This Austrian case was reported in Times Online today and has appeared all over the world:

But new ground was broken recently when the Supreme Court of Austria was asked to rule that Matthew Hiasl Pan is a person. That sounds easy enough for even an inexperienced lawyer. But the challenge was that Matthew is a chimpanzee.

An animal-rights group, VGT, had tried to have Matthew declared a person so that a lawyer could be appointed as his guardian when the shelter where the chimp had lived for 25 years closed. Donors had raised money for the chimp, but under Austrian law, only a person may benefit from a scheme such as VGT proposed.

The case failed at first instance and has now been either rejected or dismissed by the Austrian Supreme Court of Justice (English site). It sounds as if the plaintiff may take the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.

When I was trying to research the credentials of this story, I had trouble finding Austrian sources. No wonder: of course his name is not Matthew, but Matthias.

Here we are, on the site of the Verein gegen Tierfabriken (the plaintiff):

Anfang Februar 2007 hatte der Obmann des Verein Gegen Tierfabriken VGT für den Schimpansen Matthias „Hiasl“ Pan, seinen persönlichen Freund, am zuständigen Bezirksgericht Mödling einen Sachwalter beantragt. Hiasl war illegal nach Österreich entführt worden, um hier für Tierversuche verwendet zu werden. Er fand Zuflucht im Wiener Tierschutzhaus. Durch die finanziellen Probleme des WTV mit Abschiebung bedroht, beantragte der VGT-Obmann die Besachwalterung, sodass Hiasl in seinem eigenen Interesse gerichtlich agieren und z.B. eine Abschiebung juridisch bekämpfen kann. Der Antrag wurde von 4 international anerkannten Fachleuten und Universitätsprofessoren in Biologie, Anthropologie und Rechtskunde durch Expertisen unterstützt.

Ladies and gentlemen of the press, he may not be a human being, but there’s no call to translate a proper name! Otherwise we would hear more about Canute and Socken. (I gather some Nurembergers recently read an article in a Canadian paper headed ‘Her name is Flake’).

LATER NOTE: See comment – the question as to whether a chimpanzee could be treated as a human in this context was not even dealt with – what was important was that the applicant had no right to have a guardian appointed for another person. Here’s the OGH decision.

Tony Blair’s elder brother Bill has been appointed a High Court judge.

William James Lynton Blair in Wikipedia.

He doesn’t seem to have that mad glint around the eyes – photo here.

(Via Times Online)

The website of the German translators’ association BDÜ (Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer) now has English and French versions.

I notice all three opening pages start with ‘Search online for interpreters or translators’ or the equivalent, which is an improvement over the days when you needed Holmesian skills to find the search.

Angebot des Monats bei der Sparkasse Nürnberg.

Diese völlig risikolose Geldanlage bietet Ihnen für die gesamte Laufzeit attraktive, fest vereinbarte Zinsen.

Für jeden abgeschlossenen Vertrag spenden wir 10 EUR an den Tiergarten Nürnberg. Lassen Sie Ihr Geld zusammen mit dem Eisbären wachsen!

I can’t see the savings growing quite as fast as the bear, or perhaps even as fast as the polar ice melts.

For every saver, the bank promises to donate 10 euros to Nürnberg Zoo.

1. The January edition of the Journal of Specialised Translation, JoSTrans, is out. This publication is well worth looking at and has plenty in its archives too.

It has a review by Pieta Monks of London Metropolitan University of Deborah Cao’s Translating Law, and also an informative article by Deborah Cao herself and Xingmin Zhao about translating at the UN. The review is extremely positive and points out that the book is for both translators without a legal background and lawyers without translation training. I find a problem in Deborah Cao’s book is precisely that it covers many languages and thus many legal systems and therefore is necessarily superficial.

According to the review:

She presents a wealth of practical examples to illustrate the differences, helping trainee legal translators avoid particular pitfalls. The description of the differing terms and functions of the legal profession in English speaking countries and in non-English speaking countries (due, of course, to differences in education and training) will be particularly useful to students, (e.g. barristers and solicitors in England, attorneys in the US and avocats and notaires in France etc.) (60-62). I also was very interested in the rationale behind the complex syntactical structures typical of certain English legal texts and, in particular, the origin of apparent pairs of similes, word strings, which are designed to create all-inclusiveness:

But Cao’s definition of barristers and solicitors is the old chestnut ‘one works in court and the other doesn’t’, and the word ‘counsel’ does not have an S on the end in the plural. I have cut off the explanation of legal doublets such as devise and bequeath (here, but not in the book, mysteriously rendered as ‘advise and bequeath’). I would have been interested to read a review by a specialist, but then again, the book is probably not written for specialists. It is very full, has an excellent bibliography, and covers many interesting areas of legal translation – to be recommended as an appetizer for those who haven’t thought much about the subject before.

2. Among the other articles is an amazing discourse with heavy academic underpinning, by Gerrit Bayer-Hohenwarter – in German – on Zeit(druck) and Translation. Here’s a taster:

Die folgenden Forschungsergebnisse und Überlegungen stützen die These, wonach der erfolgreiche Umgang mit Zeitdruck expertiseabhängig ist und sich erst in der Berufspraxis in vollem Umfang entwickeln kann:

• Erfahrene ÜbersetzerInnen sind sicherer im Umgang mit konstruktiven Maßnahmen zur Frustrations- und Stressreduktion wie etwa das vorübergehende Aufschieben von Problemlösungen (vgl. Dancette 1997, Tirkkonen-Condit 2000: 123, Krings 2001: 513) oder zeitsparenden pragmatischen Strategien wie individuellen Merkhilfen (vgl. Séguinot 1997: 109, Englund Dimitrova 2005: 109f) und (vorläufigen)
wörtlichen Übersetzungen zur vorläufigen Erweiterung der Kapazität ihres Arbeitsgedächtnisses (Englund Dimitrova 2005).

3. There is also a review of a French book about the translation of statutes, which would interest me, but it’s in Spanish. The book considers the translations into French of the German and Swiss Civil Codes in about 1900.

4. While reading old articles in BDÜ info NRW recently, I came across a report by Dr. Cirsten Verleger on a seminar on time management held by Andreas W. Schiemenz in the October 2005 edition. Here is an extract – I would like to know if this seminar was quite as good (wertvoll) as it is said to be:

Vor mir liegt mein Zeitplaner mit den Terminen für heute und den beiden zu erledigenden A-Prioritäten. Natürlich habe ich mir insgesamt nur 3 bis 4 Aufgaben vorgenommen und nur 50 % meiner Zeit verplant. Neben mir die als Wiedervorlage-System dienende Hängeregistratur mit 31 Tagesfächern für diesen Monat und 12 Monatsfächern. Am Montag hatte ich zwischen 10:50 h und 12:50 h einen „Termin mit mir selbst“ und habe meine Lebensvision und konkret definierte und messbare Ziele erarbeitet – und außerdem meine sieben Lebenshüte für dieses Jahr festgelegt. Anschließend habe ich meine alte, fünf DIN-A-4-Seiten lange „To-do“-Liste auf einzelne Zettel umverteilt, nach A-, B-, C- und D-Prioritäten sortiert, die D-Prioritäten in den Papierkorb wandern lassen und die übrigen in das Wiedervorlage-System eingeordnet. Puuh! – Da die Post erst gegen 10:00 h kommt und ich das Fach 8 der Wiedervorlage noch nicht inspiziert habe, sind die drei Ablagen auf meinem Schreibtisch leer.