Now that even the Bavarian school holidays are over, I must get back to posting more regularly. Meanwhile, some photos – more may follow.
St. Peter’s church in Straubing.
Actually, that’s just a garden on the way there. Here is the cemetery – note the washing line in the second picture.
It’s almost impossible not to link this sort of announcement (which is getting increasingly common) with the post-Browne review changes in HE funding in England. Fees of
Thanks, that sounds logical. I don’t know anything about the fee situation and changes in it.
The news about the City Legal Translation MA is so depressing – I do wonder why everybody involved in the course has really bothered. The options open to people wishing to study specialised translation (which is, after all, the area of translation with the best prospects) seem to be dwindling all the time, and I don’t rate the Imperial TSU’s chances of survival very highly, either.
I’m afraid that news like this is going to keep on coming as long as the big players in our industry don’t give a damn about translator training and aren’t willing to invest in it.
Still no parallels being drawn with or maybe lessons learned from the phase-out of the Surrey University Legal Translation MA 30 years ago – for *non-euphemistic* reasons to do with the lecturers – and the echoes of which did not seem to have reverberated 10 years ago on the setting up of the City Uni Course.
I don’t know anything about this. I think there are comments on the course by students in the ProZ forums. The only criticism I’ve read was that even more practical work would have been good. The materials I’ve glimpsed were excellent. As for the teachers, whatever you mean by that, I wouldn’t imagine that would influence the powers that be as long as applications were coming in. Ekkehard’s idea about a future (?) rise in fees seems more convincing to me. But do tell more!
The Surrey MA Legal Translation? Never even heard of it myself, to be honest. So please, do tell – what happened to it, and in particular what do you mean about the lecturers?
I know that not all the lecturers on the City MALT course have received glowing reviews, but surely that’s par for the course (if you’ll pardon the pun). Overall, my understanding is that the quality has been very good, and I’m not saying that because I teach parts of the Financial Legal module myself.
To a City Uni. student:’What do you mean about UK employment law? Unfair and wrongful dismissal are the same thing, aren’t they?’
UniS quote: ‘And you are NOT lawyers. So don’t pretend to be’. Also used at an ITI family law workshop.
Beware: Barristers & Solicitors who get their facts wrong.
Well, I wouldn’t want to believe everything my teachers told me anyway. I don’t think that’s the point of learning to be a legal translator. You think non-lawyers assume lawyers know the law?
I am unsure what you are trying to say here?
Employment law was not actually part of the MA course (other than contracts of employment being used as examples of contracts).
As for not being lawyers- well, some of the students were, but that is not the point. I did warn students against offering (or being understood to offer) legal advice, because they are not insured for the consequences, they are not trained to provide legal advice, and they are not paid to do so.
Being aware of the fact that the authors of texts can make mistakes, whether they are solicitors, barristers or otherwise, is important. Not necessarily because one can then crow about it & feel smug, but rather so one does not assume that it *must* be correct, and as a result tries to interpret meaning into the translation which is not there.
Lawyers make lots of mistakes in the texts they write (or dictate – that generally makes it even worse), just like accountants do. But surely that’s one of the advantages of being a specialist translator: you have a better chance of identifying content-related errors in source texts. Of course, simply doing a degree like the MALT isn’t in itself going to allow you to do that out of the box, but it should at least fast-track your ability to spot errors and ambiguities in source texts, provided you’re willing to learn from other people’s mistakes, and not just your own.
And this, surely:
http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2013/april/legal-translation-ma-reception?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alumni+%26+Giving&utm_campaign=2156675_Legal+Translation+MA+Reception&dm_i=O4W,1A83N,9D2CWO,4CL1G,1
shows that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing…
I am unsure what you are trying to say here?
You mean what you were trying to say if you hadn’t taken the employment law elective at Bar School/the Inns of Court School of Law and distinguished contractual wrongful dismissal from unfair dismissal at Common Law: cf translating licenciement abusif FR/EN or ordentliche vs. au
Dear me, what is going on here? Perhaps you could let the rest of us into this cryptic exchange of ?comments? ?criticism? ?abuse? – I really don’t know. Is it relevant to the news that the MALT is being closed down?
Well, Robin, I wonder whether my barbs are irrelevant to close-down of the course when my ex-UniS lecturer – who helped set up the MALT course which she saw torpedoed by the ill-mannered course leader – and bewildered City Uni. MALT students latterly come crying to me. I could of course keep a stiff upper British lip and make ‘no comment’.