Buried in their own garden

Posted on 10 January 2014 by MMarks

I have a feeling this wouldn’t work in Germany, although you can apparently bury your cat in the garden there, if the garden belongs to you.

The Natural Death Centre, a charity for natural burials, provides useful advice on the practicalities of grave digging on its website: “If you are digging a grave yourself, you need to be careful and have help. If you are fit and enthusiastic, it should take about three hours work to dig a four foot deep grave.

“Try and shore up the first two feet of the grave so that it is supported when the mourners stand around it, and work steadily so that you don’t strain yourself. You might want to take a bucket to stand on so that you can get out of the grave at the end of a tiring day!”

The form of certified translations

Posted on 9 January 2014 by MMarks

Richard Schneider has posted a guide on how to prepare certified translations in Germany: Von Schuppen und Ösen. It’s in German but with illustrations.

Here’s a summary of the main headings

1. The stamp and signature should be blue rather than black. (I definitely use blue stamp ink, but agree it would make sense to do the signature in blue biro too. Then people can see immediately whether the translation is an original or a photocopy).

2. A round stamp is not prescribed, but looks more official: official stamps are usually round, and rectangular stamps are easier to copy.
(In Bavaria, the round stamp is in fact prescribed. It can get quite expensive when you think how long the translator’s title is).

3. Always attach a copy of the original text. (I usually do that, though it’s not always feasible. The courts don’t want it for internal use. But it covers you if you translate from a copy rather than the original, because the recipient can compare the copy with the original and see if you translated the right document. And if you do a translation of excerpts, you can use a highlighter to mark on the copy which bits you did or omitted).

4. Fold the pages over so the corners are staggered (see photo) – each then gets some blue ink on it from your stamp.

5. Add a stamp on the fold inside.

6. Bind the pages together so they can’t be separated. Use an Öszange (see picture). This is apparently an eyeletter punch. Alternatively, you can use a paper seal (Siegelstern; see pictures). (I sometimes use gummy paper, which I cut otu in a rectangle, and put the stamp on top of it. And sometimes I sew, with needle and thread).

(Richard Schneider seems thrilled with his punch. So was I when I first got one. The problem came when I sent off a set of punched translations and they passed through a machine at Deutsche Post, which ripped the translations to pieces, and I had to do the whole lot again. I have never used the device since.)

Millionaires shortbread/Englisches Flair

Posted on 9 January 2014 by MMarks

Apparently millionaires’ shortbread was invented in Australia in the 1970s, but it has become very popular in the UK recently. It is a confection made for the hoi polloi (like me), but it seems that England-Fans in Fürth are selling it as ‘the British biscuit for the more aristocratic Londoners’:

Dafür empfehlen die England-Fans besonders diverse Varianten des Millionaire’s Shortbread. Ob mit Schokolade, mit Karamell- oder leichter Whiskey-Note – das britische Teegebäck für die nobleren Londoner bietet ein besonderes Geschmackserlebnis – und ist nach dem Weihnachtsfest mit seinen Stollen und Plätzchen eine echte Alternative.

Books I have not read/Ungelesene Bücher

Posted on 7 January 2014 by MMarks

In a variation of the popular bloggers’ posts ‘Books I read in 2013’, ‘Books I read in December’ and so on, here are some books I haven’t read.

First of all, I was in Hammicks law bookshop yesterday because it was still open till 7 pm when I happened to pass it.

I didn’t buy Catherine Barnard’s tome on EU Employment Law although it looked like a good read, with quite some reference to individual countries. I had to admit I would not find time to read it. Had I wanted to, I could have got it cheaper second-hand or on Kindle (though I feel books you want to leaf through don’t work well on Kindle). EU law sometimes gets me down because I don’t know enough about it, and whether working through this book would help I don’t know – though I suspect it would

Nor did I buy Guide to Latin in International Law by Fellmeth and Horwitz. You can look inside at amazon. The Latin used in English law and the Latin used in German law are different, US law also uses different Latin and international law (with which I rarely have to do) probably uses a different one again. Not only that, but the pronunciation varies from country to country. There is some information on this in this book, but probably the two versions given, which are ‘American’ and ‘restored classical’ I think, are not enough to help those of us dealing with UK and German pronunciations. This book is not cheap. I liked the detailed explanations and layout. But again, I felt my life would be full enough without finding time to read it.

Similarly, I did not buy Rupert Haigh’s Oxford Handbook of Legal Correspondence. It’s for non-native speakers of English and it looks very good. I still don’t know how people really learn languages or learn legal English, but if they can learn something from a book, this may be a book for them – as are Rupert’s other books (see his website).

This list seems rather short, as there are very many other books I haven’t read, and it is very much biased to OUP. So here’s more: I saw a newer edition of the Barron’s Law Dictionary by Peter Gifis, which I have always liked, but I suspect the edition I have will suffice. But mine is nearly twenty years old, so maybe I should reconsider. You can get this as a paperback or for Kindle.

I also haven’t read The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law. I haven’t even had it in my hands, though. But I have mentioned it in an earlier post.

This will have to do for now, although I think I could write many more posts on this subject.

Schleierfahndung

Posted on 6 January 2014 by MMarks

When the word Schleierfahndung first began to be used, I tried to pin down its meaning for a translation (I don’t seem to have blogged it, though – this was in the mid-90s, which predates the blog).
The phenomenon seems similar to ‘stop and search’ – stopping and searching people although there is no reason to suspect them. There have been calls for it to be extended since border controls were removed in the Schengen area (which now comprises 26 European countries, not all in the EU, but not the UK and Ireland).
How the word – literally ‘veil search’ – was coined I am not sure.

Neusprech has now taken up the term. It refers to something called ein Verdachtsschleier – a veil of suspicion. The typical search takes place after vehicles have been seen crossing the border and are followed and stopped inside the border.

Das ist eine Suche auf gut Glück, bei der Menschen gerne allein deswegen schikaniert werden, weil sie fremd aussehen und bei der jeder zum Verdächtigen wird. Der Ausdruck S. lässt dabei offen, ob hier Bösewichte entschleiert, oder ob umstrittene Überwachungen verschleiert werden sollen. Die Fakten sprechen für das Letztere. Denn die S. hat weder etwas mit Fahndung noch mit Schleiern zu tun und vernebelt, dass hier Menschen grundlos durchsucht und ihrer Freiheit beraubt werden.

It’s sometimes translated by the term dragnet, but that means searching a large area thoroughly searching for one particular person. It appears the word dragnet reminded some translators of the word Schleierfahndung, but it doesn’t work like that!

Transblawg

Weblog on German-English legal translation, no longer from Fürth

Monthly Archives: January 2014

Buried in their own garden

The form of certified translations

Millionaires shortbread/Englisches Flair

Books I have not read/Ungelesene Bücher

Schleierfahndung