The German language service of the Swiss Federal Chancellery publishes details of books, articles, conferences, judgments etc. on language and law in Switzerland and elsewhere. The details are in German, and you have to register (no charge). Every few months they send an email indicating there has been an update. They are responsible for translation too. DORES gives details, for example, of

bq. Dingwall, Silvia: English in Switzerland – is it legal? In: Murray, Heather (Hg.): anglais, Englisch, inglese, Englais, … English! (= Bulletin VALS/ASLA 77). Neuchâtel: Institut de linguistique 2003, 165 S..
and of

bq. Cotterill, Janet (Hrsg.) : Language in the Legal Process. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2002, 296 S..
(Aus der Linguist-List 13.3371, Dez. 2002)Linguists and lawyers from a range of countries and legal systems explore the language of the law and its participants, beginning with the role of the forensic linguist in legal proceedings, either as expert witness or in legal language reform. Subsequent chapters analyze different aspects of language and interaction in the chain of events from a police emergency call through the police interview context and into the courtroom, as well as appeal court and alternative routes to justice.

and of

bq. Jowett, Ben: Workbook for Lawyers using English as a Foreign Language. Zürich: Schulthess 2003, 74 S..

Here is another description of the latter, at Schulthess.

The Wired Interpreter’s Page is the site of a professional conference interpreter turned IT consultant, subtitled ‘A website for conference interpreters and other language professionals’. It links to Vincent’s Glossblog, ‘Blogging the Web’s flotsam and jetsam on language’, which alas hasn’t been updated for a year, but there are good links. (Thanks to Alison Penfold).

Legal translators nowadays often encounter cross-border leasing schemes. There is an article in German about cross-border leasing at LEGAMedia. Duefinance in Düsseldorf has English materials on cross-border leasing and other German financial matters. They also have a German site. The Guardian had an article about the problems of the procedure. German and U.S. law see the transaction differently, but the U.S. permits it. But what if the U.S. stopped permitting it? Fürth withdrew from a projected scheme last year after Bavarian legislation banned it.

For those who are irritated by the public confusion between interpreters and translators (numerous ‘translators’ who were really interpreters have been killed in Iraq), here is a picture from Lower Saxony – text in German – showing two ‘translators’ sitting in a booth. An overall term in East Germany was Sprachmittler (language mediators), and some academic tomes in West Germany use the term ‘der Translator’ for both. I’m not sure what the English term for both is.

A Google image search for translator is quite amusing. There are a few ‘translators’ in booths there, but they’re outnumbered by handheld devices. This picture of ‘our new translator’ is my favourite. But the mad translator (Kenneth Kronenberg, of the New England Translators Association) looks more like my everyday life.

The BKA is looking for translators – more details on their website (in German – from William J. Hadfield-Burhardt on CompuServe). These are fixed-term jobs, not very well-paid (BAT IVa), requiring two languages in addition to German, and translating in both directions. I think it’s relevant to mention it, though. Deadline is 29th August and they want a passport photo, but it doesn’t say copies have to be certified. They would prefer three native speakers of English and one each of French and Spanish.

ADDED LATER: William says the deadline is going to be extended – I wonder why?

Keeping on the New Zealand theme, the Independent has an article on the use of a traditional Maori style of justice to deal with juvenile offenders, successful in New Zealand and apparently to be tried in Britain.

bq. As Saga Manu, a Samoan who is one of Porirua’s youth justice co-ordinators, explains: “Where I come from, we don’t go to the police. If my son commits a crime against you, then your family seeks restitution from mine. It’s up to the families and the village elders to sort it.”

I found this via the UK Criminal Justice Weblog.

I can’t help feeling that traditional Maori, Tongan and Samoan society is different from ours. Would it help in the latest Nuremberg incident? In the empty streets in the remains of the Nazi party rally grounds, youths have been racing souped-up cars at night. Up to a thousand people have been watching, and the police have removed 30 cars and 50 driving licences. On Saturday, a 15-year-old pedestrian was run over and killed by a 27-year-old driving a Golf at 120 kph. Here’s an article (in German).

