woodworking dictionary in Danish

"Børge Askholm" <baskholm (A) webspeed.dk> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
>
>
> For a lot of yrs I've been working on a dictionary of woodworking tools.
> It's a Danish one, written in Danish, for Danes especially, but may be of
> some interrest if you understand a little Danish.
>
> During the work I found out that you can hardly use any expression or
> discription from one language to another, even you are able to translate
the
> words.
>

For no particular reason, this reminds me of a project which has little or
nothing to do with woodworking, but . . . . what the heck . . . . I'm
waiting for glue to dry on an 8-sided construction and have nothing better
to do. So, here's the story . . . .



In the 1500's a German doctor named George Bauer became interested in
mining; mineral extraction; smelting and metalworking. As a hobby, over a
period of about 20 years, he wrote a book describing all the processes that
were involved.



The tricky part is that the crafts were passed along as oral tradition. The
craftsmen were illiterate Germans and Bauer was writing in Latin. This
required some creativity in creating Latin terms for items and procedures
what were explained to him in colloquial, 16th century German. He published
the book in Latin with a shit-load (technical term) of descriptive woodcuts.
The book was titled De Re Metallica. He published under the name of
Georgius Agricola.



Now . . . . flash forward about 400 years.



A mining engineer, classical scholar and Stanford graduate (this is one
guy) and his wife decided to translate this sucker into English. As a hobby
project, this fits the description of what my momma would term "a real
booger". To do this, they had to be comfortable with Latin, familiar with
the technical metallurgic processes involved and sufficiently conversant in
German to recognize linguistic complications involved in the transition from
Kraut to Latin. The English translation was first published in The Mining
Magazine, London in 1912.



Both versions . . . . original Latin and the English translation are still
available on Amazon.



The translator was Herbert C. Hoover, 31st president of the U.S.



Gotta check some glue joints . . . . . . .