike to Cesky Krumlov to have a beer with me when I was there but gut stuck with a rush medical translation.
Tell him that I said hello back and that he can leave a comment on my blog.
Funny also that you should mention Milosevic here. I have a feeling it was me who brought the mispronunciation up on Flefo. Had to take some heat for it, too. That was in 1999, when Nato started dropping bombs on Belgrade.
Sometimes it can be useful to adjust German pronunciations in English. For instance, I have often wondered (but never ventured as far as asking the question) how the name of a particularly eminent 18th-century German philosopher would be pronounced in English at school without everybody bursting out with laughter (his first name would also lend itself to abuse).