I will make this the last report on the conference; the various questions it left me with will have to to introduced gradually.

Joe McClinton (on German tax and social insurance law) gave a full discussion of a list of taxes but left me with the feeling I ought to research all these for myself. It seems to be the same with all areas of law and accountancy (and for all other special subjects too): you can’t trust any bilingual dictionaries, but monolingual reference works don’t bring out the difference between the two systems. You really need to have an overview of a complete set of taxes in one country and of a complete set in another country before being able to decide whether the suggestions given in a bilingual law dictionary are helpful.
Take Gewerbesteuer. Joe doesn’t like the usual translation, trade tax, partly because it sounds like a ‘Handelssteuer’; at all events it does not give much idea of the meaning, whereas if you used the U.S. term ‘local business tax’ you would be very close in meaning and would be adding the idea of ‘local’, since Gewerbesteuer does go to the local municipality. The term ‘local business tax’ carries some meaning even for a British reader. On the other hand, one might think ‘business’ meant ‘an enterprise’ rather than the operation of a business (even translators pay Gewerbesteuer if they revise and make a profit on translations into languages they don’t speak, or run language schools).
Joe referred to a Lexikon Steuern A-Z on the Bundesfinanzministerium (German Federal Finance Ministry) website. It is an excellent source, answering the questions: what is taxed, who pays the tax, how much tax is paid, what is the wording of the statute that creates the tax, who collects the tax and how did the tax develop historically.
The presentation covered the definition of tax and Steuer (you don’t need two words for Steuern und Abgaben, because for all intents and purposes there is no difference between the two). I also wrote down: Gebühren, Beiträge, Sonderabgaben (like Solidaritätsbeitrag, Körperschaftssteuer, Lohnsteuer, Einkommenssteuer and Umsatzsteuer.
There is a lot of stuff on the Internet that will answer some of these questions. For example, Horwath has a page with links to brief definitions of taxes in English. KPMG has a virtual library of publications in English and German, including newsletters in English on German tax. Google searches on “Doing Business in Germany” produce good results. On LEGAmedia, there are articles by Dr. Thomas Marx on the subject.

Having removed the Creative Commons licence from my blog, I have now added the German and English copyright notices written by Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz (who teaches German and international law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo) and used at Lenz Blog (English – he also has German and Japanese versions of his blog), with his kind permission.
I haven’t got the copyright notice the right shade of grey yet but am giving up for today. The content is more important than the colour.

Having removed the Creative Commons licence from my blog, I have now added the German and English copyright notices written by Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz (who teaches German and international law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo) and used at Lenz Blog (English – he also has German and Japanese versions of his blog), with his kind permission.
I haven’t got the copyright notice the right shade of grey yet but am giving up for today. The content is more important than the colour.

The ATA Legal Translation Conference, ‘Raising the Bar’, Jersey City, NJ, May 2-4, 2003, was the second of what is planned to be a number of specialized conferences (the first one was on finance). The American Translators’ Association puts on a huge annual conference too (something the BDÜ in Germany doesn’t manage), so this was quite an achievement. The details of the programme are still on the ATA website, with speakers’ biographies and exhibitors and sponsors. This was all done to invite booking, so it may disappear. The organizers were Marian S. Greenfield, Teresa Kelly and Mary David, and Tom West, who is the ATA President and also a legal translator and former attorney (his company is Intermark Language Services in Atlanta, Georgia), had some hand in it too. It really all went off very well. I can’t describe it in detail here. There were language-neutral sessions, and sessions relating to French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Russian. By my count there were at least 12 speakers for Spanish, 3 each for Portuguese and German and 2 each for French and Russian. I was talking to Joe McClinton, who also presented in German, when we went out for a speakers’ dinner the evening before the conference, and merely noted that the rest of our table seemed to be Argentinians. But it would have been useful to talk to or listen to some of these speakers from other language specializations.
There must have been a couple of hundred people there (‘attendees’, as the Americans call them), but German is a minority language so I had from 20 to 30 people, I think, and we were able to have a conversation throughout. The audiences were very friendly and keen to hear anything. German presentations were on translating German criminal law into English (me), German tax and social insurance law (Joe McClinton), Recurring problems in German>English legal translation (me again), Swiss Legal German (Tom West), and translating German contracts (Joe again, but I missed this because I had to get my plane). There was an excellent reception with complimentary hors d’oeuvres (or hors d’oeurves as they spelt it in the programme) by CLS Communication, Inc., a translation company, and some good bookstands.
I took away from the conference sessions mainly a collection of questions to pursue further. Swiss legal German always presents a challenge. Some regret was expressed that the new edition of Romain’s German-English law dictionary promises Austrian and Swiss legal terminology but seems to contain none (Romain/Byrd/Thielecke, Wörterbuch der Rechts- und Wirtschaftssprache / Dictionary of Legal and Commercial Terms DE>EN, ISBN 3 406 48068 3). I am very tempted to prepare a glossary of Swiss legal terms, but what with 26 cantons, each a separate jurisdiction, and what is the whole population? one wonders if it’s worth the effort. I think I will collect a list of 20 Swiss German legal terms and prepare a table showing how few reference works contain them. There’s a Swiss German legal dictionary, but it’s odd (Metzger, Schweizerisches juristisches Wörterbuch, ISBN 3 258 05191 7). For one thing, it often explains a term simply by giving the relevant paragraph of the Civil Code (which is better than nothing, of course), and it also contains non-legal terms. And some of its terms are not specifically Swiss, which is also OK, I suppose. It is just less use than it looks. The really good reference is the small Duden Wie sagt man in der Schweiz? Wörterbuch der schweizerischen Besonderheiten, ISBN 3 411 04131 5, which actually contains quite a few legal terms. Tom mainly discussed diverging corporate terminology, but he also had a list of types of legal fees taken from a judgment – the only way to research the meaning of these seems to be a Google search. He also talked about books and web sources.
To be continued…

