Monthly Archives: May 2010

Language weblogs/Sprachblogs

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Lexiophiles has expanded its list of blogs to vote for (Top 100 Language Blogs).

The best place to look is the list of nominated blogs for language professionals, where there is a very brief description of each blog in the Language Professionals category.

Transblawg has come up on their radar (my thanks to the unknown promoter). They have Peter Harvey, but not Kalebeul or fucked translations, nor Patenttranslator – and no fidus interpres. So it’s all a bit touch and go, and in any case they are not looking specifically for translation blogs. There are four categories: Language Technology, Language Learning, Language Professionals and Language Teaching.

To find similar lists for the other three categories, start here.

First German court hearing in English/Erste Verhandlung auf Englisch (LG Bonn)

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As reported in an earlier entry, hearings in English are now possible at three international commercial chambers in Aachen, Cologne and Bonn. Both parties have to agree to waive the use of an interpreter. The first such hearing took place on May 10 at the Bonn Regional Court (Landgericht). There is a brief report in German in the Kölnische Rundschau, but it does not go into detail, and indeed, the reporter was apparently unable to assess the effectiveness of the language:

Premiere in Bonn: “Good afternoon”, begrüßte Manfred Kaufmann, Vorsitzender der neu eingerichteten 19. Zivilkammer des Bonner Landgerichts, die Parteien: Dann erläuterte der Handelsrichter in englischer Sprache die juristische Problematik der vorliegenden Klage: Eine Aktiengesellschaft belgischen Rechts wirft darin einem Bonner Unternehmen Vertragsbruch vor. Worum es im Detail ging, blieb dem Prozessbeobachter – im Handelsenglisch nicht geübt – im Verborgenen.

However, a colleague, Martina Niessen, Diplom-Dolmetscherin, has kindly reported to translators’ mailing lists on the hearing, which she attended.

To summarize: the courtroom was rather small, seating scarcely more than twenty, but there were SAT1 TV cameras there and a reporter and photographer. The three judges’ wives were reportedly all native speakers of English. Both parties had German lawyers, and the plaintiff also had a Belgian lawyer.

None of the parties was a native speaker of English. The case related to a Belgian company which supplied the Cuban government with electronic components, and a German company which supplied such components to the Belgian company. The German company has been taken over by a U.S. corporation, and so problems have been created by the U.S. embargo against Cuba. The court wanted the parties to reach a compromise, in part because a large amount of Belgian documents in French and Cuban documents in Spanish would have needed to be translated (so much for simplifying matters by using English as the court language!).

There were some language problems. For example, it was necessary to spell names, and the judges were not used to spelling in English. The words plaintiff and defendant were confused several times. Our colleague had the impression that they would have liked to express themselves in German.

The two German lawyers called for a Grundurteil. This is a decision as to whether the plaintiff’s claim has merit, literally a ‘basic judgment’, a kind of interim judgment. I haven’t got my library with me, but I gather Dietl-Lorenz does not contain a term (German judges often consult this dictionary and if it makes a suggestion they are usually happy with it). Nobody knew what the English for Grundurteil was, so they used the term Grundurteil in German – probably the best thing they could do. I would have consulted my English translation of the Zivilprozessordnung for this blog entry, and indeed this is a reference the courts might consider having at hand, but none of these dictionaries or translations are authorities in themselves: the user needs to have the background knowledge to decide which, if any, suggested terminology works.

The record of the proceedings was dictated in German by the presiding judge. The Grundurteil is to be pronounced on 31 May. The hearing was 90 minutes long. One of the associate judges (Beisitzer) spoke excellent English, apparently.

The judges had a tendency to start complex sentences which they could not finish.

Other language problems: the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) was referred to as ‘he’.
Kritik was translated as critic, not criticism.
Gewinn was translated as gain, not profit.
Power of attorney had to be explained to the Belgian.

It does seem odd that – obviously – German law is always involved. It is difficult enough to talk about legal issues in a foreign language, but it is even harder to be constantly translating German law into a foreign language. And this is precisely what is not practised if you do an LL.M. in the USA or UK. It’s something you need to work on.

Pronouncing the English alphabet: I used to get students to write the letters in groups according to the vowel sound, like this (this presumes the British pronunciation of Z as zed – if it is pronounced zee, it goes in the second line instead:

A H J K
B C D E G P T V
F L M N S X Z
I Y
O
Q U W
R

Many thanks to Martina for this report. I’d love to attend one of these hearings!

Have you got freizeitstresse?/Mord an deutscher Sprache

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The Germans have always been good at coming up with words for those emotions we all feel but don’t have a name for: schadenfreude, for example, or angst. “Freizeitstresse” is the latest, a term that literally translates as “free-time stress”.

Admittedly one doesn’t always get decent newspapers when staying with relatives. This was the Times, speculating once more about foreign languages. Those Germans are lucky to be able to make portmanteau words, albeit somewhat misspelt in this case. We could call it ‘recreational stress’, but that would not be one word.

