Bernard Bierman’s Translation News

I have been clearing out a lot of papers – hence the putting online again of the Geoffrey Perrin articles and one by me – and I came across the October 1995 issue of Translation News, a journal that posted news about the industry from 1989 to 1995 – the October 1995 issue was the last-but-one. That news often concerned the US scene. I encountered Bernie on Compuserve’s FLEFO in the early 1990s. It was an exciting time.

I am glad to say that the New England Translators Association is in the process of putting the whole of Translation News online.

Translation News (TN) was a newsletter published regularly by Bernard Bierman between November 1989 and December 1995. At its peak it had a little over a thousand subscribers and was undoubtedly read by many more. TN specialized in reporting and opinion pieces about issues of concern to translators and interpreters on a national level. It offered an informed glimpse into the inner workings of the major translator trade organizations and was a must for anyone wanting to keep up-to-date with the field. Unlike the various house organs, it never shied away from controversial issues. Taken as a whole, Translation News is a unique and important historical document of translation in the United States just before the Internet began to come into widespread use.

Because of this historical significance, the New England Translators Association (NETA) is pleased to make available the entire run of Translation News in searchable PDF form. We are indebted to Bernie Bierman and Rosene Zaros (the custodian of Mr. Bierman’s translation-related papers) for supplying all of the editions, and to Brand Frentz for contributing six very scarce early editions in mint condition (Vol. I Nos. 2-7, 1989-1990).

Articles by Geoffrey Perrin (and Margaret Marks)

Many years ago, when I was teaching legal translation in Erlangen, I found some articles by Geoffrey Perrin which were very useful to me. Geoffrey let me put them on my website, but for some years after a move of the site they were not available. Now I had added a page with three of them, and also an old article by myself on translating German court names into English.

Geoffrey Perrin was at one time in the language department of the German Federal Ministry of Justice, then in Bonn, and later at the Bundessprachenamt at Hürth. The articles are on the many words for ‘copy’ in German, which unlike English prefers specific terms like Abdruck, Ablichtung, Abschrift and at least ten others; on how to translate ‘Rechtsverordnung’ (not necessarily as ordinance), and on the terminology of the juvenile criminal law – although the German terminology may change over the years, the article is still useful.

The link to the page Articles can be found in the column on the right.

Ehe für Alle/Same-sex marriage

Last Friday, June 30, the German Bundestag voted in favour of same-sex marriage, called ‘marriage for all’ (following François Hollande). The bill will no doubt be passed by the Bundesrat and signed by the President and become law in the autumn. But will there be a constitutional challenge?

June 30 was the last day of Angela Merkel’s current parliament and as there is to be a general election, the marriage-for-all bill, which had been introduced at least three years earlier, would otherwise have failed. I haven’t been following this closely and it’s a big issue, so please do further reading for details and don’t rely on me. But I believe that the Green Party applied unsuccessfully to the Federal Constitutional Court to make sure that the bill could be voted on on June 30 at the latest. (I can see the sense of the Court not intervening in the parliamentary process).

The CDU and CSU are traditionally against same-sex marriage, but on June 27 Angela Merkel permitted a free vote in the Bundestag, so suddenly it became possible for the bill to be passed, as not only some CDU and CSU members were in favour of it, but the SPD would also have been bound as part of the coalition government . The suddenness almost recalls the sudden opening of the Berlin wall in 1989.

New York Times:

Ms. Merkel, when asked Monday evening about gay adoption, cited what she said was a recent meeting with a lesbian who invited the chancellor to visit her and her partner’s home in Ms. Merkel’s parliamentary constituency in northern Germany, where the couple has raised at least eight foster children.
The chancellor said she had not had time to take up the invitation, but she used it as a way to illustrate that it may often be better for children to live permanently with a loving couple no matter what their sex, rather than moving from home to home in foster care.

Although Frau Merkel voted against the bill – she could be seen putting a red ticket into the ballot box – it’s been suggested that in acting this late before the election she was both avoiding a long discussion in the Bundestag and improving her chances in the election, since marriage for all was one of the issues on which Martin Schulz was going to campaign.

German legal bloggers disagree on what will happen next. Here is Maximilian Steinbeis at Verfassungsblog (lots of English there)Merkel’s Conscience:

In some way, the right always seems to succeed in making themselves believe that their reading of the constitution is somehow dictated by nature. They did that with the opening of the borders in 2015, and now they do the same with the opening of marriage in 2017. There will always be some constitutional law professor who certifies their constitutional interpretation with utmost authority, so they can keep on shaking their heads in a distressed and indignant way at the turpitude of these liberals that so blatantly disobey their own liberal constitution.

To not let them get away with that, to pierce their self-congratulatory constitutional certainty and force them to justify their readings of the law – this should be the task of constitutionalists.

Steinbeis goes on to link to Matthias Hong, who reads the Constitution differently Warum das Grundgesetz die Ehe für Alle verlangt.

A different view is presented by Andreas Schwartmann in Rheinrecht – Meinung: Diese “Ehe für Alle” ist verfassungswidrig.