There’s been a discussion on an ITI list as to whether translators into English use ‘he’ or ‘he and she’.

My answer was that it depends on the client, but I often use ‘he and she’, avoiding the construction as much as possible by using plurals and other devices.

It is very common in legal English to repeat a noun rather than use a pronoun: ‘a director must resign a director’s office’ rather than ‘resign his office’ or ‘resign his or her office’. This is useful in other cases too, where the German er / sie / es disambiguates and the translator has to be careful to make clear what ‘it’ refers to.

One suggestion was to follow the Interpretation Act, where the masculine includes the feminine. To that I would say that the Interpretation Act is a good suggestion, but it is intended for interpretation in an English court, whereas my translations go to people all over the world who have not read the English Interpretation Act. But see no. 6 of the Interpretation Act 1978, a PDF of which is on this site.

G.C. Thornton in Legislative Drafting has some suggestions on this, which I list below. But translators do not have the freedom that writers do. (To give another example, if the German cites pages 5 ff., the translator cannot take the advice of citing the exact pages – 5-7, 5-11 or whatever, because the translator doesn’t know which pages were meant…I notice I repeated ‘the translator’ there, instead of writing ‘she’ to include the masculine).

Here are Thornton’s suggestions:

1. Repeat the noun in place of a pronoun. Use ‘his or her’ in place of ‘his’
3. Recast the sentence using the plural
4. Omit the pronoun:
‘On reaching the age of 80, a director must resign office’ (instead of ‘resign his office’)
5. Replace a nominalisation with a verb form:
‘consent to’ instead of ‘give his consent’
6. Recast the sentence using a relative clause:
‘A person who has lodged a memorandum of appeal may…’ instead of
‘If a person has lodged, he may…’
7. Recast the sentence using a participle:
‘before lodging an appeal’
instead of ‘before he lodges an appeal’.

The year is still new, but the German word of the year has already appeared.

In February last year, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) found that a statute permitting civilian planes to be shot down if they were hijacked was unconstitutional. The New Anatolian reports:

Wolfgang Schaeuble said officials will draw up new legislation and an amendment to the constitution after the country’s supreme court rejected an earlier air-safety law, the Saechsische Zeitung newspaper reported. Shooting down hijacked passenger planes could be justified if the threat to Germany was considered severe, Schaeuble said, according to the paper.
“In the case of Sept. 11, the shooting down (of the hijacked planes) would have been necessary as well as legally admissible,” he was quoted as saying.

Article 115a of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) refers to the Verteidigungsfall – literally, the situation where defence is necessary (Muret-Sanders im V.: if defence becomes necessary). If this noun is used a lot, it becomes difficult to render it elegantly in English. Schäuble wants to create the Quasi-Verteidigungsfall (situation analogous to the situation where defence is necessary).

For a German article see the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Then, of course, there is the Bündnisfall (Nato-ville), and others too: Störfall, Ernstfall, to say nothing of Kniefall, Schneefall and Sündenfall. A diagram of Verteidigungsfall can be found if it’s looked up at Leipzig.

Änderungen im Justizvergütungs- und entschädigungsgesetz – JVEG, die am 22.12.2006 eingeführt wurden, werden rot markiert auf der Website des BDÜ Bayern – dank Corinna Schlüter-Ellner und Tatjana Otto (via private Nachricht an BDÜ-Bayern-Mitglieder).

David Crystal has a weblog: DCBlog, I discovered from Luxus Linguae.

It was at Broadcasting House in London, round about 1980. I was asked to talk about language to a managerial seminar series, and I started by asking them why there had been no blockbuster… etc. The answers went roughly along these lines. People remembered language work from their school days. It was dull, boring, dry as dust. Parsing. Split infinitives. Tenses. Being told off for mispronouncing something. Iambic pentameters. … I looked around the room. From their age, these were almost all people who had been through the prescriptive mill. They were probably the last generation of people to do so. They had never been enthused about language.

(On TV language blockbusters – not)

One of his reasons for blogging was one of mine – to save answering the same question many times. Not that that explains many of my posts.

This is a bit off topic, but is anyone au fait with the Leuze in Bad Cannstatt? For the second time I swam there on January 1, and I spent some time in the 20 degree outside pool with water from two springs. I didn’t write down the names of the five minerals there. It’s far too cold for me, but once you have swum nearly a length, the tingling in the water makes you feel warm all over, so you can keep swimming comfortably even though it’s actually cold. What’s more, the temperature keeps small children away. Lots of carbon but no chlorine.

There’s a detailed review online, but the reviewer didn’t try this particular pool because it was so cold. I haven’t yet found anything describing this effect.

Weltweihnachtszirkus