My wife and I were recently on Cape Cod for a wedding. While we were down there, we visited her aunt and uncle. During the conversation about our lives and what we were up to, I mentioned my parents' new house, which sits on 15 acres in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. They are scheduled to move in September.
The word is that the land plays host to a fair number of sugar maples. As I was telling Sarah's aunt and uncle about my interest in starting a sugaring operation on the land, assuming there turn out to be enough trees to make a decent sugarbush, it dawned on me that they were both looking at me with blank expressions.
"Sugarbush?" Sarah's uncle asked. "What's that?"
I often forget that people who aren't from a maple syrup producing area are rarely familiar with the related terminology. A sugarbush is an area of forest comprised primarily of sugar maple trees, which are tapped (metal spouts are literally pounded into their trunks) for their sap. The sap is collected, either in buckets or via a pipeline system, and transported to the sugarhouse, where it is boiled down to make maple syrup. The whole process is called sugaring. Once maple syrup is in the tin, it has millions of uses. Vermonters tend to put it on everything. One traditional use is in sugar on snow, which is a tasty winter treat often served at community gatherings.
Once again realizing the unique nature of these terms caused me to wonder about the corresponding German equivalents. I encountered this subject matter occasionally in the past, (once in particular when I brought some Vermont maple syrup to my host family on a high school exchange. Germans generally do not seem to care for maple syrup - it seems to be too sweet for their taste.) but I don't have much sugaring terminology in my German vocabulary.
Maple syrup is Ahornsirup, of course. A sugar maple is a Zuckerahorn, which might lead one to believe a sugarhouse would be something like a Zuckerhaus, though I've never heard that term used. It's likely that there isn't a one-word term for the production of maple syrup in German, since I don't believe there's a lot of it produced there - just as someone in the US who has never been to a sugarbush will invariably say "making maple syrup" instead of "sugaring."
If I do get a sugaring operation off the ground, I'll have to investigate this further.
Some interesting things I learned from a recent project:
A canton (der Kanton) is:
"a. A small territorial division of a country, especially one of the states of Switzerland. b. A subdivision of an arrondissement in France."
[Source]
A colluvium, or scree (called Hangschutt in German) is:
"A loose deposit of rock debris accumulated through the action of gravity at the base of a cliff or slope."
[Source]
I find both of these interesting because they are both things that I wouldn't have expected there to be a specific, unique word for.
"Widerrist" is the word of the day. For those of you who do not speak German, this word means "Withers" in English. Does that help?
I didn't think so. It didn't help me much either.
Turns out that:
"Der Widerrist [engl. withers (Pl.!)] ist der erhöhte Übergang vom Hals zum Rücken bei Vierbeinern"
("The withers is the elevated transition from the neck to the back in quadrupeds.")
- source: Net-Lexicon
This is a piece of anatomy that is used for measurement in dogs and horses. When the head of the animal is lowered, this is the highest point on the body, so it is used as a standard of reference.
A graphical representation showing the withers can be found on this very useful page: http://www.dogopoly.com/dog/freestuff.htm
I do occasional work for a translation agency in Germany which specializes in rapid turnarounds. This means that I am usually sent small jobs that need to be done quickly, but whose subject matter is something of a free-for-all at times. In short, I never know what I'm gonna get.
This most recent certificate of breed classification was probably the most obscure piece of translation I've done yet to date. I learned all kinds of new and interesting words, though, and it was fascinating to work on something so different than my usual material.