Isabella Massardo in Taccuino di Traduzione reports on a story in today’s Guardian.
The Foreign Office turned down a young Russian’s application for a 12-week course on English in Scotland, apparently on the grounds that she might not understand the language.

bq. Among the reasons for her rejection was one which said: “Given that you state you will need to resit your English exam in November, you cannot satisfactorily explain why you have chosen to attend an English course in Scotland rather than your other options of Oxford or Cambridge, where you should face less difficulty understanding a regional accent.”

Of course, it’s actually easier for foreign students to understand most Scottish accents than English ones, perhaps with the exception of Glaswegian. When a colleague and I took a group of German students to Britain many years ago, and the man in charge of the hostel near Edinburgh spoke Glaswegian, they thought he was joking.

The Foreign Office is now backpedalling. Apparently this reason is not one of those permitted by law in any case.

Similar to the German word of the year is the Lake Superior State University Banished Words List. The 2004 list contains items such as metrosexual, bling-bling, embedded journalist and captured alive.

Since last Monday, Jim Meddick’s comic strip Monty has been playing with the idea that U.S. home cartoonists are so expensive that Monty Comics has relocated its production overseas. This is reported in Lifechanges…Delayed. As Carter writes:

bq. The drawings have been changed to something vaguely Mesopotamian in style, while the dialogue is made to sound “foreign.” The grammar and word order, for the most part, are standard English, except for the use of irregular punctuation — a reversed inverted question mark (¿, but flipped on its axis) and an inverted exclamation point (¡) — and odd phrasings.

Here’s an example:

When I was first learning the law, I learnt that although general British English accepts either judgement or judgment as the spelling, preferring judgement, legal English prefers judgment. And I find that in the law reports too:

‘Transcript of the Handed Down Judgment of Smith Bernal Reporting Limited’

(a case selected at random from the BAILII site, which collects cases and legislation and has links to other international collections).

I didn’t realize there was any discussion about this in the U.S.A. – I thought it was always spelt (or spelled) judgment there – , but I see that as long ago as 31st December 2003, Blogbook had an entry on the topic.

bq. My preference has always been to omit the initial “e” for one simple reason: my 1L Civil Procedure professor told the class that “there is no ‘e’ in the word judgment – wait, I mean there is only one ‘e'”.

Handakte WebLAWg links to Courtroom 23+, showing an integrated high-tech courtroom for the Ninth Judicial Circuit of the USA (here is a nice coloured diagram of the judicial circuits), in the Orange County Courthouse.

The site has superb visuals, including a virtual tour of the courtroom (plugin download needed). Despite all its technology, the courtroom looks uncluttered and dignified. There’s also a link to a cartoon about the courtroom.

Here’s some information on what is known as the Ice Cart:

bq. The Ninth Circuit’s constant search for a cost effective high-tech mobile evidence presentation system has taken yet another turn. The Court has developed a low-cost alternative to the sleeker and more expensive models currently on the market. The new system is affectionately known as the ICE Cart (i.e., Inexpensive Court Evidence Cart). The home-grown model includes many, if not all, of the same features of its more famous contemporaries.

bq. The Ninth Circuit’s unit includes the following equipment\ features:
Projector – Toshiba TLP-T721U
Document Camera – Toshiba TLP-T721U
DVD player – Samsung DVD-V2000
VHS player – Samsung DVD-V2000
Whiteboard – Dry-Erase Contact Paper
Laptop Connection
Audio Recorder – Terapin MCR-TX3300 MP3 Recorder
Sound System – Klipsh 75 Watt Speakers w/Sub-woofer
Wireless Audio – Nady 401 Quad unit
Audio Mixer – ROLLS RM65 Hexmix 6 Channel Mixer
Cart – Apollo Multimedia Projector Cart
Rack – Middle Atlantic DR12
Mesh Cover – Polyethylene Extruded Mesh XV1347
Nuts, Bolts, Jacks, Plastic Top, Velcro etc – Home Depot

The Swiss DORES website (Dokumentation zu Recht und Sprache: Documentation on law and language) has a new update. Registration (free of charge) needed. The site gives information on books and news relating to language and law (German). You can look at the full bibliography, in which the new items are marked, or just at the new items. The bibliography contains talks and newspaper articles as well as books. Some of the books are in French and Italian, most in German.

Further information on specific matters opens in a line below (click on the + sign).

Today, for instance, there is a notice of a new edition of Peter Forstmoser and Regina Ogarek, Juristisches Arbeiten. Eine Anleitung für Studierende. Schulthess Verlag. I’ve found this book very useful in understanding citations of Swiss law, and it has a large number of abbreviations at the back.

Here’s the note:

bq. Forstmoser, Peter / Ogorek, Regina: Juristisches Arbeiten. Eine Anleitung für Studierende. 3., überarbeitete Auflage. Zürich: Schulthess 2004, 437 S..
Bei dieser Anleitung zum juristischen Arbeiten für Studierende der Rechtswissenschaft (und nicht zuletzt auch Auskunftei für Nichtjuristen, die mit der Juristerei zu tun haben) handelt es sich um den Nachfolger von Karl Oftingers “Vom Handwerkszeug des Juristen und seiner Schriftstellerei”, und als solcher behandelt das Bändchen relativ ausführlich auch Fragen des Sprachgebrauchs von Juristinnen und Juristen. Die Neuauflage wurde vor allem um viele Hinweise auf elektronische Informationsmöglichkeiten für Juristinnen und Juristen (Internet, CD-ROM) ergänzt.

There are many more entries. Another refers to a group called “Sprache des Rechts” (language of the law) at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, which is planning to publish three volumes with de Gruyter. These volumes will collate contributions to conferences and workshops of this working group in recent years: one volume on the comprehensibility of law, one on legal argumentation, and a third on communication in law. A fourth volume is to present the results of the group’s empirical research.