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Off topic: A Walk on the Basque Side
Thread poster: Mervyn Henderson (X)
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@Marjolein Jan 21, 2021

Good story, Marjolein! It's been years since I drank Basque patxaran liqueur. I never was very much into spirits, bar the odd G&T or a glass of Jameson's or Bushmills whiskey, but I stopped drinking patxaran because after three or four it had a tendency to deliver a karate chop to the back of my neck as soon as I stood up from the table.

There are various brands, and one of them, quite frankly, isn't very good, very bad quality, and it doesn't just do the karate chop, no, it gets yo
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Good story, Marjolein! It's been years since I drank Basque patxaran liqueur. I never was very much into spirits, bar the odd G&T or a glass of Jameson's or Bushmills whiskey, but I stopped drinking patxaran because after three or four it had a tendency to deliver a karate chop to the back of my neck as soon as I stood up from the table.

There are various brands, and one of them, quite frankly, isn't very good, very bad quality, and it doesn't just do the karate chop, no, it gets you down on the ground and gives you a real kicking. Only one, though, "Patxi" (not its real name).

But I found out that Patxi didn't have a reputation as a lower-quality item in the Basque Country alone. A long time ago I was in a restaurant in Madrid, where patxaran wouldn't be a natural first, second, third, or maybe even fourth choice after dessert, and we asked for it. We asked the waiter what brand it was, and he said, "I don't know, I'll check, but ... it's not Patxi, don't worry."
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Christopher Schröder
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And another thing ... Jan 22, 2021

... oh, I've forgotten what it was. Oh yes, I remember now. It's simply a shameful ploy to keep this thread at the top of the pile.

Please feel free to jump in and register your fully justifiable outrage, disgust and outrage. I couldn't think of another word at the end there.


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Outrage and disgust Jan 25, 2021

As someone urged a few days ago, I am certainly keen to place on record my disgusted outrage, and indeed my outraged disgust, at this blatant thread-bumping. There ought to be a law against this kind of thing. Why they're allowed to get away with plugging A Walk on the Basque Side as an ideal option for visitors to the Basque Country thirsting for culture, history, local customs and traditions against a pleasant backdrop of food and drink hosted by a local lass with all the facts and figures at ... See more
As someone urged a few days ago, I am certainly keen to place on record my disgusted outrage, and indeed my outraged disgust, at this blatant thread-bumping. There ought to be a law against this kind of thing. Why they're allowed to get away with plugging A Walk on the Basque Side as an ideal option for visitors to the Basque Country thirsting for culture, history, local customs and traditions against a pleasant backdrop of food and drink hosted by a local lass with all the facts and figures at her fingertips is simply beyond my ken.

Feel free to add your protest right here, on a thread which purportedly promises an unforgettable experience of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell in a picturesque environment. The very idea!

Thank you.

[Edited at 2021-01-25 07:22 GMT]
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Count me in! Jan 25, 2021

I'm even more outraged, having checked out that infamous, dedicated website, at how well it reads in English, how fluently and naturally it flows, how it adds to an already wondrous, sensuous experience of travel dreaming.

I mean, if a translation sounds as good as an excellent piece of writing in the original language, how long before a translator starts claiming to be called a writer?

Do we really need/want this? I, for one, most certainly do not.


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Travelling (and thread-bumping) Jan 25, 2021

I visited Europe in 2018. Not many countries because of the tight budget. Nevertheless, there were two memorable events during the trip.

When the World Cup final took place I happened to be in Lille. As many people remember, the French team was one of the final teams and, eventually, the winning team. I’m not a football fan (no offense) but I was moved by the enthusiasm. Crazy parties that night, of course. Everyone was singing and dancing in the street. Even the police looked les
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I visited Europe in 2018. Not many countries because of the tight budget. Nevertheless, there were two memorable events during the trip.

When the World Cup final took place I happened to be in Lille. As many people remember, the French team was one of the final teams and, eventually, the winning team. I’m not a football fan (no offense) but I was moved by the enthusiasm. Crazy parties that night, of course. Everyone was singing and dancing in the street. Even the police looked less repugnant.

Then I went to Amsterdam, that free and diverse city. I joined the gay pride there. As I was parading in the Parade, feeling underdressed, or overdressed (?), and thinking I’ve never seen so many dick-shaped objects in my life, I was very touched. Growing up in China and having lived there for more than three decades, I was a stranger to such tolerance and freedom.

Alas, last year, I planned to visit Europe again, to see more places and my friends there. Some of them planned to come to Mauritius too. It’ll all have to be later …
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Well, really ... Jan 25, 2021

... not just PLF, but Zibow as well. Is there no end to this? Disgraceful, I call it.

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Christopher Schröder
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Otzarreta. Not translation- or tourism-related. Or funny. Tree geeks only. Caveat lector. Jan 25, 2021

Was just having an amble around Otzarreta forest during my lunch break, ran across this and wondered if you might be able to enlighten me, Mervyn:

“In the specific case of the Otzarreta forest ((of overgrown pollarded trees)), experts calculate that these magnificent branches we admire so much will start to break in a matter of 75 years.