Drifting again – I assume that at least 50% of this weblog should be off topic, or no-one will be interested (here’s a very successful entry, for example): languagehat had an entry on the pronunciation of the English surname Carew, which apparently is not pronounced karoo, but like Carey.
In this connection I would like to recommend the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by J.C. Wells. Wells is a professor of phonetics at London University. He covers both British and U.S. pronunciation, and sometimes he gives the results of polls as to preferred usage.
Loitering in the comments to the languagehat entry, I found a site with some rather rude limericks and so on, requiring the correct pronunciation of some strange names. Some of these are familiar, some less so. I’d certainly seen this before:

There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley,
Whose bride was so mellow and colmondeley
That the best man, Colquhoun,
An inane young bolqufoun,
Could only stand still and stare dolmondeley.

For anyone disbelieving, may I add that the names really are pronounced in the way that makes the limerick make sense.

From Isabella Massardo’s Taccuino di Traduzione, a link to a review of a new edition of the Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Slang. The author is apparently from the south of England, but I hadn’t encountered ‘flatting in London’ before (I must have missed it). To quote the review, by Ben Lowings:

bq. This is the first edition in five years, and as such it marks the first time phrases like ‘Too much hui and not enough dui’ and adjectives like ‘aratanic’ – a term used of accident-prone ferries – have made it into print.

Some of the terms are surely used in Australia too (pointing Percy at the porcelain), but not the Maori references.

Here’s another brief reference (for tourists) to languages in New Zealand.

There seems to be a big difference between explaining NZ slang to Americans and British people, because if you look at this site of Kiwi Words & Phrases, as it says itself, a lot of the words are British.

Here is another site, called Aussie Slang, with many dialect links, not just English. It even has Swiss German slang and the Lord’s Prayer in the Germanic languages.

This week it occurred to me, in connection with some email about translation problems, that a good translation of Wegfall eines Vermächtnisnehmers is lapse of a gift (which is more like Wegfall eines Vermächtnisses).

These words are all totally untranslatable. I know everyone knows this, but a lot of the time you can get away with translating Erbe as heir. But their meanings are completely different. And suddenly, one day, there comes a translation where you have to be accurate, and the only way to do it is to use the German word and define it in brackets.

Legal systems won’t tolerate a moment when property is not owned, but German law and English law manage this completely differently. In German law, the moment someone dies, his or her Erbe(n) – successors in title, I might almost say – inherit the estate. They can reject the inheritance later, but at the moment of death there is automatic succession. The Erbe is contrasted with the Vermächtnisnehmer, a person who gets a smaller part of the estate, often an item or a sum of money, and has to claim this from the Erben.

In English, we have the word heir, and the heir to the throne has some similarity to the German Erbe. If the Queen dies, Prince Charles immediately becomes King, and the coronation (if any…) is merely a formality.

In law, the word heir has not been used in England since 1926. It used to mean someone who inherited land. A U.S. definition of heir is:

A person who is entitled to another’s real property by intestate succession. Those entitled to another’s personal property are the intestate’s distributees or next of kin. The distinction between real and personal property may no longer be significant, and many modern statutes use the term ‘heir’ to designate the intestate takers of any type of property.

(From Mark Reutlinger, Wills, Trusts, and Estates. Essential Terms and Concepts, ISBN 0 316 74112 4, a wonderful book consisting of masses of definitions of terms).

In German law, Erben exist whether there is a will or not. Continue reading →

I’ve sometimes translated descriptions of high-rise buildings and I like this one. It was built in 1935 and looks to me as if it still has its original windows. The white is nice, but I have seen a photo on the Internet where it is bare concrete. It is 42 m high. The first photograph is original, the second one corrected on my Nikon Coolpix 4500. I don’t suppose I would buy a Linhof if I could afford one. But I suppose there must be software that does this too. Have I gone too far?