IPKAT complains about the delays in receiving translations of ECJ decisions into certain languages.

bq. To give just one example, the Opinion of the Advocate General in Campina Melkunie (the BIOMILD case) has been unavailable in Danish, English and Greek since it was delivered on 31 January 2002. …

bq. The ECJ will say, correctly, that legal translation is a time-consuming, labour-intensive and expensive activity and that someone has to pay for it.

Not only that, but the ECJ needs to train its translators. I did at one time, as a freelance, translate opinions of the German and Austrian Advocates General into English, but afaik the policy is now not to send them out. But German-English is probably not the main bottleneck.

The Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly is often reported on the news programmes in Germany and presumably in other countries too. The Hutton Inquiry website contains transcripts, rulings, FAQ and other materials (via Delia Venables – New on the Web page).

I am not really here for any length of time, but meanwhile, via Denise Howell of Bag & Baggage, and Australian law blog called Courting Disaster, whose author has been blogging a sort of crime novel since February.

And thanks to Ingmar Greil for a link to the proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1834. These have been online for some months now, but the collection is increasing. There are said to be 45,000 trials in the collection now. The site was reported recently from the well-known (particular among Apple users) German weblog Industrial Technology and Witchcraft, which gave this extract.

I won’t be posting much for the next week, in particular not for the next three days, and I haven’t taken up all the comments made recently (there’s even one on entry 204…)

Meanwhile, the campaigns for the upcoming Bavarian elections are heating up. Here are two posters from the Green Party, while I wait for the general defacing of the more serious-looking posters.

I had forgotten The Meaning of Liff / Der Sinn des Labenz, although I have them on the bookshelf. There are links at the Strong German Verbs website to them (mentioned recently).

Douglas Adams, after Hitchhiker’s Guide, wrote, with John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff, a dictionary consisting of definitions lacking a word. To each of these definitions he attached a real, but underused, place name. The Deeper Meaning of Liff is an enlarged version:

Does the sensation of Tingrith make you yelp? Do you bend sympathetically when you see someone Ahenny? Can you deal with a Naugatuck without causing a Toronto? Will you suffer from Kettering this summer? Probably. You are almost certainly familiar with all these experiences, but just didn’t know that there are words for them. Well, in fact, there aren’t – or rather there weren’t, until Douglas Adams and John Lloyd decided to plug these egregious linguistic lacunae by getting a few beers and a notebook and sitting on the beach for a couple of weeks. They quickly realised that just as there are an awful lot of experiences that no one has a name for, so there are a lot of awful names if places you will never need to go to.

Sven Böttcher translated the book into German, using German place names instead of British ones. There are websites where volunteers can add new terms to the English and German versions.

The German version is still in print, and it contains the full English version.

Here’s an example:

English: Dewlish (adj.) (Of the hand and feet.) Prunelike after an overlong bath.

German: Rosien (Adj.) Gleichzeitig feucht und verschrumpelt wirkend. Beschreibt das trockenobstartige Aussehen von Händen und Füßen nach einem zu langen Badenwannenaufenthalt.

Rainer Langenhan in Handakte WebLAWg has an entry on the Diplom-Jurist. The link to JuraWiki gives a list of German universities offering this qualification.
(While there, try out QuickTrans – mark a word and QuickTrans will call up a number of possibilities from LEO. Well, it didn’t like anhängig (pending) or bayernweit (throughout the whole of Bavaria), but for Entscheidung (decision) it produced:

bq. german-english translation of Entscheidung: adjudication, arbitration, decision
frank-deu-eng translation of Entscheidung: decision, findings, run (C)
ding-ger-eng translation of Entscheidung: adjudication, arbitration, decision, decision-making

Law students study for four or five years (?) and do the first state exam (Erstes Staatsexamen). After this they used to have no title, but some universities now let them call themselves Diplom-Jurist or Magister iuris.

These titles aren’t translatable, but the German terms could be alternated with a looser reference to ‘Diploma in Law’ and ‘Master of Law’, I offer tentatively. (Or laws? I used to think that it was just common-law, but there is a Magister Legum in German law, so maybe that’s OK).

Here are some other words for lawyers in Germany, offered without any translation at all!

Anwalt Rechtsanwalt Syndikus Jurist Richter Rechtspfleger Rechtsbeistand Notar Prozeßbevollmächtigter Advokat Rechtsberater Verteidiger Strafverteidiger Staatsanwalt Amtsanwalt Referendar Volljurist Assessor Wirtschaftsjurist
Fürsprech Fürsprecher
Winkeladvokat Gerichtsschreiber