“Researchers at the Trepalari association or the Leitza Aizkolaris Group are examining ways of recovering these trees, which tell a tale of Basque history and the territory’s biodiversity.”


Why don’t they just cut them off so they regrow?

In a former life, I trained and briefly worked professionally as a hedgelayer (and my son is training as a tree surgeon) so I have some experience with trees.

(Hedgelaying, for the uninitiated, is a dying rural craft which is kinda like coppicing which is kinda like pollarding. With coppicing, you cut broadleaf trees off at the base and they send up new shoots. Do this on a regular cycle and you get more material from the tree over time. Pollarding is the same, only you cut them off a few feet up so animals don’t eat the young shoots. With hedgelaying, you coppice the trees but retain a few stems which you weave into a fence to retain and shelter livestock while the new shoots grow.)

So, pollarding a formerly pollarded tree to restore it is such an obvious solution I’m wondering why they’ve discounted it...



[Edited at 2021-01-25 12:53 GMT]


Mervyn Henderson (X)
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Not ... Jan 25, 2021

... you too, Chris. Aren't you ashamed of yourself, bumping up this A Walk on the Basque Side thread on the duff pretext of a reasonable question from a well-informed point of view?

The short answer is I don't know. I remember trying to make sense of all the pollarding and depollarding and/or repollarding or retropollarding, and I might have glossed over it a bit in A Walk on the Basque Side. I also remember that not a lot of people know what "trasmocho" is in Spanish here, but then
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... you too, Chris. Aren't you ashamed of yourself, bumping up this A Walk on the Basque Side thread on the duff pretext of a reasonable question from a well-informed point of view?

The short answer is I don't know. I remember trying to make sense of all the pollarding and depollarding and/or repollarding or retropollarding, and I might have glossed over it a bit in A Walk on the Basque Side. I also remember that not a lot of people know what "trasmocho" is in Spanish here, but then a lot of English speakers don't know what "pollarding" is.

But ...

help is at hand for anyone out there who really wants to find out what pollarding is all about - simply specify a visit to the Otzarreta Forest when taking Vanessa up on her Walk on the Basque Side. Couldn't be easier.

Now please, seriously, stop bumping up this A Walk on the Basque Side thread willy-nilly. Thank you. Comprehensive information available at the A Walk on the Basque Side website.
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Christopher Schröder
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Labour of love Jan 25, 2021

I really don’t envy you that translation job, Mervyn.

It’s the kind of thing we used to do years ago as light relief from an endless stream of accounts and business plans. We’d get these little tourist pamphlets in (this was long before every village had a website) for all these poxy Swedish places we’d never heard of.

It turned out every time though that Poxås and Poxköping were disproportionately and downright unfairly endowed with a breathtaking array of e
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I really don’t envy you that translation job, Mervyn.

It’s the kind of thing we used to do years ago as light relief from an endless stream of accounts and business plans. We’d get these little tourist pamphlets in (this was long before every village had a website) for all these poxy Swedish places we’d never heard of.

It turned out every time though that Poxås and Poxköping were disproportionately and downright unfairly endowed with a breathtaking array of exciting attractions, both natural (generally some special bits of rock and a rare orchid) and cultural (monthly barn dances and an old wooden house).

So we’d put in all this effort researching every last unique species of grass and breed of shire horse (and that was pre-Google effort too) and jazzing it all up to make it a go-to destination for the tourist hordes, up there with London and Paris and even, dare I say it, the Basque Country...

... only to fall at the final hurdle, as there would always be some pesky little something somewhere in that pamphlet that no human that ever lived, and certainly not the Poxholm municipal tourist board that wrote it, could explain, and you’d end up having to bodge it, thus sacrificing any sense of a job well done.

I’m well out of it now. I get the “labour of love” thing, totally, but these days if I wasn’t an experienced pollarder and I came up against pollarding, I think I’d scream. But as you can probably tell, I don’t have the passion for Poxsund that you do for Basqueville. I’m just a lazy bugger who likes his comfort zone.

Today’s great translation challenge is whether to hyphenate emerging market debt.
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@Chris - to pollard or not to pollard Jan 25, 2021

Indeed. I mentioned in the initial post that it was pretty tough in places, kind of tourism-plus, plus flora and fauna and some biological/chemical/physics terms, as I remember. Any kind of similar tourist guide can be so all-encompassing- those jobs talk about anything and everything.

In fact, I wrote something on that technical/non-technical criterion a few years ago on ProZ, about being told by a customer "this is a really easy translation, not technical at all - a Town Hall webs
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Indeed. I mentioned in the initial post that it was pretty tough in places, kind of tourism-plus, plus flora and fauna and some biological/chemical/physics terms, as I remember. Any kind of similar tourist guide can be so all-encompassing- those jobs talk about anything and everything.