The ATA Legal Translation Conference, ‘Raising the Bar’, Jersey City, NJ, May 2-4, 2003, was the second of what is planned to be a number of specialized conferences (the first one was on finance). The American Translators’ Association puts on a huge annual conference too (something the BDÜ in Germany doesn’t manage), so this was quite an achievement. The details of the programme are still on the ATA website, with speakers’ biographies and exhibitors and sponsors. This was all done to invite booking, so it may disappear. The organizers were Marian S. Greenfield, Teresa Kelly and Mary David, and Tom West, who is the ATA President and also a legal translator and former attorney (his company is Intermark Language Services in Atlanta, Georgia), had some hand in it too. It really all went off very well. I can’t describe it in detail here. There were language-neutral sessions, and sessions relating to French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Russian. By my count there were at least 12 speakers for Spanish, 3 each for Portuguese and German and 2 each for French and Russian. I was talking to Joe McClinton, who also presented in German, when we went out for a speakers’ dinner the evening before the conference, and merely noted that the rest of our table seemed to be Argentinians. But it would have been useful to talk to or listen to some of these speakers from other language specializations.
There must have been a couple of hundred people there (‘attendees’, as the Americans call them), but German is a minority language so I had from 20 to 30 people, I think, and we were able to have a conversation throughout. The audiences were very friendly and keen to hear anything. German presentations were on translating German criminal law into English (me), German tax and social insurance law (Joe McClinton), Recurring problems in German>English legal translation (me again), Swiss Legal German (Tom West), and translating German contracts (Joe again, but I missed this because I had to get my plane). There was an excellent reception with complimentary hors d’oeuvres (or hors d’oeurves as they spelt it in the programme) by CLS Communication, Inc., a translation company, and some good bookstands.
I took away from the conference sessions mainly a collection of questions to pursue further. Swiss legal German always presents a challenge. Some regret was expressed that the new edition of Romain’s German-English law dictionary promises Austrian and Swiss legal terminology but seems to contain none (Romain/Byrd/Thielecke, Wörterbuch der Rechts- und Wirtschaftssprache / Dictionary of Legal and Commercial Terms DE>EN, ISBN 3 406 48068 3). I am very tempted to prepare a glossary of Swiss legal terms, but what with 26 cantons, each a separate jurisdiction, and what is the whole population? one wonders if it’s worth the effort. I think I will collect a list of 20 Swiss German legal terms and prepare a table showing how few reference works contain them. There’s a Swiss German legal dictionary, but it’s odd (Metzger, Schweizerisches juristisches Wörterbuch, ISBN 3 258 05191 7). For one thing, it often explains a term simply by giving the relevant paragraph of the Civil Code (which is better than nothing, of course), and it also contains non-legal terms. And some of its terms are not specifically Swiss, which is also OK, I suppose. It is just less use than it looks. The really good reference is the small Duden Wie sagt man in der Schweiz? Wörterbuch der schweizerischen Besonderheiten, ISBN 3 411 04131 5, which actually contains quite a few legal terms. Tom mainly discussed diverging corporate terminology, but he also had a list of types of legal fees taken from a judgment – the only way to research the meaning of these seems to be a Google search. He also talked about books and web sources.
To be continued…

Looking at the reaction to the court dress story in The Volokh Conspiracy, I remembered the court dress I find most ridiculous of all – that of the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany. It looks to me as if it was designed in the 1960s – I haven’t checked; the headgear somehow reminds me of the spaceship in 2001.
Eugene Volokh then showed the picture (I had hesitated to show a picture from Der Spiegel), and he has another of the Supreme Court of Canada, added to the same entry.