On the legaltranslators mailing list at www.yahoogroups.com, the site www.tradulex.org was mentioned for a set of articles on legal translation from Hieronymus, the journal of the Swiss translators’ association ASTTI (thanks, Jacek!). The ASTTI site has German, French and Italian, but the English and Rumantsch links don’t work (yet). There are links to the articles here too, but they aren’t working at the moment either.

I actually had this Hieronymus, because I subscribed for a year. I think I had to put some Swiss notes in an envelope eventually, because they gave no bank account, only a post office account for payment. The journla is in German, French, Italian and some English.

At the moment, the tradulex site (which has other materials for translators on it) is not behaving well, so I won’t quote. There is a long article by Barbara J. Beveridge: ‘Legal English – How it developed and why it is not appropriate for International Commercial Contracts’ that contains a lot of useful minutiae. And there is an article in German by Suzanne Ballansat-Aebi on prepositions in English legal texts.

Artikel, mehrsprachig, zu juristische Übersetzung aus Hieronymus, der Zeitschrift der schweizerischen Übersetzervereinigung.

Ein Artikel von Suzanne Ballansat-Aebi auf Deutsch über Präpositionen in englischen Rechtstexten könnte interessant sein.

I know I’m not the only person of my name (as I’ve mentioned before, and see below). Now another one: a publisher is looking for a Margaret Marks who translated a song from the Polish. The song is to be reprinted and it’s a question of translator’s copyright.

Here is the ditty:
(English words by Margaret Marks, printed in a 1981 Silver Burdett music textbook)

bq. “Who’s been eating up my corn?”
Cried the farmer one fine morn;
Saw a rabbit, tried to grab it,
But the critter got away!
Etc.

Incidentally, there is a version on the Web with slightly different words, but that isn’t the one.

I had to confess that this is a bit too American for my usual style (apart from the fact that I don’t speak Polish).

Anyone know this person?

There was a Margaret Marks who was a barkeeper in Nevada and died in 1998.

bq. One of the best known saloons that Virginia City ever produced was the Crystal Bar. It was established and operated by Con Ahern until the very early part of the nineteenth century. It was then sold to his friend and employee, William Marks, Sr.. Marks began a family legacy with the bar that lasted until the late 1990’s.

bq. The “Mystery Clock” was installed by the Marks family and has remained a focal point of interest to the tourists. The secret of the “Mystery” clock passed on with Margaret Marks, Bill’s wife, when she died in 1998.

They don’t explain why it is a mystery. Perhaps no-one now knows it’s a mystery, and that is the mystery. MM was famous for her mint julep.

People in my family have run pubs, but I don’t think there’s a connection.

There is another Margaret Marks in Nevada who is involved in local politics or something.

language hat reports that the New York Times had an article on this on March 4th (see earlier entry). (That NYT link should be a keeper)

The article went a bit further. It consulted Brian Garner

bq. Bryan A. Garner, the editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and the president of LawProse, a legal-writing consulting firm, said courts are becoming increasingly impatient with many lawyers’ substandard writing skills.
“Lawyers are the most highly paid professional writers in the world,” he said. “It’s a good thing for judges to be more demanding.”

and it found another story. A Utah appeals court, on the same day as the Hart decision mentioned above, criticized a lawyer for ‘shouting’.

bq. “While I appreciate a zealous advocate as much as anyone, such techniques, which really amount to a written form of shouting, are simply inappropriate in an appellate brief,” Judge Orme continued. “It is counterproductive for counsel to litter his brief with burdensome material such as “WRONG! WRONG ANALYSIS! WRONG RESULT! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”

Trevor on Kaleboel has been reading Ghana Web and discovers a guest saying that English common law requires a man to make his spouse enjoy the act of sex.

I don’t seem to recall this coming up at the College of Law.

More on law in Ghana.

I know Turkish vocabulary is rich because I have been trying to learn some with little success. I know there are words there that come from the Arabic, and I suppose Persian/Farsi too. But am I to believe the famous Zaman Daily Newspaper?

‘Turkish Vocabulary Rich Compared to English’

It says that Turkish has over 600,000 ‘vocabulary words’ (as opposed to non-vocabulary words?) and English has 430,000 vocabulary words.

Well, it certainly seems like that when I look at the next chapter of my book for the Volkshochschule (evening classes institute). I think all the language book publishers have been forced by the German VHSs to create a textbook and a workbook and a CD. The vocabulary in the textbook is never listed alphabetically together with the translation, because we aren’t supposed to think about the German word. There is an alphabetical list of Turkish words in the back, directing you to a chapter and section, where you will find the German. The grammar only becomes vaguely clear if you look at the workbook. So you finish up with fingers in about five places in the books. I have long since torn the vocabulary pages out of the back of the textbook. (I should say that the way the grammar is gradually introduced is quite good, or would be good if it were more accessible).

For a sensible approach, I recommend Colloquial Turkish, which is published by Routledge, by those mysteriously un-British and un-Turkish-sounding authors Jeroen Aarssen and Ad Backus.

But back to the article.

bq. Turkish Language Institution (TDK) President Prof., Sukru Haluk Akalin, said yesterday: “This work will show our magnificent richness. When this work is completed, we will organize meetings with writers, poets and media institutions in order to spread the use of Turkish.”

Well, it may be too late for me.

In an interview for the Guardian, Mark Haddon briefly discusses the translations of his novel (the German one has already appeared, translated by Sabine Hübner).

This is just an excuse to say how much I enjoyed it. Having a narrator with Asperger’s syndrome is like an intensification of the naive child narrator. Unfortunately it was over too soon. (I am recovering from a couple of other books I perhaps shouldn’t have read to the end).

bq. Q: How much input do you have into the various translations – especially with the idiomatic expressions (pig of a day, apple of my eye, skeleton in the closet etc)? Do they tell you how they think they would work in another language and ask your permission, or do they just go ahead and do whatever they want?

bq. I worked in Swindon for a while. Made me want to kill a poodle too…

bq. MH: I have had long, involved and often very funny email discussions with other translators about, for example, the precise size of the fork or the precise nature of liquorice laces.

bq. Q: Did you discuss the book with your translators at all, or was it simply something organised by your publisher without your input? Were they able to contact you with specific queries?

bq. MH: The translators are organised by the foreign publishers but they’re always free to contact me through my agent over here. Mind you, so far there have been, I think, 34 foreign co-editions, so I’m quite glad that most of the translators were happy to go ahead without input from me…

The remark on the translation of metaphors is misplaced. Christopher, the narrator, cannot understand metaphors. If ‘a pig of a day’ doesn’t work in the target language, any other idiom will do just as well. I can’t imagine asking the author’s permission if the original metaphor doesn’t work, or you could ask 300 questions. The reference to ‘other translators’ makes it sound as if something has been cut.

[No offence to Armin in Swindon]