Bubbles in the Bathtub

The reason for all of the hits is, unfortunately, less than desirable.

First a little background. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources is planning to satellite track 12 loggerhead turtles this summer, and Mark Dodd, the state sea turtle coordinator for GA-DNR, had arranged with me for the tracks to appear on seaturtle.org. To publicize their tracking effort the State held a naming contest, in which children in grades K-5 in Georgia would submit names for the turtles to be representative of the countries participating in the G8 Summit, which is wrapping up today, roughly coincident with the release of the satellite tracked turtles.

So a couple of weeks ago GA-DNR announced the results of the contest and the names that would be given to the turtles.

So far so good.

Until Tuesday...

Apparently the German magazine Der Spiegel picked up on the story and they reported on it on their website Tuesday morning. My German language skills are pretty poor, but from the online translation I ran it appears that their report was less than flattering,

The short of it is that they apparently took exception to the turtle name selected to represent Germany. "Ormanda", which the press release from Georgia said means "of the sea" in German. I personally have no idea if that's right or not, but the Der Spiegel article said that it wasn't a German word, citing encyclopedic databases and local linguists, and that the word was in fact Turkish and meant "of the forest". The story was then picked up by other German outlets that let to a flood of hits on the website Tuesday morning.

In any case, it was nice to see that the author of the original story consulted a linguist, but it would have been nice if they had actually contacted some one associated with the project or naming contest and asked them about how the name was selected. They obviously did not and apparently drew all of their material from the original press release. They also did not contact me, although they linked to seaturtle.org and noted that "Ormanda" was not yet on the tracking site and suggested perhaps that she had gone off to Turkey (ha ha). If they had tried to contact me I could have explained why "Ormanda" was not yet on the site (They are still in the process of tagging turtles).

Odd side note, babynamesworld.com says that "Ormanda" is German and means "of the sea", although I certainly wouldn't consider a baby name website to be an authority on the German language. Most of the links that come up when you search Google for the term "Ormanda" do appear to lead to Turkish sites.

Anyway, the kicker was that a few disgruntled German readers decided to complain to me, as seaturtle.org was the only reference provided. Most complaints were relatively tame, but one gentleman (I use the term loosely) was nice enough to point out that Americans are stupid because "YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO TELL THE KINDS A GERMAM NAME OR CORRECT THEM". He also pointed out that:

"American People killing people in Iraq
The Atom bomb was from you
You bomb every ......... country you don't like as Iraq, Vietnam, Somalia ...."

Not sure what that has to do with naming turtles or turtle tracking, but you never know. Nice of him to point that out, and I'll get right on taking care of those issues. The real irony I suppose is that he complained about the education of American school children, in this case improperly translating a German word, in extremely broken English ("Sorry what do you learn them in school?"). I suppose if he had sent it in German the complaint would have been lost on me. But if he's going to complain about a bunch of second graders messing up a German word, then he probably should have worked on his English grammar a little harder :)

In any case, I hope that at least some of the new visitors to the site enjoyed the satellite tracks and the information provided and that all of those hits were not for naught. And despite any errors or mistakes that were made, I hope that most people can take joy in knowing that a new found interest was instilled in thousands of children in the conservation and protection of sea turtles through the efforts of the State of Georgia and their Department of Natural Resources.