I happened on the Wikipedia entry on legal translation:
bq. Only professional translators specialising in legal translation should translate legal documents and scholarly writings. The mistranslation of a passage in a contract, for example, could lead to lawsuits and loss of money.
Well, loss of money for some, gain of money for others.
bq. Translators of legal texts often consult law dictionaries, especially bilingual law dictionaries. Care should be taken, as some bilingual law dictionaries are of poor quality and their use may lead to mistranslation.
I’m not knocking the entries on legal translation and law dictionary. Just wondering why all the books they recommend are written by the same person.
I wonder, too. :-) Just for variety’s sake (no other motive), and not with any kind of representation at all that the particular articles I referenced are the very first ones anyone should look at, I added three references to the first Wiki article. I vouch only for their relevance, and do not necessarily agree with any particular thesis advanced in any of them.
A good German-English legal translator with wide reading habits would probably be able to add some even more interesting references, I’d imagine. For that matter, such a translator with nice readable prose — say, as shown on her blog — could no doubt add to the basic article itself. Hmmm. There’s a name on the tip of my tongue for the next editor or contributing author to the Wiki . . ..
Thank you!
I was toying with the idea of adding a list of references, but even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t bother to work out how to contribute. However, I do think I should find out how to contribute to Wikipedia in the near future, just as general knowledge and so I’m not so slow another time.
Another possibility we were considering on http://www.flefo.org (albeit in the Bulgarian section, where we were discussing the word ‘bugger’) was to add an article advertising http://www.flefo.org.
I’ll look at your references. I think I have seen the arčević one – I have a book by her on legal translation, but I find it rather mechanically done and can’t get my brain round it.
Contributing to Wikipedia is simple – just view an entry and click edit in a section.
That is the reason why so many users have contributed to wikipedia. That is the reason, however, why there is so much ‘unprofessional’ Information or hidden ads (Schleichwerbung) are included, too.
The moderators at wikipedia do an excellent job in reviewing new entries and delete obvoius ads, but due to the number of changes made to articles already existing they are rather unable to ensure high quality in articles in the long run.
It is the majority/minority game – a common problem in open source stuff. Same is with statistical machine translation: Imagine a machine translation will provide translations based on unreviewed texts: common mistakes (false friends) will in the end become ‘correct’ due to their statistical probability