On China Law Blog, in a post titled The Legal Faults With Faulty China Translations, Dan Harris suggests you need a good legal translator to do business in China, preferably ‘a truly bilingual attorney who works just for you’:

My favorite (which I have seen at least a half a dozen times) is to do an English language contract that says “A” and a Chinese language contract that says “not A.” The Chinese language contract then makes clear that in any dispute it will prevail. The American party thinks it just signed a contract that says “A” but in reality it just signed a contract that says “not A.” We have twice dealt with situations where a company came to us believing that its joint venture agreement required the joint venture to use the American company as the exclusive US distributor of the Joint Venture’s products, but the contract actually made the US company the exclusive distributor of the Chinese joint venture partner’s product. The problem in both cases was that the Chinese company joint venture partner had never and was not making the product for which the US company believed that it had become the exclusive distributor. Then there are the countless times a word like “must” is changed to “may.”

I wonder whether these contracts provide that the Chinese language and Chinese law govern. Sounds like it. When I translate contracts they’re in German and the German language and German law govern, and my translation into English is just a gloss. I believe one of the biggest German law firms used a watermark on their translations into English saying ‘For information only’ – and those were practising (and therefore insured) lawyers involved. Whatever is going on here involves legal work, as far as I can see. In my situation, if I happened to translate the opposite to what the contract said, firstly the client normally checks in, but in the last instance the German prevails. From my regular reading of China Law Blog (I get the RSS feed), things are not so rosy in China.

William Wilson, as reported here before, was the British driver of the first train that travelled between Fürth and Nuremberg. There isn’t much about him in the internet in English, but a Wikipedia article in German, and more in the franken-wiki. One learns that he didn’t speak a word of German when he came, but he spent the rest of his life in Germany. His health was affected by standing at the front of the train in a frock coat and top hat in wind and weather.

The franken-wiki reports on letters from the consul in Cologne, where Wilson first arrived in Germany, to the Ludwigs-Eisenbahn railway company:

„Gleich nach dem Abgang unseres Briefes zur Post erschien Wilson, ein Stück Beefsteak. Wir mussten einen Dolmetscher nehmen, um uns mit ihm zu verständigen.“ und: „Der Engländer sitzt hier und verzehrt gutes Geld – er sagte mir schon gestern, dass ihm Herr Stephenson nur sparsam mitgegeben habe, er von mir also Geld und Beförderung erwartet.“

(Wilson is described as ‘a piece of beefsteak’ – ‘We had to use an interpreter to talk to him’ – and spending good money because Stephenson gave him so little for the journey).

Today the Nürnberger Zeitung reports at length on Wilson, who died 150 years ago (on 17 April 1862).

Curiously, Wilson, who was born in Walbottle, now a suburb of Newcastle on Tyne, has become a Scot in the article, and Walbottle been transplanted to the Highlands. Having called him ‘ein worthy gentleman from England’, the article immediately ‘corrects’ itself and says that ‘on the British islands’ people take such things as whether one is English or Scottish very seriously. He is referred to as ‘a Scot who can stand up to the Highland winds’ and my favourite:

Am 18. Mai 1809 in Walbottle geboren, versuchte Wilson sein Glück jedoch nicht in den heimischen Hochlanden, sondern beim Nachbarn in den tieferen Gegenden: er lernte beim Eisenbahnpionier George Stephenson im englischen Newcastle und brachte es dort zum Maschineningenieur und Lokführer.

(Born on 18 May 1809 in Walbottle, Wilson tried his luck not in his native Highlands, but in the lower regions of the neighbour(ing country): he trained under George Stephenson, the railway pioneer, in Newcastle in England and became a mechanical engineer and train driver).

The Highlands of Walbottle in Google Maps.

The article is quite detailed in other respects, about how Wilson accompanied the train and supervised the reconstruction – students made sketches of all the parts first (why does this remind me of Germany selling high-speed trains to China?), how popular he was with passengers and how much he earned in Nuremberg.

LATER NOTE: A day later, the text has been changed. Must stop commenting on local paper websites. Why should I mind if the population of Nuremberg can’t tell the difference between Mao and Zhou?

Happy Easter to any readers, with a picture of some German cars and phallic structures in central Nuremberg last week.

And here is the window of Confiserie Neef:

and part of the counter of the Russian cake shop Konditorei Reimer in Fürth:

Note small video (in Russian) on the Reimer site.

I know the word preclusion exists in English, and it may be slightly more common in the USA than in the UK. But I always feel worried when I see it and wonder what peculiar technical details may apply to it. It reminds me of German lawyers teaching German law and spending a good half hour on terms like hemmen and unterbrechen (different ways of interrupting a limitation period), when you’re more confused at the end than you were before.

In the same connection, I got the term Einwendungsausschluss, for which you might say Einwendungspräklusion. It refers to the deadline for objections to administrative acts. I found it translated on the Web as preclusion from objection. That just doesn’t work for me – it’s obviously an attempt to create a neat term, but the preposition sounds odd, and preclusion is something I have to look up.

Präklusion to me is time bar
präkludieren to bar
Einwendungsausschluss cut-off period for objections

Another term is statute bar, but in my recent translation there was no statute, just delegated legislation.

All I can find in Black’s (8th ed.) is

preclusion order: An order barring a litigant from presenting or opposing certain claims or defenses for failing to comply with a discovery order.

And Garner’s book on legal English says preclusory is a needless variant of preclusive. Gifis (Barron’s) has preclusion of issue, which is something else too (‘the rendering of a decision that precludes the issue decided from being relitigated’).

If anyone who writes legal English disagrees, let them say so!