In fact, I wrote something on that technical/non-technical criterion a few years ago on ProZ, about being told by a customer "this is a really easy translation, not technical at all - a Town Hall website, so it's dead easy". Right. And suddenly you're translating all those descriptions of stellar vaults in Romanesque churches and quotes mentioning the place in the Edict of Nantes, in the language of hundreds of years ago, not to mention reports on witches and heretics and stake-burnings by Torquemada's Spanish Inquisition, which nobody was expecting, of course.

But this job wasn't all like that, not by a long chalk, plus there wasn't any hurry for it, so it was one of those jobs you can just tootle along with, alternately dipping into it and leaving it aside among other jobs with shorter timelines.
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Something sweet and Basque... Jan 27, 2021

The Basque Burnt Cheesecake recipe from my beloved Nigella Lawson – a scrumptious dessert, tried and tested on New Year's Day (though we left out the liquorice sauce and served it with a coulis de fruit rouges): https://www.nigella.com/recipes/basque-burnt-cheesecake

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Nigella, naughty but nice Jan 27, 2021

Thanks, PLF!! Nigella's dad used to look as if he ate her burnt cheesecake every day when he was cooking books for Margaret Thatcher back in the day.

There's actually a story behind it. A famous Basque chef, Sabela Betetzeko Helburua, was making cheesecake one day, but someone rang him and the conversation went on for so long he completely forgot. By the time he pulled it out of the oven, the top and sides were all burnt, and he was about to throw it away and start again, but his p
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Thanks, PLF!! Nigella's dad used to look as if he ate her burnt cheesecake every day when he was cooking books for Margaret Thatcher back in the day.

There's actually a story behind it. A famous Basque chef, Sabela Betetzeko Helburua, was making cheesecake one day, but someone rang him and the conversation went on for so long he completely forgot. By the time he pulled it out of the oven, the top and sides were all burnt, and he was about to throw it away and start again, but his partner chef, a man called Jaten Duguna Gara, said No, wait, let's turn a disaster into an opportunity here, Sabela, and market it to the punters as Basque Burnt Cheese Cake. And it's 100% fictitious, too, that story.

The names are fictitious as well, but both of them mean something daft, and so it's time for the:


1st ProZ.com Basque Burnt Cheesecake Chef Names Competition


All you have to do is write what the two phrases mean on a postcard and send it to the usual address in Syracuse, New York. First correct answer out of the hat wins an evening with Nigella Lawson and a year's supply of her cake. Management have asked me to add this little note of no importance:

******

Management wishes to point out that this competition does not actually exist, and frankly we are getting rather tired of this. There is no prize, for God's sake. We do not know Nigella Lawson. Or her father Nigel. Do not send a postcard. We will burn it like the cheesecake.

By simply reading this, you are committing yourself to a solemn undertaking to send us 1,000 dollars at your earliest convenience. This does not constitute advice, an offer, an advisory service or a recipe. Investments may go down as well as up. Thank you.

[Edited at 2021-01-27 09:27 GMT]

[Edited at 2021-01-27 12:14 GMT]
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Very funny! Jan 27, 2021

I've just google-translated those 2 names; you're so very clever, Mervyn!

I'm not sending 1,000 dollars to Syracuse though. And I won't hear a single bad word uttered against my Nigella: her father might be persona non grata, but she's a Domestic Goddess, even a Goddess tout court, and I love her.

The Basque Burnt Cheesecake follows in the glorious footsteps of many different – but all delicious – cakes and desserts made from cream cheese/ricotta, and so on.
I
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I've just google-translated those 2 names; you're so very clever, Mervyn!

I'm not sending 1,000 dollars to Syracuse though. And I won't hear a single bad word uttered against my Nigella: her father might be persona non grata, but she's a Domestic Goddess, even a Goddess tout court, and I love her.

The Basque Burnt Cheesecake follows in the glorious footsteps of many different – but all delicious – cakes and desserts made from cream cheese/ricotta, and so on.
I feel about it so strongly, just as much as you do about those bloody Torres oranges, Mervyn.
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Nigella Jan 27, 2021

I wouldn't dream of lambasting Nigella. Especially since, with her background, presumably she could have sat around her entire life eating the cheesecake instead of making it in publications and on TV, so more power to her.

I was expecting some Google translation. I tested them myself, in fact. Far too easy.


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Christopher Schröder
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Ewwww! Jan 27, 2021

Much as we love Nigella's Victoria sandwich, liquorice? Liquorice?! On a cheesecake?!!

As a cheesecake connoisseur of long standing, I would argue that NOTHING should EVER be poured over a cheesecake. No chocolate, no fruit coulis, nothing. And certainly not liquorice. What an abomination.

Oh, and Mervyn. Are you on commission for driving traffic to Google Translate as well now?


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A Walk on the Basque Side






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