Shock of the day: this dictionary arrived in the post (see earlier entry).

Date on book: 2005 (preface 2004)
Date on CD-ROM: 2007 (content 2006)

ISBN 3-89699-192-2
Price c. 50 euros

Gesetzesentwurf für Nordrhein-Westfalen

A Problem
Das Bundesverwaltungsgericht hat mit Urteil vom 16.01.2007 (6 C 15.06) die Bestimmungen über die allgemeine Beeidigung von Dolmetschern und Ermächtigung von Übersetzern für die Gerichte und Notariate des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz als Berufsausübungsregelung im Sinne des Artikel 12 Abs. 1 Satz 2 GG bewertet, die einer normativen Regelung durch den Gesetzgeber bedarf. Entsprechendes gilt für Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The German Länder / states that haven’t yet passed a statute governing certified interpreters and translators are now doing so. This is a draft of the NRW one. It studiously avoids the term beglaubigt, and it prescribes wording to be placed at the end of the translation. I see no reference to a stamp or seal.

(Announced on the pt list at yahoogroups.com by Marisa Manzin)

The (new) legal writer wrote about the word shall recently, with a link to Ken Adams, and in particular an article by Ken in the New York Law Journal.

Not many German lawyers are going to feel they have got their money’s worth if a contract translation does not contain a few shalls. I agree that it’s probably best to take an intermediate line – neither completely avoid shall like the modernists (following a movement in the English-speaking legal world outside the USA; see Clarity) nor use it very liberally.

When to use it? I would stick to obligation in the third person singular (‘The tenant shall pay the rent at the beginning of each month’). To quote the NYLJ article:

One way to address overuse of “shall” is through more disciplined use of the word. I advocate using “shall” only to express an obligation that’s imposed on the subject of a sentence in the active voice – “Doe shall purchase the shares from Acme.” (But if a contract uses the first or second person – that’s sometimes the case with letter agreements – your best bet would be to treat it as analogous to a consumer contract and not use “shall.”)

It would be better to have an active subject, not ‘The rent shall be paid…’ – who is to pay it? But translators can’t change their original if that’s what it says.

There are some cases where courts have had to interpret what ‘shall’ meant, but that should not be the case if you translate a German text where the German is to prevail: the court would have to interpret the German, not the English.

Boing Boing gives a link to a site with pictures of odd office equipment – a good opportunity to present a photo of my nose pencil sharpener.

Novalis is the subject of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel The Blue Flower. That novel, which is on my list of ‘must read again’, has a curious way of placing the reader in 18th-century Germany by rendering German speech and writing in a rather literal way, a kind of translatorese: characters are called ‘the Bernhard’, ‘the Mandelsloh’, ‘Söphgen’.

‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’
Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.
‘You are beautiful, gracious Fräulein,’ said Fritz.
…
Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedrime as a sedative, if his mind was too active – only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.

languagehat reported recently that Jeremy Osner of READIN is inviting readers to help produce a translation of Hymnen an die Nacht. He presents George MacDonald’s translation, which he finds unsatisfactory, opposite the German and a working version of his own translation in between.

This is great fun, and would be even more so if one actually wanted to translate Hymnen an die Nacht into English.

When I was searching for the last entry, I discovered a Fürth pedestrian zone webcam I didn’t know. It belongs to the Hirsch Apotheke and is practically on my corner. At the time of writing you can still see both the old and new rubbish bins beside each other. You can see the pretzel kiosk and Wurstbude, and the ticket machine that used to be a nice shade of green. Sometimes a couple of cats used to walk from one window on the roof of the building with New York on the ground floor, but maybe that no longer happens. Also the Rathaus in the distance, of course. And you don’t have to refresh the page to update the camera every 60 seconds.

Here’s another reference to the same webcam, on a page that leads to others. It was entered there on September 15.

Here are two shots of the webcam which I sneaked out and took.

Anfang Juli erschienen in der erneuerten Fürther Fußgängerzone bronzefarbene Abfalleimer, Baumumrandungen und Sitzgelegenheiten. Ich berichtete über die Bronzierung des Fahrscheinautomats und die Begrünung der Abfalleimer durch Hundeurineinwirkung.

Heute sieht man neben den bronzenen Abfalleimern wieder die alten. Die neuen “kommen weg” (Zitat Müllabfuhr). Man beachte auch den Baum, dessen Metallumrandung angefahren und nicht ersetzt wurde, jetzt mit Holzumrandung.

Hot off the press: the new bronze rubbish bins will be disappearing (tomorrow, I think).

Danilo Nogueira beschreibt ein enttäuschendes englisch-brasilianisches Rechtswörterbuch und einen erfolgreichen Plagiatsprozess gegen einen Nachfolger.

In Hey, counsel, you’ve plagiarized my book! in the latest Translation Journal, Danilo Nogueira summarizes a case of dictionary plagiarism and how it was proved. Surprise, surprise – people in Brazil too buy dictionaries by price rather than quality.

I have never put much stock in Noronha’s. I do not even think it deserves to be called a dictionary. It is just one of those rough-and-ready bilingual wordlists loosely put together by the staff in offices where they have to cope with a foreign language. People just go and throw in everything that comes to their minds on the quod abundat non nocet principle, so dear to Brazilian lawyers. Noronha’s book provides no usage notes, no examples, no collocations, no explanations. Nothing but a term, a hyphen and one or more translations. … It also tells you

* intoxication = intoxicação.

and fails to mention that intoxication translates both as intoxicação (what happens when you eat bad fish) and embriaguez (what happens when you have just had a couple beers with the guys) and nobody ever gets arrested for driving while intoxicado, but driving while embriagado may get you in trouble with the law. In other ways, it does not give you the translations most likely to appear in legal contexts.

There is to be an appeal, apparently. I was surprised the case even went to court, but it’s often claimed you can’t plagiarize the content of dictionaries.

At Christ Church, Spitalfields:

Round the corner from the church:

Smokers, driven out of doors since July 1st, outside Liverpool Street Station; Children of the Kindertransport sculpture by Frank Meisler:

David Currie, im Alter von 71 gestorben, hielt in den achtziger Jahren Vorlesungen über amerikanisches Verfassungsrecht an der Universität Hannover und an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, und später noch in Heidelberg und Tübingen, und veröffentlichte ein Buch auf Deutsch darüber, sowie ein Buch auf Englisch über das Grundgesetz. Er war Professor für Jura an der University of Chicago.

David Currie was a professor at Chicago Law School. His death at the age of 71 is reported by the WSJ Law Blog, which has links to other obituaries.

He studied German as an undergraduate, was a visiting professor at some German universities, and wrote about the German constitution in English and the US constitution in German (seems to be out of print, but the ISBN is 3 7875 5352 5 – I see amazon.de has an interesting page ISBN-Suche giving the option of searching for an ISDN in various catalogues).