Law.com (The Legal Intelligencer, by Shannon P. Duffy) reports:

bq. Finding that attorney Brian Puricelli’s courtroom work was “smooth” and “artful” in securing a $430,000 verdict in a civil rights suit, but that his written work was “careless” and laden with typographical errors, a federal magistrate judge has ruled that his court-awarded fees should be paid at two rates — $300 per hour for the courtroom work, but $150 per hour for work on the pleadings.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacob P. Hart wrote a 12-page opinion on fees.

bq. Hart said he recognized that the case was a complicated one, but said he found some of Puricelli’s writing in the amended complaint to be “nearly unintelligible.”

bq. When defense lawyers complained that the typographical errors in Puricelli’s work were “epidemic,” Puricelli’s response included several more typos, Hart said. The judge quoted a paragraph from Puricelli’s response, adding “[sic]” after each typo.

bq. Puricelli wrote: “As for there being typos, yes there have been typos, but these errors have not detracted from the arguments or results, and the rule in this case was a victory for Mr. Devore. Further, had the Defendants not tired [sic] to paper Plaintiff’s counsel to death, some type [sic] would not have occurred. Furthermore, there have been omissions by the Defendants, thus they should not case [sic] stones.”

I haven’t read the whole of this long article, which is not all about typos.

One of the big problems of translators is errors in the original, of course.

Via The Legal Reader.

Britischer Privatdetektiv erklärt den Beruf.

The Guardian Weblog’s pick of the day is Private Investigator:

bq. I hear so many people ask how to become a Private Investigator or a Private Detective, what does it involve etc. so I thought I would dedicate a blog to this particular field of work. I’ll cover everything you want to know from training, to getting that first Job, to running your own business and to the latest developments in the Industry. Nearly forgot! This is Private Investigation in the UK.

It seems more of an information collection gradually building up than a diary.

Driving in Bavaria without a licence. /Ohne Führerschein fahren in Bayern.

And here, for those who think it should be cropped even more:

Off topic: Ernie the Attorney links to a webcam showing the streets of New Orleans and updated every twenty seconds. At the moment it looks like the morning of January 1st, but it isn’t over yet.

Ein Artikel auf Englisch in der Technology Review beschreibt die Versuche der FBI und CIA, mit modernen Technologien Dokumente in Fremdsprachen zu analysieren. Maschinenübersetzung wird nicht weiterverfolgt; der Computer soll Humanübersetzern (ein schönes Wort) unterstützen, nicht mehr ersetzen.

In the Technology Review, there is an article by Michael Erard called Translation in the Age of Terror. The topic is the National Virtual Translation Center in Washington D.C., the FBI & CIA’s joint project to expand the use of computer-assisted translation technologies in the intelligence community (to quote Michael Erard’s own description on the Forensic Linguists mailing list.

bq. In a Washington, DC, conference room soundproofed to thwart eavesdropping, five linguists working for the government—speaking on condition their names not be published—describe the monumental task they face analyzing foreign-language intercepts in the age of terror.

In view of the mass of material collected, technology has to assist translators. It seems that attempts to use machine translation have been given up in favour of techniques to assist human translators. For example, software might make Arabic easier to read – the documents are often in bad condition. In one example of the way things might work, a document containing one suspicious word is farmed out to a retired translator in Idaho (!), who uses translation memory with a shared database of translated phrases to determine that the document is not suspicious. (This is an odd example – I would have thought a quick human inspection would have done that, saving the OCR time, and if not, that machine translation rather than translation memory would have been used to give the document a once-over).

Other software processes Arabic text to make it easier to search.

Of translation memory it says:

bq. A translation memory works sort of like a spell-check application; it selects a chunk of text—whether a word fragment, several words, or whole sentences—and matches that chunk against previously translated material, saving time and improving accuracy by providing at least a partial translation. It’s already a key tool in the medical and legal industries—where the same jargon frequently crops up in different languages.

The reference to the ‘legal industry’ is rather brief and I have my suspicions. The article also has a sidebar on ‘white elephants’ – transliteration and multimedia systems that have not lived up to the hopes invested in them in the past.

For more forensic linguistics links, see my earlier entry.

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