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?

The latest issue of Free Pint (August 21), mentioned here before, has an article on the problems of running a multilingual website. The site is in Britain and attempts to offer up-to-date information on benefit law in languages of the local community. The main emphasis is on the advantages of Unicode over PDF. Here is the Multikulti site the article reports on. It includes versions in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, and Gujerati.

Howard Bashman, in How Appealing, has an entry headed You know they’re criminals because they have aliases. He quotes an opinion beginning:

bq. Chittakone Chanthasouxat (“Chanthasouxat”) and Keopaseuth Xayasane
(“Xayasane”) (collectively, “Defendants”) appeal their convictions for drugrelated offenses.

Bashman’s mild query as to whether it was necessary to write “Chanthasouxat” is taken up by Eugene Volokh:

bq. Why do lawyers think it’s helpful to have obvious parentheticals like this? If there is only one Chanthasouxat in the case, people will realize that Chanthasouxat refers to that Chanthasouxat. If there is more than one, then you shouldn’t call either Chanthasouxat. Likewise, there were exactly two defendants in the cases being considered in the opinion; who else would “Defendants” refer to?

Bashman also links to a Findlaw review of Volokh’s new book on academic legal writing.

These parentheticals make me think of the technique in translation of quoting a statute both in German and English to introduce the German abbreviation. This shouldn’t be done slavishly, only as far as is necessary to help the reader.

The use of aliases for criminals reminds me of a report about two shoplifters in Fürth whose names were replaced by aliases – Oleg and Olga. Their nationality was not mentioned.

Udo on law blog quotes a wonderful sentence of German officialese or legalese from der.millo.de’s tax office:

»Ich weise in diesem Zusammenhang auf die Möglichkeit einer ggf. verbösernden Entscheidung hin.«

A websearch reveals quite a number of occurrences of verbösern, especially in tax contexts.

This kind of language is a problem for translators. This one is easy to guess, but not all are. I usually get help from the big 8-volume Duden Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (superseded by a ten-volume one) – I see now on CD-ROM. I can’t imagine the officialese in it has changed. It says for verbösern:

bq. (scherzh.): [in der Absicht zu verbessern noch] schlechter machen: durch das Einfügen dieses Absatzes hat er den Artikel nur verbösert…

but for the noun Verböserung it has a second, legal meaning:

bq. (Rechtsspr.) Änderung einer gerichtlichen Entscheidung zuungunsten eines Betroffenen, der gegen die Entscheidung ein Rechtsmittel eingelegt hat.

Corinna Schlüter-Ellner, a German lawyer and Spanish-German translator, has prepared materials on Juristendeutsch – verständlich gemacht. Wendungen und Wörter der Rechtssprache mit Definition oder Übersetzung in die Gemeinsprache und Kontextbeispielen.

There is no website, nor are these materials in a book. They consist of a pack of 32 pages of A4 paper, each with about 15 examples, sold from November 200 for DM 15.00. Contact details and examples: read on. Continue reading →

Again from IPKAT (on August 19th, but I have only just seen it), an interesting entry with links, headed Unfair Practices, German Style, on the basis of an article in The Lawyer.