Today, the European Court of European Rights held that it was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights when Germany seized property from its citizens in the east after reunification in 1990. (Via Expatica)

This decision relates to land awarded to east Germans after 1945. A later decision will deal with land seized between 1945 and 1949, before the GDR came into existence and effectively under Soviet control.

In 1992, Germany expropriated the land without compensation. Up to 70,000 former GDR citizens are affected.

Here is a summary; the case itself should be on that site in English and French, but the links aren’t working at the moment. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung has an article (in German), together with a

Steve Maas has a new translation weblog with an emphasis on the translation business and starting out as a freelance. He must also be a German-English translator.

When I posted on John Cage’s 4’33” recently, I did think to myself ‘I couldn’t have written that’.

Now Friedrich Lenz has an entry discussing the issue of copyrighting silence. He concludes that the work is protected by trade mark concepts. He also gives a link to the Wikipedia entry on John Cage, which has further information on this work and on Cage’s visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University (he was disappointed to find he heard things).

From January 1, 2004, the requirements of invoices presented in Germany have changed. This came up in the comments to an earlier entry that mentioned an article on the BDÜ website. These requirements apply particularly if you want to set off an invoice against VAT.

First query: what form of electronic signature will be accepted? Does it require extra hardware or would one of the two or three forms of signature in Adobe Acrobat suffice?

It looks to me as if you do need the hardware, so I will go back to sending invoices on paper and wait for more advice. Here is some information in German).

Another requirement is that invoices are numbered consecutively. Information for German lawyers in two PDF files (here and here) at the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer site is partly relevant to translators. (via Vertretbar.de) There is a transitional period until 30 June 2004 in which this rule need not be followed. (Does this period apply to the electronic signature too?)

The Times Online law section today (registration should be free) has a big section for students today, including information on barristers/solicitors, traineeships/pupillages, applications, media law, magistrates’ legal advisers, and also ‘the top ten’ legal thrillers. The term ‘justices’ legal adviser’ was new to me; it apparently means anyone who is doing the kind of things a justices’ clerk does but is not a clerk – so presumably there is one Clerk to the Justices per court, and the rest are trainees or legal advisers. A Google search produced a lot of documents that assumed the term was known, as did a search at the Department for Constitutional Affairs.
(Via Handakte WebLAWg)

Gail Armstrong of openbrackets recently mentioned a subject that sometimes irritates me: how do I, as a native speaker of English, pronounce English words that have entered the German language and are pronounced ‘wrongly’?

bq. The only times I’ve failed to understand what for the love of Pierre a French person was saying have been when English words were involved.

bq. I once spent many minutes talking with someone about Dire Straits and another group called Deer Straats, certain that we were speaking of two different bands, and so struck by the similarities. I’m still looking for a recording by another band called Tallkeen Eds.

bq. I have regular bouts of panic when having to ask for an American product. Upon entering KFC (ka eff say), say, does one order a byoockette or a bouquet, and is it salade de chou or ze slow on the side? Who knows.

On the whole, I pronounce the words the way the Germans do, but when it comes to the products, problems arise. For instance, there is a chocolate and caramel bar called Twix in Britain. In Germany it was originally called Raider. However, this was pronounced not raider but rider. Later, they changed the name to Twix, for perhaps obvious reasons, and there was a much-repeated exhortation in their TV ads ‘Raider is now Twix’. Yet they laughed at me when I tried to buy a peanut bar called Nuts, pronouncing it ‘Noots’. Vick had its spelling changed to Wick, of course.

I have sometimes annoyed people by repeating all the English words in the TV advertisements in order to improve my German accent. I still find it hard to pronounce the last word in the shampoo name ‘Head and Shoulders’ – something like shooowwlders – preceded by ‘hett ‘ ent’. The Douglas saying ‘Come in and find out’ (apparently taken by many Germans to mean ‘Come in and then manage to find your way out again’) is pronounced staccato, with lots of glottal stops: Come ‘ in ‘ and ‘ find ‘ out. (See report by PapaScott).

Today I heard on the radio that John Carey won the Iowa primary, but later I found out it was John Kerry.