David Pannick is an academic one of whose specialities is collecting legal trivia. Anyone writing an after-dinner speech for lawyers might profit from his writings. Today’s Times Online (free registration) has his round-up of the legal year. Here he reports inter alia that Saddam Hussein wants to be represented by a British Queen’s Counsel and legal team.

bq. Judge of the Year was Justice Dean Mildren, of the Northern Territory Supreme Court in Australia, who said he was “absolutely staggered” that the serial burglar appearing in his court had previously been granted bail. He demanded to know: “Who is the idiot who did that?” Judge Mildren was later informed that the judge responsible was Judge Mildren.

There are references to non-English-speaking countries too:

bq. The Italian Supreme Court upheld a fine of €300 on a Trieste man for using offensive language by telling a parking warden: “You are nobody.”

Then there’s the legal cartoon of the year, by Leo Cullum in The New Yorker:

bq. One attorney tells another: “My client got twenty years, yet he paid me in full. It just shows the system works.”

You can order printouts of New Yorker legal and other cartoons here, at www.cartoonbank.com.

For those who still remember how to write with a pen on paper, www.covelus.com offers a system where you send a handwritten page to an email address and it is there converted into electronic text.

The system seems specifically designed for time-costing, since it records exactly how long a lawyer spends writing. There is a press release and apparently evaluation kits are available, but the system remains mysterious to me.

bq. As end-to-end solutions providers, Covelus make digital pen and paper applications based on Anoto functionality – an open service software platform which allows users to write with pen and paper, whilst transferring this written information to any particular environment such as a back office database or web portal.

This is from Richard Susskind’s article on gizmos for lawyers at Times Online (Tuesday legal round-up – free registration required).

Ein Artikel bei heise online bestätigt meinen Eintrag vom 27. Oktober, welches online-Wörterbuch angeblich einen großen Open-Source-Bestand ohne Quellenangabe übernommen hat (über Handakte WebLAWg)

According to a German article, Paul Hemetsberger, who runs the online dictionary dict.cc, has had a lawyer request Pagedesign to respect the terms of GPL in its woerterbuch.info.

bq. Auch Frank Richter, Betreiber von dict.tu-chemnitz.de, hat auffällige Übereinstimmungen gefunden. So hatte er öfters seine Heimatstadt Chemnitz in die Übersetzungen eingebunden. “Jemand anders, der nicht aus Chemnitz kommt, würde kaum dieses Beispiel verwenden”, sagt Richter. Dennoch finden sich auch bei Woerterbuch.info Ausdrücke wie “Chemnitz revisited” oder “in the Chemnitz area”.

According to heise online, Pagedesign now says in its ‘Impressum’ that it bought the database on which its dictionary is based in 2001, but in fact all the translations used by Pagedesign can be found in the other non-commercial dictionaries, down to punctuation and spelling mistakes, and including usage notes, which tend to be long.

Armin shows a picture of the German Christmas market in Glasgow, so here is the Glasgow Christmas stall at the Christkindlesmarkt in Nuremberg.

This is on a separate square with stands from all Nuremberg’s twin towns: Prague, Venice, Gera, Atlanta, San Carlos, Krakow, Kavala, Shen Zhen, Kharkov, Antalya, Skopje, Nice, and Hadera. I also saw Limoges – maybe the Fürth connection.

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing says, ‘Man, I wish I’d had one of these as a kid’. (Via Boing Boing and Wired)

I must agree – I always liked Mr Potato Head (and so does Gary Larson). But can it be true that they have a plastic head now and you don’t use a real potato? I suppose it’s not PC to use a potato – this kind of thing drives me mad.

The facial reconstruction kit is by CSI, for kids from 8 up. It’s currently out of stock at amazon – I wonder why?

The Observer selects Umberto Eco’s book on translation, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, as the paperback of the week, though without making it sound like a fun read.

bq. He starts with what may seem a rather obvious conclusion – that Babelfish and its like are doomed to failure because translation requires the ability to understand a language as a cultural system, with nuances and contextual associations beyond the dictionary definitions. From this starting point he moves into far more complex territory; how, for example, do you even begin to go about translating poetry, where meaning is so often conveyed by a rhythm and musicality unique to the poet’s original language? How do you translate regional dialect, or the language of past ages – a problem Eco set for the various translators of his last novel, Baudolino?

There is a review by Arle Lommel at the LISA site. He finds the book worth its cover price, and that was the hardback. Apparently the translation is into British English. ‘Negotiation’ means compromise:

bq. In each case, a decision of which word to use is made that requires some information to be lost (size of the rodent, distinction from other similar rodents, etc.), while other information is preserved in the translation. It is in this sense that Eco uses negotiation: something must be lost for something else to be gained, and the basis for the negotiation is generally not within the text itself, but rather in factors external to the language of the text. Although in the Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation (GILT) industry we are generally dealing with texts that try to control language, such issues are never entirely eliminated, and we frequently deal with materials, such as marketing collateral, where these issues are at the forefront. What might seem like theoretical pondering on Eco’s part can have real impact on how we conduct business.

The Guardian has already published a review of the book by Michael Hofmann , an interesting essay on translation in its own right (via Isabella).