Crows

When I first came to Germany I was struck by this type of crow, which I wasn't familiar with from the south of England:

Turns out it's a Hooded Crow, Corvus cornix, which does appear in the UK, but just not in the southeast; they are mostly in Ireland and Scotland.

In Germany they live along the Elbe, but are otherwise no more common.

OWAD's "Hoist the Jolly Roger"

OWAD's phrase of the day is "hoist the Jolly Roger", which according to them means "get ready to fight" and has 40,000 Google hits. They give an example from a BBC news headline: "St. Pauli ready to HOIST THE JOLLY ROGER over the Bundesliga" and suggest smuggling this new phrase into your conversation by saying "Get ready to hoist the Jolly Roger, the competition are about to drastically reduce prices".

I guess you could try that, but you'd certainly raise a few eyebrows. "Hoist the Jolly Roger" is something you'd only say in the context of pirates; as OWAD points out, the Jolly Roger is the pirate flag. The one with the skull and crossbones. The one St. Pauli fans use, hence the BBC headline.

Google UK gets 83 hits for "hoist the Jolly Roger". All of them are connected to piracy or the Adam and the Ants song of this name.

Elizabeth Shaw

Elizabeth Shaw (* 4. Mai 1920 in Belfast; † 27. Juni 1992 in Berlin) war eine irische Grafikerin und Kinderbuchautorin.
Elizabeth Shaw wurde in Irland geboren und wuchs in England auf. Sie studierte von 1938 bis 1940 in London an der Chelsea School of Art. 1940 leistete sie Kriegsdienst und arbeitete bis 1944 als Mechanikerin. 1944 heiratete sie den Bildhauer und Maler René Graetz, der sich im Londoner Exil befand. Mit ihm zog sie 1946 nach Berlin-Zehlendorf.
In Berlin arbeitete sie zunächst für den Ulenspiegel, dann vor allem für den Eulenspiegel und ab 1950 auch als Karikaturistin für das Neue Deutschland. 1959 porträtierte sie 43 Mitglieder der Akademie der Künste (Steinlithographien). Sie illustrierte Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht, schrieb eigene Kinderbücher und illustrierte diese. Es entstanden weitere Illustration zu Büchern von James Krüss, Gerhard Holtz-Baumert, Heinz Kahlau und Rainer Kirsch. Sie starb 1992 in Berlin-Pankow, wo jetzt die 2. Grundschule ihren Namen trägt.
Für ihre Arbeit erhielt sie unter anderen den Kunstpreis der DDR, den Hans-Baltzer-Preis, den Gutenberg-Preis der Stadt Leipzig und den Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis der Akademie der Künste Berlin.

http://www.artshaw.com/

Kontaktperson

This is a word you come across a lot in German. While its direct translation, "contact person", is occasionally used in BrE, it is not very common.

858 Google hits for "contact person" site:uk>

(Of the first ten hits, two are German companies, three are companies from other countries, and one is an "out of contact person", leaving three remaining good hits on that page.)

863 Google hits for "contact person" (in English) site:de >

More hits in Germany than in the UK does not suggest this is always the best translation.

So what do you say in the UK? Let's take some examples in German and find the equivalent.

Rektoratsbeauftragte und Kontaktpersonen zu ausseruniversitären Institutionen und universitätsnahen Einrichtungen >

This is above a table of names and phone numbers of people to contact about institutions linked to a distance university (foundations, societies).

A similar page at the Open University is labelled:

Contact Us

You can contact us at: >

Another page uses a noun:

UK contacts

Worldwide contacts >

The University of Cambridge also uses "contacts">.

Names are not provided. E-mail addresses are not for individuals; they start with "enquiries" - which is also a useful word in this context.

The University of Essex uses contact addresses, contact details>, contacts> and this line:

To contact staff in the Vice-Chancellor's office>

(Here, names are given.)

Or this line, above a similar table to the German one:

Academic Section Staff Contact List>

Christmas tree statistics

USA
•36 million – Estimated number of real Christmas trees to be sold in 2006
•46 million – Households that plan to use an artificial tree in 2006 >

UK
Around eight million trees are sold in this country every year. Most of these trees are grown in the UK. Currently, around a third of homes buy a real Christmas tree, around a third have an artificial Christmas tree and around a third have no tree at all. According to the BCTGA, the market is dominated by the Nordmann fir, of which more than four million are sold every year. >

DE
28 Millionen Christbäume wurden 2008 in Deutschland gekauft. >

Television viewing

A survey for 2009 by Media Control shows how much TV Germans watch:

Average TV viewing per day: 212 minutes (3 1/2 hrs)
Age 14-49: 182 minutes (3 hrs)
Highest rise - Saxony: 182 minutes (3 hrs), 18 minutes longer than 2008.
Most watching - Brandenburg: 262 minutes (4 hrs 22 mins)
Over-50s in Berlin: 333 minutes (5 1/2 hrs)
Age 3-18 in Berlin: 75 minutes (1 hr 15 mins)

An Ofcom report for 2008 shows that the average number of TV watching minutes in the Uk in 2008 was 225, and in Germany 207. (USA: 277)
It also shows that a TV licence cost £140 in the UK and £163 in Germany, also in 2008.

The CHILDWISE Trends Report 2009 reports that British children age 5-16 watch an average of 2.7 hours per day, up from a low of 2.4 hours in 2006.