EN
Since the year 2000, the section on orthography of 'SzoVilag' [The world of words], a journal for shorthand writers, typists and typographers, has been headed by Maria Zambori, a volume of whose exquisite poems has recently been published. Both her pedagogical essays on the difficulties of orthography and her scholarly papers discussing the abbreviatory conventions of Hungarian stenography are characterised by a delicate humour and playfulness that also feature in her poems. Even though stenography is being supplanted by sound recording devices in many parts of the world and in most areas of life, it is nevertheless indispensable in Parliament, for instance. The Minutes of Parliament had not been marred by so many errors in fifty years as in the six months during which, for the sake of economy, professional stenographers were replaced by employees of the National Bureau of Translators to take shorthand of the speeches delivered in parliament. The activity of a stenographer putting down public speeches is not at all similar to that of a translator; if anything, it is closer to the work of a simultaneous interpreter.