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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Copy editing a problem in Germany, too

Posted July 24th, 2008 at 11:15 AM by Jon Ham

The decline and fall of good copy editing in American journalism has been remarked upon extensively. Apparently, though, the problem is international. On the Web site of the German magazine Der Spiegel (it’s Deutschland’s equivalent of TIME) is this notice:

1:42 p.m.: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The air base in question (where I was stationed for two years) is Ramstein Air Base, not Rammstein Air Base, which gets its name from the nearby town of Ramstein, not Rammstein. As far as I can tell, there is no Rammstein in Germany.

I’m thinking this must be a glitch in the translation because misspelling Ramstein would be like TIME spelling it Anndrews Air Force Base. Or maybe Der Spiegel has outsourced their copy desk duties to India.

7 Responses to “Copy editing a problem in Germany, too”

  1. steveegg Says:

    Maybe they’re thinking of the group Rammstein.

  2. clayj Says:

    I was going to post the exact same thing, Steve.

  3. Jon Ham Says:

    I didn’t even know there WAS a group called Rammstein. Should have googled them. I see that their name has a connection to the Air Force Base in a grotesque sort of way:

    Rammstein takes its name indirectly from the West German town of Ramstein-Miesenbach, the site of the flight show disaster on August 28, 1988.

    I guess the Spiegel copy editor is a fan of Tanz Metall.

  4. steveegg Says:

    That’s what we of the younger generation are here for ;-)

  5. clayj Says:

    Apparently they didn’t feel like posting the reason… Obama had said he wanted to go to Ramstein to visit wounded servicemen in the hospital there. The Department of Defense turned him down yesterday, saying they could not allow this while he’s on the political part of his trip. He did visit wounded soldiers in Iraq, but he was part of a Congressional delegation at that time, so that was acceptable.

  6. No Runny Eggs » Blog Archive » The Morning Scramble, part 1 - 7/25/2008 Says:

    [...] a related note, her dad was the only one to catch a rather embarrassing error by Der Spiegel; the copy editor confused Ramstein [...]

  7. EllieXd Says:

    The hard working students will learn your theme about this good topic and buy the doctoral thesis from the dissertation writing service.

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