Figures show that about 75 per cent of people are incapable of relaxing; even on holiday they experience high levels of stress and feel more overburdened than anything else,” says Professor Doctor Henning Allmer, a psychologist and expert in freizeitstresse at the German Sport University Cologne. “One of the reasons for this is because people take too much on. In Germany, at least, the idea of doing nothing has negative connotations. A ‘nichtstuer’ (a do-nothing) is a derogatory term. So there are people who fill their free time with a very busy schedule.”

LATER NOTE: The Times article, which was wrong in print and online, has now been corrected online (see comments).

Translation problems in murder trial/Übersetzungsprobleme in Mordverhandlung

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Steve at languagehat takes up an article by Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker (abstract available here, full article only on subscription). The subject is a murder trial requiring written translation of an audiotape in Russian and Bukhori (a dialect of Persian spoken by the Bukharian Jews in Central Asia). It seems that the audiotape was difficult to hear and the translator made a number of errors, although there isn’t enough evidence as to why. The biggest misunderstanding was very favourable to the prosecution – one person to another, travelling in a car, saying ‘Are you getting off?’ but translated as ‘Are you going to make me happy?’ – the verb used is described as odd by commenters to the languagehat entry, and was apparently hard to hear anyway.

I haven’t got the full article, but I find some curious features:

One can imagine the translator’s own happiness when he heard those lines—and Leventhal’s when he read them in the transcript.

Leventhal was the main prosecutor. I don’t know why the translator would be happy.

We go through life mishearing and misseeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

This raises a number of questions. The prosecution should certainly not be playing for high stakes if this means getting a conviction on the basis of one translated sentence – they would have to have a lot more to convince them. Prosecution should not be about convicting people at all costs. And if two people are in a car, then ‘Are you getting off?’ is not exactly a tale told by an idiot that needs to be reconstrued to make sense.

(I’ve read at least three books by Janet Malcolm, all of which were excellent – most recently ‘Two Lives – Gertrude and Alice’, but here I have not enough to go on).

LATER NOTE (and spoiler): I did actually get the whole article. It’s extremely interesting and is mainly a psychological study of what we know of people in court cases. It’s clear there will be an appeal. The problem with the audiotape transcription strongly suggests this was unreliable evidence, but in the context of the whole, it appears just one piece in the mosaic. One has the impression that the trial was unfair to the defendants and to the defence counsel, but nevertheless that the defendant Borukhova may have been correctly convicted.

Translating foreign-language litigation documents/Übersetzung für Gerichtsverhandlungen

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An article by Erik Sherman at law. com, Don’t Let Litigation Get Lost in Translation
Can language conversion software cut cross-border litigation bills?

discusses the problems for a litigation lawyer of dealing with a huge amount of foreign-language material. One has heard tales of US lawyers being presented with truckloads of papers at the discovery stage (Offenlegung).

The conclusions seem to be:

Use machine translation (MT) to get a rough idea of which documents might be worth translating

The article mentions free software and implies that there are other systems. It doesn’t mention the possibility, if you often work with a particular language, of ‘training’ an in-house MT system to translate certain terms in a certain way, to expect legal terminology rather than general terminology and so on. Nor does it mention the problems of optical character recognition (OCR) if the documents are poor faxes. They may even be handwritten. If documents are not in electronic form, you might need to call in a translator to help you sift them. I remember Steve Vitek‘s stories of helping lawyers sort through Japanese patents.

If you need to keep an eye out for keywords, get a translator to identify them in the foreign language, since if they are inconsistently MTd, you may overlook them in English.

Get important documents translated by a human translator

For languages using a different alphabet or writing system, get a translator to identify possible software problems in advance

If you have to use several human translators, use a computer-aided translation system (CAT – translation memory) or at least a glossary to keep them consistent on the main terminology

Don’t let your lawyers change to a foreign language to discuss sensitive issues in the hope that the other side won’t notice what you’re up to

A law firm’s translation department should know a lot of this already. But maybe there are fewer translation departments in the USA.

The article doesn’t go into detail on what law firms need to know, for instance when it obliquely refers to CAT.

Once down to the critical documents, it’s time for human translation. But even here, translation technology plays an important role. Not only can it help jump-start an experienced translator’s efforts, but it can also enforce important uniformity of translation. “A lot of words are subject to multiple interpretations, so what can happen is that you can have two duplicates that have been translated differently, and it can have consequences,” says Constantine Cannon’s Solow. The more translators working on a matter, the greater the chance for variability in translation. Professional translation tools can “learn” specific translation choices and then present them as preferred options to any translator on the team. The translators then feed refined translations back into the tools, increasing the speed of the entire process. And suddenly, you’re ready for court before you can count un, deux, trois.

Sounds great. I incline more to quatre-vingts-dix myself.

I would add to the above: if you have a good translator who knows about software, don’t underestimate their value to you.

This is a weird statement:

The problem of trusting a translation becomes even more critical when dealing with many Asian languages, in which a single character can represent a complex concept. “One of those characters could have hundreds, maybe even thousands of meanings,” says Duncan McCampbell, president of international business consultancy McCampbell Global and a former litigator. “There are characters in Chinese [for example] that have no equivalent in English.”

(Via MA Translation Studies News)